Who by Water

These poems came into being as a result of new nearness to loss and to the sea. They are intimate, an attempt to express the beauty of untamed power that demands respect of the human heart; the terror it strikes into the soul. The form of each poem or sequence flows freely from its emotional or visual impetus: often dark, sometimes joyous or ecstatic or pictorial. Always there is an underlying sense of awe, of the unknowable and the impossibility of knowing. Neutrality is sought in echoing the earliest Anglo-Saxon or Chinese poetry. The sea becomes witness, calm interlocutor, feared judge, absent lover, intercessor. The aim is impersonality, to evoke the eternal in relation to the present; 'now-ness', as David Jones put it.

Born in Beith in 1948, Kate Ashton trained as a nurse in Edinburgh before moving to London and journalism on Nursing Times. From 1979 until 2003 she lived, worked and wrote in The Netherlands, publishing full-length fiction and non-fiction. She has translated widely from Dutch and Flemish; reviews, and reports as expert assessor for PEN Translates! Her memoir, Losing Eric Gill's Eden, is forthcoming from Frances Boutle Publishers. She lives in Nairn, on the Moray Firth. This is her first full collection.