The Seafarer
With Original Photographs by Norman McBeath
Hazel Press
Paperback, 48pp., 9781739421854 (28 November 2024) |
Black Bough Poetry Book of the Month
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.
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‘Hollis's "The Seafarer" is a version for a new generation, one that hearkens back to the atmosphere of the olds worlds of ice and snow that it navigates, whilst retaining the raw emotion and the prophetic power of the original. Get it and prepare to be mesmerised.’
– Matthew M. C. Smith, Black Bough Poetry Book of the Month
‘A welcome new interpretation of the medieval text. Like [Ezra] Pound, who is cited on the first page of the foreword, Hollis is never dull, always picking pleasing turns of phrase or striking images over faithful translation. And, like Pound, he has created a thoroughly contemporary adaptation that drifts increasingly away from the source text to seek how this ancient "self song" can speak to us today.’
– Pablo Scheffer, Times Literary Supplement
– Matthew M. C. Smith, Black Bough Poetry Book of the Month
‘A welcome new interpretation of the medieval text. Like [Ezra] Pound, who is cited on the first page of the foreword, Hollis is never dull, always picking pleasing turns of phrase or striking images over faithful translation. And, like Pound, he has created a thoroughly contemporary adaptation that drifts increasingly away from the source text to seek how this ancient "self song" can speak to us today.’
– Pablo Scheffer, Times Literary Supplement
