Sea Poetics

Lyrical, personal, but always accessible, Sea Poetics is imbued with a deep feeling for the natural world. Wooldridge approaches poetry as though it is a painting, inspired by an experience of light or a moment that focuses attention, words are her canvass and the sea and sky her frequent themes, often leading to explorations of how individual experience relates to the macro scale of the universe. Her fresh images distil moments with skill and delicacy, pulling the reader into a shared emotional response. Skilful, evocative and compelling, Patricia Helen Wooldridge is an elegant debut voice.

from ''The Green Sea''

Of course, if I had the green sea to contemplate
every day for as long as I shall live, what mind-shift
would take place? How would I begin to compensate
for a time before this? To observe how the swell will lift
its glassy head and, in that instant, become unaware that a breath
is taken. There is little else now but the slack tide for inspection,
being lost in the waves’ giving way, no longer out of my depth.