Sea Swim
Sea Swim
John Wedgwood Clarke
Paperback
'Your wake complicates mine. Our footprints dream in the tide.'
Throughout 2011, Sea Swimmers swam in Scarborough's South Bay as part of imove, the Cultural Olympiad Programme in Yorkshire. They were led bravely into the waves by poet John Wedgwood Clarke, whose eighteen-poem sequence inspired by this experience was collected in book form and published by Valley Press in April 2012.
The poems explore the fluent, fragile and sometimes agonisingly pleasurable relationship between the swimmer, the land and the sea around Scarborough; how swimming transforms the way we feel ourselves to be in our bodies, and the liberating effects these changes have on the imagination. Sea Swim may be as close as you can get to swimming in the sea without donning a wetsuit.
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Imprint: Valley Press
Published: April 2012
ISBN: 9781908853066
Catalogue no: VP0029
Page count: 32
Trim size: 198 x 129 mm
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Praise for Sea Swim:
"I am thrilled to be patron of this simple and simply beautiful idea. Poetry is going down to the sea again."
— Carol Ann Duffy
"[Clarke's] work is amongst the best to have emerged from new poets in this country in recent years."
— Simon Armitage
About the author
John Wedgwood Clarke was born in St Ives, Cornwall in 1969. He trained as an actor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, before going on to study literature and completing a D.Phil. in Modernist poetry at the University of York. He set up the Beverley Literature and Bridlington Poetry Festivals, and ran them for ten years, before leaving to pursue a full-time career in writing and editing, as well as teaching Creative Writing at the University of Hull, and more recently at the University of Exeter.
His publications with Valley Press include the pamphlets Sea Swim (2012) and In Between (2014), as well as the full-length collections Ghost Pot (2013) and Landfill (2017).