The British archipelago has over 7,000 miles of coastline – everything from limestone cliffs to muddy estuaries and from sand dunes to saltmarshes. The variety of these landscapes – and of others far beyond – is reflected in these glorious poems selected by naturalist Miriam Darlington.
 
There are poems about wild Scottish shorelines and mudflats filled with birds, along with a ballad that celebrates 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 step away from 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.
 
Donation to Surfers Against Sewage.