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.

&#150 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.”