In Need of Seawater: Performance Takes Centre Stage in This Docu of a Poet

Richard Yeagley’s In Need of Seawater is a 26-minute documentary following its writer Mark Anthony Thomas across an evening of poetry and which, through reflection, flows across the years leading up to that evening in a crowded kitchen. Its draw is its subject, whose spirited recital even outshines the poems themselves. 

Thomas brings the emotion behind each poem alive with his enunciation and the audience responds each time with the gratification of finding resonance. The film includes acted sequences to accompany the poetry, fleeting glimpses of imagination and experience that fueled the words that are kept tucked into folders at different spots in the room. Thomas moves to each in a subtly choreographed, elaborate piece of performance art that uses the conversational character of dinner parties as its basic structure. 

The poems bring together social and political history, romance, aspirations, and the tenderness of youth. For this last part, Ziaire Mann is cast in a quasi double role: for a long while, he is Thomas’ younger self, before the film reconfigures him as a young poet influenced by Thomas’ mentorship. 

The poems develop the idea of romance as sensuous, domestic but also reverent. Amanie Meade features as the image of romantic love from the poems, silent but like Mann, a persistent presence. 

Archival and home video footage are interwoven to create a fitting mosaic that shows with conviction how political the personal really is. Each fragment of speech, every view of Thomas’ growing life, enriches his poetry. 

The final poem of In Need of Seawater brings together the distant past in relation with Thomas’ childhood and then with Thomas’ future: new poets influenced by and carrying forward his work. The interpretation of existing work, the forming and coming together of a community over it, and the resulting legacy that gets built: this is the idea of value that the film concludes with.

Watch In Need of Seawater Documentary Trailer