The Rime Of The Modern Mariner - Tapa dura

"Nick Hayes has somehow or other managed to channel and combine the spirits of Coleridge, William Morris, the Romantic poets, most American 60s underground comix artists, probably Eric Gill, possibly a hippy chick who once offered you a bowl of lentils at Glastonbury and doubtlessly the fiercest eco-warrior you can imagine... and succeeded in producing something simultaneously poetical, polemical and frequently beautiful. An extraordinary achievement." (Martin Rowson)

"The Rime of the Modern Mariner achieves a powerful cumulative effect, and the Mariner's environmental message will surely influence many readers who will never casually discard another plastic carrier bag or water bottle" (Paul Gravett Times Literary Supplement)

Deep in a polluted city, a worker escapes his office for a sandwich on a park bench. But his moment's peace is shattered by a stranger - a seaman with a tale to tell...

The Rime of the Modern Mariner is a recasting of Coleridge's famous poem - now, though, the fantastical voyage is one of environmental disaster. Stranded in the North Pacific Gyre - a vast, hypoxic maelstrom of plastic waste - the mariner comes face to face with the consequences of man's excessive consumption - in the form of wrathful gods, petroleum slicks and tsunamis, ghostly apparitions, and the great endangered creatures of the deep.

Crackling with moral force, humour and pure craftsmanship, The Rime of the Modern Mariner is a beautiful book which confronts directly the burning issue of our time.