Sea Swim

'I am thrilled to be patron of this simple and simply beautiful idea. Poetry is going down to the sea again.' --Carol Ann Duffy

'[Clarke's] work is amongst the best to have emerged from new poets in this country over the past two or three years.' --Simon Armitage

Throughout 2011, Sea Swimmers swam in Scarborough's South Bay as part of imove, the Cultural Olympiad Programme in Yorkshire. They were led into the waves by poet John Wedgwood Clarke, whose eighteen-poem sequence inspired by this experience was collected in book form and published by Valley Press in April 2012.

The poems explore the fluent, fragile and sometimes agonisingly pleasurable relationship between the swimmer, the land and the sea around Scarborough; how swimming transforms the way we feel ourselves to be in our bodies, and the liberating effects these changes have on the imagination.