No Far Shore A Costal Quest

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, 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.

Anne-Marie Fyfe was born in Cushendall, Northern Ireland and lives in West London. Fyfe is a poet, creative-writing teacher, arts-organiser and former Chair of the Poetry Society (2006-2009). Her collections include Late Crossing (1999), Tickets from a Blank Window (2002), The Ghost Twin (2005), Understudies (2010) and House of Small Absences (2015). Fyfe has previously won the Cardiff International Poetry Competition with her poem 'Curaçao Dusk'. In addition to her writing, Fyfe has read throughout the world at festivals and events and on BBC radio and television. She founded Coffee House Poetry at the Troubadour, which is now London's liveliest and longest-running literary venue. Fyfe also runs a range of poetry workshops and classes for writers and aspiring writers, having founded Wordworks at Richmond-upon-Thames College (1993), and the creative writing strand of the John Hewitt International Summer School.