Lunar Drift

By Marlene Cookshaw

In Lunar Drift, award-winning poet Marlene Cookshaw’s study of time is a lyric meditation on order and wilderness, in which the human construction of time becomes something against which our own lives are bent and measured.

From weight to coiled spring: in one transition
we’re disconnected from the common
calling to assembly, mass, or work. We beg to differ
about which of us approaches the true
solar noon. Freed from the village clock,
then from the mantel of the family, now
we have time in hand; we think we manage it.

from “Pocketwatch”

In illo tempore, the book’s second half, is a kind of counterpoint where desire, memory, and loss collapse into a familiar present with its unnumbered wonders, such as a redbreast, a lost love, a dog on a driveway.

Lunar Drift is a clear-voiced call toward another way of being in the world. Its poems are loss-sharp, wise, celebratory, and lyric in the full sense of the word: musical, integrative. With singular focus and skill, Cookshaw shows how, at last, we can let ourselves go: “We could be, / only more so. We could meet the world.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Oct 15, 2005
• ISBN: 9781771313100

Marlene Cookshaw

Marlene Cookshaw was born and raised in southern Alberta and now lives on Pender Island, BC. She edits The Malahat Review, and teaches at the Victoria School of Writing. She has served on juries for various writing awards, among them the BC Book Prize for Poetry and the Prince Edward Island Literary Competition. Marlene is the author of three earlier books of poetry, two of which, The Whole Elephant (1989) and Double Somersaults (1999), were published by Brick Books.

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