No Far Shore: Charting Unknown Waters

No Far Shore is a rich exploration of various coastlines across England, Wales, Ireland, Canada and the US, in the form of travel writing, narrative non-fiction, memoir and poetry. In it poet Anne-Marie Fyfe visits the meeting place of land and sea, and takes in the maps, waves, lighthouses, islands, north, maps, journeys, boats and fishermen which mark this changing boundary. She looks too at the work of a number of writers for whom the coast has been influential (and who in some cases have a surprising link to her hometown of Cushenden in Northern Ireland). They include Elizabeth Bishop, Herman Melville, Eavan Boland, Moira O’Neill, Robinson Jeffers, George Mackay Brown, C.P. Cavafy and Louis MacNeice. In addition, Fyfe also travels into her past, and that of her family, and charting her own relationship with a number of coasts and the way that they have shaped her life and those of others. Living next to the sea brings almost as many subjects as the waves falling on to the land, from the quiet ease of fishing to the impact of the shipwreck of the Princess Victoria, from the lyricism of nature poetry to the specialism of morse code and cartography.