The Distance Run

Simon Beechinor went to sea at sixteen and spent forty-five years in the shipping industry: first as a merchant seaman, and later as a shipping executive working in Papua New Guinea, Hong Kong, and the City of London. The Distance Run is what that life produced. A collection of mostly prose poems, it traces a journey from an English childhood through the decline of British shipping to post-colonial Papua New Guinea, Hong Kong, the City of London, and the more intimate terrain of family life. The collection speaks in a register of unflinching and often amusing observation rarely heard in contemporary poetry. These poems move between the documentary and the imagined, between elegy and comedy, between the ship's deck, the boardroom, and the family kitchen. Alongside the autobiographical works are a number of imaginative poems that explore the boundary between memory and invention. Occasionally profane and often surprising, these poems speak from a world of work, family, and lives lived far from the literary centre.