Twice in recent reviews of books that take the sea and coast as their subject, one of which was my own, I have read critical comments on the style of writing and method of organization.

These reviews cluster on claims of a lack of clarity, and due procedure, and the latest review of a friend's book prompts me to write some reflections on writing about the sea, the past, and the critical present.

For my own part, I thought very carefully about how to express relationships between poems, novels, literary journals, works of visual art, the coast, and sea, in prose composed in comparative forms that allowed the reader see fluid connections between text and context.

This was, in a way, an attempt to find a critical register whose language went beyond territorial possession. I was aware of the danger of becoming unmoored, which in my own case meant careful attention to the chronology and sequence of the readings, and years of edits.

All of this was clear to me, and is explained in the book. The point remains that to write about these edge phenomena in ways that don't reduce them to, or capture them in, landed languages asks of the reader a different set of responses than they might expect.

Perhaps this is something you have more sympathy with as you write more books, and learn as you change. Perhaps there are missteps, and we all have different ideas of what we do, and what we don't like, what we will recognize, and what we won't, for reasons we only know.

And the debate over what is legible in the blue world is an old one, and well-rehearsed in many writers. A sequence I find powerful is the beginning of Tim Robinson's Pilgrimage, in which he imagines the difficulty of writing this way.

Robinson calls it that 'structure of condensation and ordering necessary to pass from... various types of knowledge' to create 'an instant of insight' that 'would have the characteristics of a work of art'.

Perhaps to write about the blurry line between art and reflection, the work of criticism has to take new, strange and challenging forms. It also has to be open to failure, and to ask different questions of its readers, who may still like to answer as before, as is their right.

Which is not the same as saying there is no sense or order, which registers only disengagement. Elsewhere, Robinson described his work as progress by digression. Perhaps then, distance between these books of the maritime, and some readers, resides in a tolerance for wandering?

I'd be very interested to read your thoughts.