The Seafarer
With Original Photographs by Norman McBeath
Hazel Press
Paperback, 48pp., 9781739421854 (28 November 2024) |
Come, lean in for this song of myself.
Bear with me these tides of telling. Days without dawn, nights of no end, the oceans upturning. I cannot calm the surge within . . . |
The seafarer is alone on an empty and threatening winter ocean. And not just alone, but something far more punishing still: he is cast out. To be the winter wunade – to be the seafarer – is to pose ourselves a series of troubling questions. In what way should we live our life: from the security of the known, or on the risky path of revelation? What should our obligations be: to depend upon others, or survive in our way alone? And what of our greater purpose: is it to live, or merely to exist? As our planetary weather grows dangerously wild, as our kinship to society comes under strain, and as we desire to find a life in tune with natural elements, The Seafarer commands us urgently to hear again, as the Anglo-Saxons did, the spirit-music of land, wind and sea.
