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The Seafarer
Matthew Hollis, Norman McBeath
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From the publisher
Come, lean in for this song of myself.
Bear with me these tides of telling.
Days without dawn, nights of no end,
the oceans upturning. I cannot calm
the surge within;
A new translation for our times of the classic Anglo-Saxon poem.
The seafarer is alone on an empty and threatening ocean. And not just alone, but something far more punishing still: he is cast out.
To be the winter wunade – to be the seafarer – is to pose ourselves a series of troubling questions.
In what way should we live our life: from the security of the known, or on the risky path of revelation?
What should our obligations be: to depend upon others, or survive in our way alone?
Is suffering inevitable in order to arrive at enlightenment?
And what of our greater purpose: is it to live, or merely to exist?
As our planetary weather grows dangerously wild, as our kinship to society comes under strain, and as we desire to find a life in tune with natural elements, the poem commands us urgently to hear again, as the Anglo-Saxons did, the spirit-music of land, wind and sea.
About the photographs:
Norman McBeath says: ‘On first reading the opening lines of Matthew’s translation and interpretation of The Seafarer, I was instantly captivated by the salience of the words for our current times. The psychological depths revealed in such spare, strong language drew me in from the start. It acted like a catalyst on my subconscious, priming my vision, as I reviewed previous work and explored possible new themes and subjects.’
‘It has always been a guiding principle for me in my collaborative work that any pairing of image and text should not be directly descriptive or explanatory. The words and images should always be able to stand on their own. When they are put together, they should bring different and additional possibilities of understandings to the reader and viewer. So the photographs I selected in response to Matthew’s work are evocative, largely abstract in nature and open to multiple interpretations.’