Dark, salt, clear : life in a Cornish fishing village

First Title Value for Searching:

Personal Author:

Ash, Lamorna

Physical Description:

xiv, 316 pages ; 24 cm.

Summary:

"From an adventurous and discerning new voice reminiscent of Robert Macfarlane, a captivating portrait of a community eking out its living in a coastal landscape as stark and storied as it is beautiful. Before arriving in Newlyn, a Cornish fishing village at the end of the railway line, Lamorna Ash was told that no fisherman would want a girl joining an expedition. Weeks later, the only female on board a trawler called the Filadelfia, she is heading out to sea with the dome of the sky above and the black waves below. Newlyn is a town of dramatic cliffs, crashing tides, and hardcore career fishermen-complex and difficult heroes who slowly open up to Ash about their lives and frustrations, first in the condensed space of the boat, and then in the rough pubs ashore. Determined to know the community on its own terms, Ash lodges in a spare room by the harbor and lets the village wash over her in all of its clamoring unruliness, thumping machinery, and tangled nets-its history, dialect, and centuries-old industry. Moving between Ash's surprising, transformational journey aboard the Filadelfia and her astute observations of Newlyn's landscape and people, Dark, Salt, Clear is an assured work of indelible characters and a multilayered travelogue through a landscape both lovely and merciless. Ash's adventurous glint, her delicate observations, and her willingness to get under the skin of a place call to mind the work of Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, and Robert Macfarlane. This is an evocative journey and a fiercely auspicious debut"--

Contents:

The end of the line -- Way down to Lamorna -- Vesica Piscis -- Guts -- The sing of the shore -- Lines through rocks -- Wild beasts -- Fish through fingers -- Leather purses -- Misways -- Fish within fish -- Careworn -- Smoke -- Sea-hab -- Beaten copper -- Local -- A feast of seabirds -- Rosebud -- Dropped things -- Some old residents -- Graveyard -- Storms do come -- Raymundo -- Vortex -- A passionate rage -- 'Ome -- Fisherman's blues -- Holloways.

Subject Term:

Fishing villages -- England.

Fishers -- England -- Newlyn.

Fisheries -- England -- Newlyn.

Publication Info:

London ; New York : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.

Subject:

Fishing villages -- England.

Fishers -- England -- Newlyn.

Fisheries -- England -- Newlyn.

Newlyn (England) -- Social life and customs.

Ash, Lamorna -- Travel -- England -- Newlyn.

Anglers

Fishermen

Sports persons

Sportspersons

Coastal fisheries

Commercial fisheries

Commercial fishing industry

Farms, Fish

Fish farms

Fishery industry

Fishery methods

Fishing industry

Freshwater fisheries

Inland fisheries

Large-scale fisheries

Marine fisheries

Marine recreational fisheries

Recreational fisheries

Sea fisheries

Sea fishing industry

Sport fisheries

Newlyn (Cornwall)

Newlyn, Eng.

SAILS ISBN:

9781635576153

Available:

Library	Shelf Number	Shelf Location	Status
Searching... Mattapoisett Free Public Library	942.37 ASH 2020	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Plympton Public Library	942.3 ASH	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Taunton Public Library	942.37 AS31D	3RD FLOOR STACKS	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Wareham Free Library	942.3 ASH 2020	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

From an adventurous and discerning new voice reminiscent of Robert Macfarlane, a captivating portrait of a community eking out its living in a coastal landscape as stark and storied as it is beautiful.

Before arriving in Newlyn, a Cornish fishing village at the end of the railway line, Lamorna Ash was told that no fisherman would want a girl joining an expedition. Weeks later, the only female on board a trawler called the Filadelfia , she is heading out to sea with the dome of the sky above and the black waves below.

Newlyn is a town of dramatic cliffs, crashing tides, and hardcore career fishermen-complex and difficult heroes who slowly open up to Ash about their lives and frustrations, first in the condensed space of the boat, and then in the rough pubs ashore. Determined to know the community on its own terms, Ash lodges in a spare room by the harbor and lets the village wash over her in all of its clamoring unruliness, thumping machinery, and tangled nets-its history, dialect, and centuries-old industry.

Moving between Ash's surprising, transformational journey aboard the Filadelfia and her astute observations of Newlyn's landscape and people, Dark, Salt, Clear is an assured work of indelible characters and a multilayered travelogue through a landscape both lovely and merciless. Ash's adventurous glint, her delicate observations, and her willingness to get under the skin of a place call to mind the work of Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, and Robert Macfarlane. This is an evocative journey and a fiercely auspicious debut.

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Playwright Ash turns a curious and empathetic eye on the small fishing village of Newlyn in Cornwall, England, weaving history, myth, and memoir into a gripping and affecting debut. Introducing locals both down-to-earth, such as Roger, a grieving retired geologist, and eccentric, such as self-styled "Duchess of Newlyn" Pat, Ash succeeds in bringing the town vividly to life. While Ash explains her connection to the area--her mother grew up nearby and named her for local landmark Lamorna Cove--she shows how she gained a new understanding of it through firsthand experience with the fishing industry that provides Newlyn's lifeblood. Her activities include observing fish graders rate a catch for auction, riding along on crab-fishing dayboats, and taking a weeklong voyage on a trawler, at the end of which she at last feels like a member of the community. Writing that "the consumer can know nothing of the pranks, the storms and the struggles that their weekly fish supper has been privy to," Ash leaves readers with a lasting impression of the toil, elation, and sadness faced by her subjects. Ash's remarkably empathetic take on a small town and its outsized contribution to the fishing industry is one to savor. Agent: Cathryn Summerhayes, Curtis Brown. (Dec.)

Kirkus Review

A Londoner goes to sea. Making an engaging book debut, Ash offers a gently told memoir recounting several extended visits to Newlyn, a Cornwall fishing village to which she feels "unwittingly bound": Her mother was born there and named Lamorna for a small local cove. Ash captures the color and rhythms of a close-knit community where life, livelihood, and death center on the sea, and "if there is a case one person believes in, it rapidly becomes a village-wide concern." Generously welcomed by fishermen and supplied with seasickness pills, she embarked on day-boats and trawlers, sometimes for days at a time. She learned to gut, fillet, and box fish, tasks--such as stabbing a huge stingray in its heart--that sometimes left her repulsed. "My physical connection to those fish," she admits, "the literal opening of their bodies and directing my attention to the secrets inside of them, engenders a permanent change to the way I view fish when back on land." For the 20-something Londoner, life at sea seemed to be "a kind of monastic existence: imprisoned and yet free, roaming, but in the most confined space possible." In evocative detail, she depicts the unique personality of each boat--"the particular wheezing, spluttery cough of each engine"--and each fisherman, some of whom became her confidants; others, drinking buddies. Younger fishermen, especially, expressed their urgent concern with sustainability and worry about humankind's "potentially devastating impact on the oceans." Ash deftly weaves her own reflections with those of many other writers, including W.G. Sebald, Elizabeth Bishop, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, and Barry Lopez, as she considers the indelible connection of identity to geography. "Though your body is in the harbour once more," she notes, after getting back on land, "for a long time your mind is still at sea." A graceful, lovely homage to people and place. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

In this debut work, education worker and playwright Ash recounts leaping on a fishing vessel and learning the trade to chronicle the fate of a small Cornish village and a way of life that's dying. With a 30,000-copy first printing.