SeaManShip is an extraordinary and challenging poem. The ‘Sea’ of the title is a symbol of the natural world, ‘Man’ represents human feelings and intellect, and ‘Ship’ signifies the artificial or man-created.

By turns rhapsodic and incantatory, the poem is loosely based on the structure of a computer manual. The author writes of it that ‘SeaManShip charts the struggles of a man, perhaps an overly romantic one, forced to face reality and come to terms with the chaos and confusions of the modern world.’