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.

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