After months of writing, editing, and second-guessing, I’ve arrived at that strange, quiet point where the poems from Postcards from the Floating World feel finished — or at least as finished as they’re going to get. Any new revision just creates another version of the same poem, not a better one. It’s a familiar kind of exhaustion and satisfaction, like getting home after a long voyage. You unpack your bags, look at the souvenirs, and realise that while you’ve come a long way, part of you is still swaying with the sea.
This project began on a world cruise. One hundred and two nights, one short poem a day. It started as a private challenge — a way to record what I saw, said, overheard, and imagined while the ship moved across time zones and weather systems.
Some days I wrote beside the pool while crew members hosed down the deck. Other days I sat in the bar listening to the choir practice. A few times I even scribbled lines in the cabin coffee table while Frances had a bath.
Soon the poems became their own kind of travelogue. Some were small sketches of a moment, others more like letters to myself, written from the middle of nowhere. Together, they started to form a record of motion and stillness — of people temporarily unanchored, and the odd beauty of routine life at sea. And there were a lot of days at sea, about 66.
There are love poems, weather reports, being scared, elegies, jokes — in fact a whole floating city’s worth of human voices.
Coming home, I started revising. And revising. And revising again. At first it was thrilling — I could see the weak spots and fix them. Then the process slowed. I’d move a comma, break a line differently, shift a word, then shift it back. Eventually I realised I wasn’t improving the poems anymore, just orbiting them. Each change made a slightly different version of the same thought, and none felt more “right” than the others. That’s when I knew I’d reached the end of the creative phase.
Of course, it’s difficult enough to know when a single poem is finished, let alone a whole collection. A poem can stop moving, but that doesn’t mean it’s complete. With a collection, there’s the extra question of consistency — not just in tone, but in voice. Does the same speaker inhabit all these pages, or are there several versions of me talking at once? I’ve tried to keep the voice steady, honest, and recognisably mine, even as the settings and moods shift from port to port.
That’s not to say the poems are perfect — I don’t believe in perfect poems. But they’re good enough, and as honest as I can make them. About a quarter have already been published in magazines, which gives me a quiet sense of validation that they hold up in the wider world. The rest are waiting their turn, patient and self-contained, ready to be gathered together.
What surprised me most was how the poems began to speak to one another. A line written in the Pacific suddenly echoed something from the Atlantic weeks earlier. It was as if the poems knew more about the journey than I did. And then of course there was hearing about my brother being taken into hospital, and later still dying.
I’ve learned that perfection isn’t the goal; connection is. If a poem can make someone pause, smile, or remember something they’d forgotten, then it’s done its work. These poems carry what I wanted to say in the voice that emerged while I was writing them, and I trust that voice now more than I ever did at the start.
So, what happens next? The obvious next step is a book. The sequence already has a shape: a beginning full of movement and discovery, a middle of reflection and routine, and an ending that tilts toward home and stillness.
It’s called Postcards from the Floating World, which feels right — each poem a snapshot from a drifting moment. I imagine the book like a box of postcards you find in a drawer years later, each one holding a piece of a life that was temporarily unmoored.
Before publication, there are the practical choices: layout, order, notes, the question of whether to include photographs or keep it purely textual. But these decisions feel lighter than the creative work. They’re about presentation, not invention. The hard part — finding the voice, building the rhythm, discovering what the poems wanted to be — is done.
Writing every day taught me that inspiration is overrated — most days, you just show up and trust that something small will open. The sea doesn’t perform for you; it just keeps moving. I still catch myself noticing things in the same way — a snatch of conversation, a shaft of light, a stranger’s awkward grace. Maybe those will feed into something new. But for now, I’m content to stand on the deck and watch this one come to shore.
If you’ve followed bits of this journey, thank you. These poems began as private notes and have turned into something I can share. Postcards from the Floating World will become a book soon — something to hold in your hands rather than scroll past. I’ll share more once the tide carries it into print.
Finishing a project like this doesn’t feel like triumph. It feels like gratitude — for the words that arrived, the days that held them, and the ship that kept moving forward even when I wasn’t sure where we were going.
About the author:
Rodney Wood lives in Farnborough and writes poems about travel, memory, and the odd grace of everyday life. Postcards from the Floating World grew from a world cruise, where he wrote one poem each night for 102 nights. A quarter of the poems have already appeared in magazines including The High Window, Seventh Quarry, Black Nore and Morphrog. The full collection is now sailing toward book form.
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Rodney Wood 