In his first collection of poetry, Richard Barnett turns a precise gaze and a musical sensibility on the worlds we inherit and the worlds we make for ourselves. In the award-winning title sequence, the sea sifts and rolls through the dreams of an old man asleep in a deckchair, conjuring a vision of England’s history and our human crossings.
Seahouses is a distinctively English work of low modernism, cranky, eloquent, broken-hearted. It is a book for people who read Hill, but who wish he’d be less marmoreal; people who read Paterson & Robinson, but who wish they’d drop the pose sometimes & fucking well cheer up; people who are smart and musical and angry, but who don’t want to read yet another version of the Duino Elegies or ‘The Wood of Suicides’; people who love history, but hate National Trust Houses; people who read nature poetry, but who don’t hate cities; people who walk by the cliffs; people who’ve had their hearts broken, & who’ve broken someone else’s.
Richard Barnett studied medicine in London before becoming a historian, and is now a freelance writer and broadcaster. His history books include The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration (Thames & Hudson, 2014).