poet seabird island
by Sarah Wallis
Sarah Wallis
Sarah Wallis is a writer who lives by the sea, based on the East Coast of Scotland, UK, looking out at two nearby islands, The Bass Rock and The May Isle, both seabird sanctuaries. She is originally from London but spent so much time in Yorkshire having stayed after university, that feels most like home now, especially since there is no longer a family home in London. Poet Seabird Island is her fifth chapbook, others include How to Love the Hat Thrower and Precious Mettle. 2023 works included cauliflower poem art at Osmosis, podcasting with Eat the Storms and a winning story, Earthbound, at The Welkin, now a nominee for Best Short Fictions 2024. She lives with two cats, a wonderful husband and a large collection of hats. Her favourite seabird is the Northern Gannet, so fierce and strong and they have that cool, ice-blue gaze. Sarah has three island trips planned this year, one to The May, mostly to see the pufflings this time and also, to Mull and Iona in the Hebrides.
praise for poet seabird island
Sarah Wallis’ poems carry the energy of flight — ascending with grace, adrift in windstreams, dotting islands in their travel. The poems in this collection offer their journeys to the reader: tales of migration, transformation, and the cycles of leaving and returning. These poems find their home in the air and on the waves.
– Aaron Lelito, Editor in Chief of Wild Roof Journal
Sarah Wallis’ poetry shows a keen eye and ear for the wonders of the marine world, and a well-honed instinct for myth and story. From school dinnertime fishcakes to the free natural theatre of diving gannets, she understands the depth of our connection to the sea and just how vulnerable that connection has become. Here are poems that lift the heart and remind us that by looking, listening and, yes, loving, we too can ‘make waves’ and renew our ties to the shorelines and oceans that have given us so much.
– Chris Powici, Paperboats
In Poet Seabird Island, Sarah Wallis breaks from the glass cabinets of the city and dives into a collection cut from the coast. Wallis excels at language, playful in its alliteration, white cold mallow marsh wallowed on the pale yellow sand, its symmetry of sound, failed to fly, failed to fish, and its repetition that turns back like the tides, verges on hymnal, hypnotic. These poetic pelagic escapades are painted with multi-coloured characters – orange-footed clownbirds, white bellied geese, violet winter skies over the sapphire surf. These poems are seasonal and leave you, with hope or not, with the sea sobbing in your ear. These are love poems to the curve of the earth, seen from the edge of land and the world above and beyond. They capture the cormorant, the current, the call to adventure and the loss encountered on the fight to flight. And this is an exceptionally fine flight.
– Damien Donnelly, EIC, The Storms, print journal, host and producer of the podcast Eat the Storms
An intelligent and emotional collection laced with salt, Poet Seabird Island teems with stunning poetry fresh from the shoreline. Sarah Wallis has dug her hands into the beach and lifted treasures which she presents with clear eloquence and wonderful symbolism. I devoured every page.
– Seb Reilly, Editor of Seaside Gothic
