Book Description

No Far Shore: Charting Unknown Waters sees poet Anne-Marie Fyfe, who grew up on the Antrim Coast, explore her own writerly passion for horizon-gazing, on an odyssey from her native Cushendall by way of water’s-edge locations such as Orkney, Felixstowe, Swansea and Cork to Martha’s Vineyard & north from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia’s remote Breton Cove. Charting, in a travel/literary memoir that blends poetry and prose, research and recall, the maritime sensibilities of loved writers from Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson to Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bishop, Fyfe finds shore-dwellers divide into those who exult in setting out to sea, and those who long instead for headland & island remoteness, an obsession seemingly traceable to absences in childhood, which echo something of Fyfe’s own growing-up on the edge of the North Channel. This is the story of a quest that took the author to known & unfamiliar coastal waters, via lighthouses, lost islands & small harbours, & back into the shifting tidelines of memory & the hidden inlets of her own family narrative.