Not Sealions but Lions by the Sea

Alec Finlay's Not Sealions but Lions by the Sea is a remarkable, clear-sighted act of poetic attention-tender without evasion, quietly radical in its form and feeling. These poems trace grief, illness, and memory with the kind of lyric integrity that insists on care, on craft, on depth. Finlay moves fluently between modes-memoir, elegy, topography, conceptual play-holding language to account while also letting it breathe. This book is a field guide to the unspoken, and to what might still be spoken if we listen closely enough. It is also a prospectus for the poem as an act of witness that promotes parley.