Moored Man

Moored Man is a shape-changer, passionate and dangerous.  In this powerful cycle of poems we see him moulding dykes, sorting gravel, infilling creeks, trickling at the unwary, drowning the innocent, howling and dancing, and all the while worrying away at his own contradictory identity and relationship to human beings. This is Kevin Crossley-Holland’s first new collection since The Language of Yes (1996), and it is a vivid and penetrating enquiry into the dramatic north Norfolk landscape in which he now resides.  Norman Ackroyd’s evocative etchings and watercolours provide a haunting and colourful accompaniment to the poems in this enthralling book.

‘In a sequence of wild, desperate, beautiful and original statements the seashore tells us how it can never get away, how it has struggled in its liquid chains, and how it is both captive and yet free.  Moored Man may be tied to the edge but he is never stationary…  Moored Man is the voice of that ultimate geography which separates land from water.’  RONALD BLYTHE