Off the Coastal Path Dark Poems of the Seaside

PUBLICATION DATE March 2010

EDITION Hardcover

COVER ART Ben Baldwin (Cover and Interior Artwork)

PRINT RUN 300 unsigned

The 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.

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

CONTENTS

• 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