Found at Sea

By Andrew Greig

The acclaimed Scottish writer reflects on a small boat excursion through the Orkney Islands in this poetry collection of “touching lyrical sensitivity” (The Times Literary Supplement, UK).

Andrew Greig has won much acclaim and numerous awards for his novels, poetry, and nonfiction evoking the natural beauty of rural Scotland or chronicling his far-flung adventures. In this volume, his love for his home and his passion for travel come together.

One summer evening, Greig embarked upon a micro-odyssey from his home in Stromness to the island of Cava, and Found at Sea recounts in poetic sequence the tale of his open dinghy voyage. Written in six weeks, this is a “very wee epic” about sailing, male friendship, and a voyage. In sailing small boats in scary open waters, Andrew Greig has found a new activity and a new metaphor for life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780857905871

Andrew Greig

Andrew Greig is a Scottish writer living in Edinburgh and Orkney. He has written seven novels, a variety of non-fiction books, and nine volumes of poetry, including Found At Sea, Getting Higher: Complete Mountain Poems and This Life, This Life: New and Selected Poems. His collection The Order of the Day was a Poetry Book Society choice.

Book preview

VOYAGE

OUT

‘And then went down to the ship,

Set keel to breaker, forth on the godly sea’

The ‘Arctic Whaler’

(i) The name

Tales of Orkney men under aurora

chasing the whale, themselves harpooned

by memories of warmth, booze, home

- those barbs of love that don’t pull loose -

made a fictive pub for Mackay Brown’s

fine-crafted ‘Hamnavoe’;

the derelict store on Gareth’s pier

was the set when the poem was filmed -

thereafter folk, as joke then custom

still cried it that; I knew it best

on those Hogmanays we thrashed

banjo, fiddles and guitar, huddled round the brazier

(‘Into the fire of images / Gladly I put my hand’)

by windowless window and doorless door;

then Mark’s boat needed a name:

this the declension by which she became

the ‘Arctic Whaler’

(ii) The specs

‘a sea-hawk, perched on its trailer by wind-swept Ness’

‘Fine entry, shallow draft.

Raked