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.”

Born and raised in south Alberta, Marlene Cookshaw now lives on Pender Island and in Victoria, B.C. Since receiving her BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria in 1984, she has taught at the Victoria School of Writing and served on juries for various writing awards, including the Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry, the Archibald Lampman Award, the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, BC Festival of the Arts literary scholarships, and the BC Arts Council and provincial scholarships. She has been associated with the quarterly literary journal Malahat Review since 1985 and was its editor until 2004. Shameless (2002) was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Prize. Lunar Drift (2006) is a chronology of poems that ostensibly marches through time, from 4241 BC, the first numbered date in human history, to a hotel tryst in Room 39. Cookshaw has received the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry and the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize.

Marlene Cookshaw's profile page

• Short-listed, ReLit Awards

In Cookshaw’s hands, largely unseen and rarely commemorated moments shimmer.

Gulf Coast Reviews

Ms. Cookshaw’s collection is an ambitious work, succeeding in no less an enterprise than tracking the emergence of city states from clockwork mechanical and digital fragmentation of western consciousness, all the while that it seeks sanctuary in the rural, the langorous, the evanescent fragility of nature’s continuous refreshing aquifer and pulse beneath the concrete and steel. Indeed, it is the closely observed poems of the natural world that delight the most, and the fact that the poet lives close to nature on the relatively unspoiled Pender Island supplies plenty of poignant moments.

poetryreviews.ca

In Cookshaw’s poetry, it is always twilight, a time of reflection as well as refraction. But there is no hint of lazy melancholy in what she writes. The reader imagines her with a furrowed brow, concentrating to set down with precision the record of her intelligence.

George Fetherling