Off the Coastal Path: Dark Poems of the Seaside edited by Jo Fletcher

Format: Hardcover, 69 pages

Publisher: Stanza Press, March, 2010

ISBN: 1848630826

(Includes Shipping to Canada or the U.S.) 

*LIMITED EDITION OF 300 COPIES ONLY!!*

*SIGNED BY BEN BALDWIN - THE COVER ARTIST!*

Come - take my hand, and wander with me off the coastal path and into that strange

hinterland between earth and water, where life and death walk together, and where the rolling sound of the sea is a siren's luring voice, a wild, clear call that echoes in the blood and cannot be ignored . . .

The seaside is a unique place, a magical no man's land caught between the ever-changing waves and the stolid earth, and just as diverse.

Off-key music heralds tawdry end-of-pier shows and run-down fairgrounds, with their dilapidated ghost trains and fluorescent candy floss.

Pathetic holidaymakers brave the vile weather, too scared to brave the vile landladies, who run their faded-wallpaper-and-cabbage-scented B&B domains with rules set in stone.

As you pick your way over pebbles, or sunbathe in the sand, perhaps you'll see

pirates, breasting the waves, or monsters, lurking beneath, or hear mermaids, beckoning you closer with a song, or the bells of lost Atlantis, in the deeps below.

Or perhaps you may come upon the lonely, the bereft, the hopeless, walking forever beside the sea, oblivious to all now but the pull of the tide . . .

This unique, evocative collection gathers thirty poets from across seven centuries, to explore the shadowlands beside the restless waters off and the coastal path.

Atlantis by Clark Ashton Smith

Triptych by Donald Sidney-Fryer

The Sea Went Away by Ray Bradbury

The Storme by John Donne

Three Seas by Tanith Lee

The Port by H.P. Lovecraft

Pier, Beneath by John Kaiine

The Sea-Wife by Rudyard Kipling

To Her Sea-faring Lover from Tottel's Miscellany (1557 )

The Daemon Lover

My Last Landlady by Neil Gaiman

Sea Fret by Brian Lumley

The Great Sellie o' Suleskerry

Shuck by Kevin Crossley-Holland

The Ghost Crab's Woman by Marly Youmans

Creation of the Horse by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Great Unknown by Joel Lane

A Half-Broken Heart (On Brighton Pier) by Robert Edric

Keepsake by Peter Crowther

Night Watch by Dana Gioia

Mermaid by James Reidel

The Beach in August by Weldon Kees

Cape Vacatown by Unknown (after Weldon Kees)

Lost by William Hope Hodgson

Admiral Death by Henry Newbolt

Souls Under Water by Judith Barrington

In 1962, on the Harbor Ice by T.M. Wright

Something Happened by Patrick LoBrutto

On Different Shores by Jo Fletcher

Day's End by John Gordon