Beyond the Blue is Jackie Anderson's second collection of poetry, following on from Of Love and Shadows published in 2014.
In this new collection, Anderson explores how her life, her thinking and her perceptions have been influenced by closeness to the sea which was the main feature of her life's landscape, surrounding her native Gibraltar on almost all sides. Anderson grew up by the sea and then spent three decades living by the Medway river on the North Kent coast where her horizon stretched out beyond the flat reaches of the estuary waters. The closed border years of the 1970s endured by Gibraltarians, the old fishing villages of southern Spain, the myths and tales of sea farers, sunshine, ice cream and decaying English resorts, the call of sirens and the rage of sea storms all feature in Anderson's poetry. If people shape their landscape, so too, does the landscape shape the person, says Anderson, in recognition of the limitations and possibilities, the joy and the danger, and, above all, the yearning to reach beyond the blue that the sea has come to represent to her.
Currently available in paperback from Amazon