Adam Thorpe

The Strandir coast begins with a dirt track, the guttural end of tarmac in a waste

of bared rock, grass and scree, and empty coves where great white trunks

have floated from Siberia: they litter the vast and stony strands

like matches if seen from afar, but down among them now they block our way

in booms of perimeter barriers, logs pale as the long drowned,

stripped of bark to the...

County Cork

Between the portals and the axials lay the central slab with its flotsam of euro-cents and hair-bangs, wet-scarred words, a Ryanair boarding pass kept from flight by a pebble.

Just when the grey rain cleared enough to take a photograph and find the atmospherics I’d so looked forward to, your mobile rang.

Our teenage son in Corsica, wild-camping with a hammock in the...

The dollardom shore of big Lake Michigan finds him doing what he did as a boy

by real seas, running alongside them: the land’s hem stitched, he’d look

back upon a long beach emptied by twilight (his spoor blurred as if already

old), and turn it to Avalon, or Crusoe’s island. Even on the edge of Central Africa

he had to change into somewhere else what they would always...

We know you’ve got a thing about us, scuffing the earth at our feet, giving us a voice. Like this.

We know about the groans we’ve heard, the yelps in moonlight, rumours of progeny. Bellies keep pressing us; we decline.

Thunder on the moor and your effeteness assured, we think of us as crown whetted on the storm, not bald queans.

We know about the influx of coach parties; the way...

For every booming bittern there are ten, for every cliff-stacked gannet mass

there is at least one with his clingfilmed lunch-pack, wringing his socks on St Kilda.

This is surety of sorts. That the index finger will go on twitching till the loch

gives up its greylag, the moor its merlin, that even the chough has its hangers-on

grim-jawed on outcrops where the breakers’ sting assures Him...