Blue: a lament for the sea

Update: Published by Stewed Rhubarb Poetry Press 2025. Critical praise includes:

A powerful work of mourning and hauntings. At once elegy and call to arms, this is a spellbinding meditation on margins and oceanic longing that leaves the reader changed. – CJ Cooke

In haunting, melodic lyric, MacWhirter turns language itself into a ‘thin place’ of remembering, reckoning and renewal. – Jenn Ashworth

As our world grows bluer, through sea level rise, floods and storms, we need to listen to poets. In phrases that capture oceanic movements and both medieval and contemporary seascapes, ‘Blue’ charts our ecological grief and abiding connections to water and rock, humans and seabirds, surf and tides. Listen to these voices! – Steve Mentz

‘Blue’ carries its weighty material easily, in a free, slim, slender verse, immediately accessible, emotionally buoyant in a challenging narrative of discovery and disclosure… The lyrical exploration that the poem enacts is fraught and yet beautiful: its tone is exactly as its subtitle discloses, a ‘lament’, a keening, yet it is wide-eyed at the colour and vividness of the visual, and the spiritual substance Iona provides. – Alan Riach

Available from Stewed Rhubarb Press, Waterstones, Blackwells and other good bookshops. Distributed by Gardners Books.

Original post 2022:

A hybrid long verse narrative spoken amidst an immersive, abstract filmic vision of shifting waters. Show at Hidden Door Festival 12 June 2022.

An ancient Scottish Gaelic prophecy foretells a flood at the end of time. It proclaimed waters will sweep over all lands save for the sacred Isle of Iona. Words that wintered a thousand years are unfolded in Blue, haunting the Anthropocene as the sea entangles birth with death

I think on those who drowned in tears, and I wonder if the seas of this world will rise in grief at so much loss.

Blue draws on strands and trails from my current creative-critical PhD at the University of Glasgow. The words drift to us from a hidden time of medieval Christian contemplative thought… when paradox was a place for holding complex loss, when the doorway to the infinite was through the finite and homely, when a closed place could become a gateway to the endless.