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Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach

Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach

by JeanSprackland (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2012

    $3.27
Synopsis

This is the ultimate beachcomber's book. A series of meditations prompted by walking on the wild estuarial beaches of Ainsdale Sands between Blackpool and Liverpool, Strands is about what is lost and buried then discovered, about all the things you find on a beach, dead or alive, about flotsam and jetsam, about mutability and transformation - about sea-change. Every so often the sands shift enough to reveal great mysteries: the Star of Hope, wrecked on Mad Wharf in 1883 and usually just visible as a few wooden stumps, is suddenly raised one day, up from the depths - an entire wreck, black and barnacled, and on either side two more ruined ships, taking the air for a while before sinking back under the sand. And stranger still, perhaps, are the prehistoric footprints of humans, animals and birds on the beach: prints from the Late Mesolithic to mid-Neolithic period which are described as 'ephemeral archaeology' because they are preserved in the Holocene sediment, revealed briefly and then destroyed by the next tide. Strands describes a year's worth of walking on the ultimate beach: inter-tidal and constantly turning up revelations: mermaid's purses, lugworms, sea potatoes, messages in bottles, buried cars, beached whales and a perfect cup from a Cunard liner. Jean Sprackland, a prize-winning poet and natural storyteller, is the perfect guide to these shifting sands - this place of transformation.

$3.27

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Quantity

2 in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 256
 Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Published: 31 May 2012
ISBN 10: 0224087452
ISBN 13: 9780224087452
Book Overview: An insightful and lyrical account of a year on one beach - part natural history, part meditation, part travelogue.

Media Reviews
Elegant memoir. For those for whom such encounters are a rare occurrence, reading this beautiful book is only a tide's whisper away from being on a beach itself and feeling the wind in your hair and the sand between your toes. The Economist Compelling...well-contextualised, sharply-observed, clued up, environmentally aware and deeply researched. She writes a supple, attractive, gently ironic prose that brings alive this distinctive shoreline. Independent Each sentence is as cunningly crafted as a piece of driftwood, a lyrical tribute to the meeting place of land and sea. -- Mary Crockett Scotland on Sunday Sprackland's clean and unfussy prose, her powerful sense of atmosphere, gradually draw you in. If a book can have the appeal of a really good long walk, this one does. -- Marcus Berkmann Daily Mail Nature writing is the Olympics of metaphor production, requiring technical agility and testing the writer's stamina for simile. In this respect Sprackland excels; her quick portraits of the sea's idiosyncratic cast-offs are inventive and precise.absorbing narrative. -- Laurence Scott Guardian
Author Bio
Jean Sprackland's first collection of poetry, Tattoos for Mothers Day, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 1999. Her second collection, Hard Water, was published by Cape in 2003 and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. In 2004 she was named by the Poetry Book Society as one of the 'Next Generation Poets'. Her third collection, Tilt, won the 2007 Costa Poetry Award. She lives in London.