The Distance Run

A Life in Poems and Prose
A collection of mostly prose poems tracing a journey from an English childhood through the decline of British shipping to post-colonial Papua New Guinea, Hong Kong, the City of London, and the more intimate terrain of family life.

Simon Beechinor went to sea at sixteen and spent forty-five years in the shipping industry: first as a merchant seaman, and later as a shipping executive working in Papua New Guinea, Hong Kong, and the City of London. The Distance Run is what that life produced.

A collection of mostly prose poems, it traces a journey from an English childhood through the decline of British shipping to post-colonial Papua New Guinea, Hong Kong, the City of London, and the more intimate terrain of family life. The collection speaks in a register of unflinching and often amusing observation rarely heard in contemporary poetry.

These poems move between the documen