Katrina Porteous's sequence of poems in The Blue Lonnen is set, as her life is, on the spare and beautiful, long-limbed coast of Northumberland, facing the North Sea. Lonnen is the Northumbrian word for a lane, and the Blue Lonnen is a path, paved with the crushed mussel shells from long ago bait, which leads down through the fishermen's huts to the sea. At the end of it, until very recently, lay a boat, a coble, built and shaped for that shore and those seas, but which has now, after a long and honourable existence, been abandoned and removed, taken away in the end to decorate some distant caravan park. That abandonment is the subject of the sequence, a long and connected elegy, songs sung at the death of something precious, once treasured, now gone.