General Poetry posted April 14, 2015

Chapters:

-Prologue- 1...

Exceptional

What this collection is all about.

A chapter in the book Littoral

Introduction

by Pantygynt

This book is a collection of poems about those places in our world where the land meets the sea, the beaches, the coastline or, to employ a less common word that covers them all, the littoral. The poems are concerned in many cases with the continuous war, waged between sea and land, in which first one and then the other claims victory as the tide ebbs and flows, for the most part twice a day or thereabouts. This ongoing warfare between our two main protagonists, effectively runs the lives of the countless sea creatures and wildfowl that flock to the coast, so some of the poems are about them too. Then there is mankind to be considered. For thousands of years men have won their living from the sea, but we are not concerned here with deep water sailors and fishermen, so much as those who work the dangerous coastal waters, where rocks and sandbanks lie in wait for the unwary. We shall also be investigating the lifeboatmen who have to rescue those who get into difficulties around our coasts. Weaker than Water retells one of Selkie legends, part of our rich, coastal folklore. More recent has been the discovery of the pleasures of sea bathing, so there is a poem describing a bank holiday beach scene. By way of contrast there is a song lyric that I originally wrote in the mid nineteen sixties describing a seaside resort in the depths of winter. As well as those who are only down for the day, there are many artists and craftspeople that live out their lives by the seashore, recording its moods in their pictures and sculpture; they also have their moment under the spotlight here. There will inevitably be some aspects of the littoral that I have missed; if you can think of any then please, let me know and I may be able to include them in a later edition. Since history has often been about the invasion of one country by another, I decided to include one poem that deals with the largest seaborne invasion of them all, which took place on the Normandy beaches in 1944. The poems here are varied in style. A Shakespearean style sonnet and blank verse poetry rub shoulders with other formal styles such as, roundel, triolet and terza rima. There is an example of alliterative verse in the style of the Anglo-Saxon sagas (that's for the Selkie story), which is the oldest form of written poetry in the English language. It's right there with examples of free verse, sestina and villanelle. Perhaps the most ambitious piece is a crown of heroic sonnets, covering the life of the most decorated lifeboatman of all time, Henry Blogg, coxswain for thirty-eight years of the lifeboat, based at Cromer, on the Norfolk coast of England. I have put this collection together because I enjoy the challenge of getting to grips with a wide variety of styles and matching them, appropriately I hope, to their content. It is my earnest hope that you will enjoy reading them as much as I have enjoyed my part in their creation

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