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Signals to the Disappearing Shore
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781837380206
Publisher: Shearsman Books
Published: Jun 12 2026
Pages: 90
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.22 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
The title Signals to the Disappearing Shore embodies an ambiguity central to the poems' care for the world we inhabit. Does the shore appear to disappear because viewed from a departing vessel - viewed perhaps by desperate emigrants or deportees; or is it literally disappearing, submerged or eroded by changes wrought by time and humankind? Are the signals waves of farewell, or urgent warnings? From the start, the theme of migration is set in a deep historical context, a pattern extended widely in the long poem 'A raga for Enheduana', which ranges in time and geography from the ancient Sumerian poet-priestess who is the earliest individually known writer to the contemporary crimes of some contemporary political leaders.
Environmental threat is given sharpest expression in the central section of the book, eight poems drawing on the author's long-held concern over nuclear proliferation, both weapons and power, the human costs and land destruction. The book also includes the 12-part 'Journal of a plague year' written, as the title suggests, at the height of the Covid pandemic and the social restrictions that came with it, again drawing links between landscapes and events ancient, medieval and modern.
Aidan Semmens's poetic landscape is vast and I feel mountain-high as I read these enthralling, often topical and terrifying descriptions of the many peaks of human history. The poems picture destruction, far past and vividly present, using brilliant and subtle lineation, original phrases that stay with you. This is a poet who opens your mind with everyday settings and casual-sounding descriptions, then fills it with precisely the historic and scientific knowledge we need to grapple with today's sociopolitical horrors. -Claire Crowther
If you are inclined to believe that the significance of the distant past is somehow remote or even absent from the contemporary world, then Signals to the Disappearing Shore is not for you. That deep history speaks in the present and Aidan Semmens articulates it for all its brutality and wonder in an uninflated, direct and referential poetry. With unblinking vision Semmens shows us how the same 'spiritually ordained slaughter' which in part shaped a mythology, also writes today's headlines. -Kelvin Corcoran
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