Ship's Log: David Punter
Ship's Log: David Punter
David Punter’s Ship’s Log is a collection of poems for the SS Great Britain which is, after a long and varied life, now a museum in Bristol harbour. The museum has an archive attached, which holds a mass of passenger letters and diaries. In this book, David has taken extracts for these materials, and written his own poems in response to them.
The extracts range from the tragic to the richly comic; from the despairing to the wonderfully hopeful; from the staccato factual to the remarkably powerful descriptive. Underlying all of them is a sense of the magnitude of the ocean; the strength yet also the frailty of the ship; the danger of being overwhelmed by the sheer difference of the sea, its colours, its shapes, its majesty. Each poem provides an engaging response to these extraordinary texts.
Pages: 80
Softback
ISBN: 9781909446335
Size: 152mm x 225mm
About David Punter
David Punter is Professor of Poetry at the University of Bristol and Honorary Professor at Xian Jiao-Tong University, China, having previously worked in Scotland, Hong Kong and Shanghai.
David has published a number of poetry books, most recently Those Other Fields (Palewell, 2000) and Stranger (2001), as well as a great deal of literary criticism. He has been on the Boards of Poetry Can, Literature Southwest and the Ledbury Poetry Festival, and was recently a judge of the Bristol Cathedral Poetry Prize. He has been preoccupied with ships and the sea for most of his life, and has sailed in many waters.
