The Memory of the Drift

This greatly expanded volume combines a revised version of the 2007 text of The Memory of the Drift, Books I-IV (also published by Shearsman Books) with a fifth book, 'A New Walking Age', plus out-takes and abandoned, but related pieces, and prefaces the whole with a long related work, 'Airborne or Still'.

"The Memory of the Drift is a serial poem, which began as a mixture of automatic writing and collaged text, its shape imposed by severe formal restriction. While compositional strategies have varied during the course of its development, the overall trajectory of the work continued to follow the admittedly approximate diagram I had made at the outset. The process of its making extended far beyond my original estimate, beginning on 17 April 1993 and not reaching a conclusion until 26 October 2017, with a further period of editing beyond that. In this edition, The Memory of the Drift - the 2007 version of the text having been revised and expanded by the inclusion of a fifth book, A New Walking Age - is prefaced by an earlier work, 'Airborne or Still'. I had originally envisaged the two sequences as being reflections of each other, and there continue to be significant links between them, despite the disparity of their scale. In retrospect, it strikes me that the crucial difference between the two derives from my exchanging a typewriter for a computer as my primary instrument of composition. Added to this, as a series of Appendices, is a series of out-takes and drafts, plus the original prologue to the work." --Paul Holman