Nancy Gaffield - Continental Drift

Published 2014. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins

ISBN 978-1-84861-329-4 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Continental Drift is a book about place, about the attachments and appropriations that shape our relationship with the land. Transcending the border of country and continent, these poems search out ways that language balances the demands of location. This is a poetry of shifting localities and the forces that make them. Continental Drift is Nancy Gaffield’s second collection. Tokaido Road , published in 2011, won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize.

“Nancy Gaffield’s poetry sounds its landscapes. Grounded in the music of her immediate environment, but drawing on the crossings that have shaped her life, Gaffield establishes a modern ecology, a writing equally attuned to bird song and the echoes of political history. What these poems understand is that the parameters of place have altered, that as we seek to situate ourselves in a location so the networks of our expression must open out. We are listening at the edge of a field and the phenomenal world is with us, but so are forces and structures that would choose to go unsaid. Writing after Olson and in the tradition of Howe and LANGUAGE, Gaffield speaks directly and beautifully to the contours of our contemporary moment. It is a work of intense listening, a language that places us, then places us again. We are standing in a new geography. Nancy Gaffield’s music catches its drift.” —David Herd

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