Adam Hansen is Senior Lecturer in English at Northumbria University. He has published widely on early modern culture in its own time and in later appropriations. He has also been publishing poetry for more than 10 years, with work featuring in Oxford Poets: An Anthology, edited by David Constantine and Bernard O’Donoghue (Carcanet, 2007), BBC Radio 3’s Words and Music(2010), the London-based contemporary poetry magazine inc. (2012), and The Tangerine(Belfast, 2016).
Goswick Sands
Adam Hansen, Northumbria University
Illuminations show that on this coast
St Cuthbert preached and calmed beasts from the sea.
Here are creatures drawn in clear lines by kids
on a beach darkening in the rain and dusk;
here are our steps, revealing brighter sand.
At first, we took the brightness for the beams
of a torch, or lighthouse, or headlights. But
it was just us, alone there on the beach.
No saints, beasts, or illuminations – us.
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