Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach

An insightful and lyrical account of a year on one beach—part natural history, part meditation, part travelogueStrands 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 printed mug from a Cunard liner. This is a series of meditations prompted by walking on the wild estuarial beaches of Ainsdale Sands between Blackpool and Liverpool. It 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.

Parenting & Relationships

Sprackland, Jean

Reference

Vintage, UK

These Silent Mansions: A Life in Graveyards

'A refreshingly original meditation... I wish I had written it myself' Literary Review Graveyards are oases: places of escape, peace and reflection. Liminal sites of commemoration, where the past is close enough to touch. Yet they also reflect their living community - how in our restless, accelerated modern world, we are losing our sense of connection to the dead. Jean Sprackland - the prize-winning poet and author of Strands - travels back through her life, revisiting her once local graveyards. In seeking out the stories of those who lived and died there, remembered and forgotten, she unearths what has been lost.

These Silent Mansions: A life in graveyards

Vintage

Chaos and calamity abound in the shape of fire and flood, ice-storm, and hurricane; trains stand still, zoos are abandoned, migrating birds lose their way—all surfaces are unreliable, all territories unmapped. These are poems that explore the ambivalence and dark unease of slippage and collapse, but they also carry a powerful sense of the miraculous made manifest amongst the ordinary: the mating of toads, ice on the beach ("dream stuff, with its own internal acoustic"). Bracken may run wild across the planet "waiting for the moment/to pounce on the accident/of the discarded match" but there are also the significant wonders of children and the natural beauty of the world they have inherited. This is a collection of raw, distressed, and beautiful poems, a hymn to the remarkable survival of things in the face of threat.

Tilt (Cape Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

JONATHAN CAPE.

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: intertidal 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.

Biographies & Memoirs

Graveyards are oases: places of escape, of peace and reflection. Each is a garden or nature reserve, but also a site of commemoration, where the past is close enough to touch: a liminal place, at the border of the living world. Jean Sprackland's prize-winning book, Strands, brought to life the histories of objects found on a beach. These Silent Mansions is also an uncovering of individual stories: vivid, touching and intimately told. Sprackland travels back through her own life, revisiting graveyards in the ordinary towns and cities she has called home, seeking out others who lived, died and are remembered or forgotten there. With her poet's eye, she makes chance discoveries among the stones and inscriptions: a notorious smuggler tucked up in a sleepy churchyard; ancient coins unearthed on a secret burial ground; a slow-worm basking in the sun. These Silent Mansions is an elegant, exhilarating meditation on the relationship between the living and the dead, the nature of time and loss, and how - in this restless, accelerated world - we can connect the here with the elsewhere, the present with the past.

This short story collection features three authors who each contribute half a dozen stories that are linked by their shared setting. Jean Sprackland follows characters clinging to lost dreams and obsessions amid the dunes and fairgrounds of Southport. Set in the derelict rooms and vandalized stairwells of a tower block in south Manchester, Tim Cooke's stories draw intricate spirals around the claustrophobic lives of those who occupy them. Sean O'Brien's voices are also those of lost souls that actively seek their own dereliction, staggering between the vaulted libraries and nocturnal drinking dens of Tyneside.

Ellipsis 1: Comma Modern Shorts

Cooke, Tim

O’Brien, Sean

Short Stories & Anthologies

Comma Press

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Books by Sprackland, Jean

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sprackland, Jean. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach

These Silent Mansions: A life in graveyards

Tilt (Cape Poetry)

Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach

These Silent Mansions: A Life in Graveyards

Ellipsis 1: Comma Modern Shorts