Instead of a Card: Poems from the Coast

This pamphlet is gorgeous both inside and out and can be sent as a substitue for a greeting card, or as a lovely little poetry book in its own right. Cover designers are created by leading contemporary artists and poems hand-picked to speak to every kind of reader.

Pamphlets are supplied with an envelope for posting and a bookmark with space for you to write a special message. 

Poems from the Coast

The British archipelago has over 7,000 miles of coastline – everything from limestone cliffs to muddy estuaries and from sand dunes to saltmarshes. These landscapes – and others far beyond – are reflected in these glorious poems.

We find mudflats and wild Scottish shorelines, along with a ballad celebrating the shingle of a Suffolk beach where:

“The shelving’s steep
With stones to skim
As if they’d feet
To hop and skip
Across the deep…”

from ‘The Ballad of Shingle Street’ by Blake Morrison

Everywhere, there’s a sense that we go to the land’s edge to escape the hurly-burly of our daily lives. Being close to the ocean is “as near as we come to another world” as Anne Stevenson says in her paean to the North Sea.

Poems by Matthew Arnold, Miriam Darlington, Helen Dunmore, Jen Hadfield, Kathleen Jamie, Blake Morrison, Kenneth Steven, Anne Stevenson, Giles Watson and Derek Walcott.

Cover illustration by Sam Cannon.