The Lost Music

The author spent five years working and living along-side the fishermen in the Northumberland village of Beadnell, listening to their dialect, learning their ways. In a dialogue between her own voice and the fishermen's dialect, The Lost Music traces the identity of this fishing community, revealing loss of spiritual direction with the passing of the old ways of life. Her poems suggest the way forward is neither to cling to the past nor to abandon it, but to change and remember. One critic has said: There are poems here to take to heart and to have by heart.