Spring-time clothes
A thrilling image of glittering northern waters in a moment of calm and gentleness.
'Crossing from Scalpay in...
As quiet as…
Christopher Logue’s vivid, muscular version of some episodes in the Iliad abounds with striking metaphors – I noted about 60...
Wave-girt land
A little old-fashioned, this 'girt', but still an unexpected way to speak of an island, focusing more on its surrounding...
Easy-limbed stirring
I liked this description of a boat responding like a limber-limbed youth to the movement of the sea. 'Easy-limbed stirring'...
The tide running with you and the sun out
How many times I've read about exploration, about getting in a boat or a ship and chancing it, and yet...
Eyes like (II) …
Another unusual description of eyes by Virginia Woolf, as Orlando tries to confirm the gender of the girl he is...
Food-rich water
Here's to hoping the future will see the ocean still full of food-rich water.
'Its dredger-bucket mouth agape...
Tempest-haunting birds
I picture scurf-surfing cormorants and carrion birds buffeted by winds in anticipation of sailors' corpses washing up on the wind-blasted...
Scobie and the sea
This quote has haunted me since I first read Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet about thirty years ago. It is still on my wall...
Frogs around a pond
I liked Socrates' image of the Mediterranean, that great big watery basin, as a pond around which we live like...
Sea-battered island
A perfect spot for a hermit, even more so in the seventh century.
'... a hermit living on...
An island is loyal
Having a poetic love of the sea and a practical fear of it, the presence and faithfulness of land resonates. ...
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