Blue; a lament for the sea

UPDATED OCTOBER 2025:

OUT NOW, A POETRY PAMPHLET PUBLISHED BY STEWED RHUBARB PRESS £6

Blue: a lament for the sea is one woman’s journey through the interstices of land and sea, grief and love. The medieval Gaelic myth of the Isle of Iona escaping an apocalyptic flood infuses this contemporary lyric epic in free verse. Words unravel from deep time to the Anthropocene and our collapsing ecosystems, asking: what is hope in these times?

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A hybrid long verse narrative by Liz Macwhirter spoken amidst an immersive, abstract filmic vision of shifting waters by Jonathan Kearney. Pilot 15-minute show performed at Hidden Door Festival 12 June 2022 and Voice PG Conference, Glasgow 10 June 2022.

An ancient Scottish Gaelic prophecy foretells a flood at the end of time. It proclaimed waters will sweep over all lands save for the sacred Isle of Iona. Words that wintered a thousand years are unfolded in Blue, haunting the Anthropocene as the sea entangles birth with death.

“I think on those who drowned in tears, and I wonder if the seas of this world will rise in grief at so much loss.“

Blue; a lament for the sea draws on strands from my current creative-critical PhD at the University of Glasgow. Words drift to us from a hidden time of medieval Christian contemplative thought… when paradox was a place for holding complex loss, when the doorway to the infinite was through the finite and homely, when a closed place could become a gateway to the endless.

As Cole Arthur Riley says in her New York Times bestseller This Here Flesh, in lament we can make a journey into our deepest sorrows knowing tragedy doesn’t own us. Blue weaves together loss, trauma theology, medieval poetics both Gaelic and Middle English, and the contemplative wisdom of the female writer Julian of Norwich. In a gentle holding, she understood everything as connected.