SS Great Britain Inspires Bristol Poet
Letters and diaries written by passengers on the SS Great Britain when it sailed the high seas have inspired a Bristol poet to produce a unique anthology.
Ship’s Log (Bristol Books, £8) has been researched and written by David Punter, Professor of Poetry at the University of Bristol, with every poem inspired by original writings of passengers and crew on Brunel’s great ship, now a permanent fixture in Bristol’s Harbourside.
David Punter searched through the archive attached to the ship and found passages written off the coast of Australia, America or on the high seas by passengers, the ship’s doctor, officers and crew members.
Ship’s Log faithfully records extracts from the archive and the poems that he was moved to write after uncovering them.
Said David Punter: “I have been reading through these archives for several years and have been continually startled by the extraordinary words in which those on board attempt to convey and craft their experiences, to form some kind of explicable narrative – to explain to others, but also in many cases to explain to themselves.
“They were articulating situations of the utmost strangeness – telling of experiences of raging tempest and blinding calm, of death and survival, of wonder and marvel, of seemingly impossible encounters with distant shores and inexplicable creatures.”
David Punter has published a number of poetry books, most recently Those Other Fields (Palewell, 2000) and Stranger (2001), as well as a great deal of literary criticism. He has been on the Boards of Poetry Can, Literature Southwest and the Ledbury Poetry Festival, and was recently a judge of the Bristol Cathedral Poetry Prize.
An Honorary Professor at Xian Jiao-Tong University, China, having previously worked in Scotland, Hong Kong and Shanghai, he has been preoccupied with ships and the sea for most of his life and has sailed in many waters.
Ship’s Log is available from the author’s website www.david-punter.org.
