ABSTRACT

Between land and sea is the beach, an ambiguous littoral zone in which elemental forces – rocks, water, air, sun – are in constant interanimation. According to the physical geographer Cuchlaine King, ‘[a] beach is one of the most variable of land forms. It can be there one day and gone the next’ (3). To write about the beach, and other kinds of littoral landscapes, then, is to be attuned to the temporalities of such places and their characteristic changeability. It is also to recognise their at-least-dual status as material environments and cultural images. Noting the sensory richness of our encounters with the beach, Yvonne Rydin comments on its function as a conceptual border or boundary: ‘A boundary between water and land, but also between the everyday and the holiday, the domestic and the natural, the stable and the shifting, the safe and the dangerous’ (153). It is this manifestation of littoral landscapes, their role as physical and metaphorical boundaries, that I propose to explore in this essay. In particular, I want to try to read the multiple significations of the shoreline between land and sea as they are articulated in the poetry of Michael Longley and Robert Minhinnick.