Falling for a Dolphin

by Heathcote Williams

A poetic account of the author's encounter with a hermit dolphin off the west coast of Ireland

Genres: Poetry, Animals, Nonfiction, Nature

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

John Henley Jasper Heathcote-Williams was an English poet, actor and award-winning playwright. He was also an intermittent painter, sculptor and long-time conjuror. After his schooldays at Eton, he hacksawed his surname's double-barrel to become Heathcote Williams, a moniker more in keeping perhaps with his new-found persona. His father, also named Heathcote Williams, was a lawyer. He is perhaps best known for the book-length polemical poem Whale Nation, which in 1988 became "the most powerful argument for the newly instigated worldwide ban on whaling." In the early 1970s his agitational graffiti were a feature on the walls of the then low-rent end of London's Notting Hill district. From his early twenties, Williams has enjoyed a minor cult following. His first book, The Speakers (1964), a virtuoso close-focus account of life at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, was greeted with unanimous critical acclaim. In 1974 it was successfully adapted for the stage by the Joint Stock Theatre Company.

Reviews

[Tui Allen]

Today, this book arrived in my letterbox, inside a re-used envelope. It had the old address crossed out and my name "Tui" handwritten in large letters. I sat down and read it from cover to cover on the spot and was mesmerised.
I do not know who left it for me. I do not know why they left it.
But I found a hint of why I was meant to read it, in the form of a question nestled there amid the rest of the poetry:
"But where do you think it will lead . . . ?
What can it come to in the end?"
This convinced me that whichever human hand put it in my letterbox, The Universe intended it, because my own story Ripple, answers that question, but only by delving 20 million years in the past and also by peering into the future.
Thank-you whoever you are who left me this book. I will give you a Ripple if you knock on my door next time.

[El Rato Pequeño]

Free-verse rhymeless poem recounting the author's brief but emotionally impactful encounter with a dolphin on an Irish coast. A breezy 15-minute mood piece, though at its base it's really more of a recount than a poem - its frequent references to cheap scientific factoids get quite distracting ("The lipids and protein in fish / Now revealed to have a similar structure to cerebral tissue"), but it seems like the idea was to recapture the author's unfiltered thought patterns during the incident, complete with the educated guesswork involved, rather than an attempt to impress with secondary school trivia or to soften the inevitable new-agey aftertaste of the concept.

"Marooned beside a living raft,
And understanding how sea-creatures of the past
Were reputed to beguile sailors,
Persuading them that they were entering a well of forgetfulness -
Unaware that in the sharp bliss of that sea-creature's song
Centuries were passing."

[Phi]

Okay. So this is my mum’s book. I think she got it back in the nineties. It’s just a long poem but it’s really amazing.

Not to be vsco but I love reading about nature (specifically sealife) so this was perfect for me.

I basically started it last year and was reading ten pages a day then stopped. So I read it last night.

It’s such a beautiful book and I can’t wait to read “Whale Nation”!

[Jen]

Lent to me after a trip dolphin watching in Wales, such a beautiful little book

[Lyndsay-ann]

This was a neat book, making it an interesting read. I viewed it as a poem as it wasn't a conventional sort of story. It also had some amazing photos of dolphins.

[David Brain]

A beautiful recollection. The book I buy whenever I see it.