The Boat Game

The Boat Game moves through a world of ships, ferry routes, offshore rigs, and subsea cables, tracing the hidden systems that connect lives across oceans and islands. Here tourist cruises hover above the wreck of the Titanic, decommissioned oil platforms linger as accidental reefs, and radio signals carry fragments of human voices across open water. From Shetland sea stacks to space missions, from childhood imaginings to maritime rescue channels, Siún Carden’s poems explore what it means to travel, to depart, and to remain. Siún is a poet of quite remarkable talent and potential. Her work is a concise, surprising and imaginatively bold interrogation of our relationship with both natural and unnatural worlds. Every one of her poems, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, is an event, a happening, an action, not a still life. – John Glenday Wry, surreal, and always humane, Carden’s poetry is a lightbox to which she holds up the astonishing facades of Anthropocene existence. – Jen Hadfield