The Last True Poets of the Sea by Julia Drake: book review

The Last True Poets of the Sea (2019) is set in the coastal town of Lyric, Maine, in America in contemporary times.

Violet Larkin is a tall lanky partying teenager when her younger brother Sam is in a psychiatric ward for treatment. Her parents send her from New York to the quiet seaside town of Lyric in Maine to ‘chill’ – but she thinks she is in ‘exile.’

Lyric is her mother’s home town, where Violet and Sam go every summer holidays. There is a lot of family history in that town. When the ship Lyric sank in 1885, her great-great-great-grandmother Fidelia was the only survivor. Fidelia swam to shore and stayed where she established the township of Lyric – and the shipwreck was never seen again.

Violet is seventeen, and gets a volunteer position at the Lyric Aquarium, where her ‘sea friends’ are not only the creatures in the tanks – she also makes friends with the marine biologists, especially handsome Orien Lewis. But Orien has a partner – 26-year-old professor Liv Stone.

Violet finds one of Fidelia’s letters, dated November 1919. Liv, a historian, thinks something ‘dark and twisted’ is going on in Violet and Sam’s ancestoral history. Violet wants to find the shipwreck where her ancestry began. It’s an ambitious plan, and although suspicious of each other, Liv and Violet go shipwreck hunting together.

This novel is about recovery after a physical shipwreck and an emotional shipwreck, about finding the missing pieces in the town’s history and in the personal history of Violet and Sam in order to be able to move on with their lives, to leave the past behind, live in the present, and to think about their future.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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