Drift Gestures - by C S Mills (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Here is a work of mythopoeic crosscurrents subsumed in language: ecological soundings, alchemical inquiries, celestial correspondences, and interspecies cantillation. Informed by the author's fieldwork with endangered shorebirds, by the Great Lakes and the greater seasons, three poetic movements coinhere to form an undulating vision of perception as grace.

Review Quotes

"Drift Gestures is an utterly contemporary text with deep roots in ancient knowledges and sensibilities. A ceremony of water, stone, sky, least sandpipers and terns. Shorelines and lunar cycles. These poems stirred and unsettled me with their thinking, and lured me with their finely tuned sonics. These are rare pleasures not found in every book. Here is a rare book. Open it." - Holly Wren Spaulding

"This book is new philosophy and old science-alchemy, and astrology-meta-natural hymns, invocations and evocations, mystical readings of water, moon, stone and stars. Drift Gestures renders fantasies and fantasizes renderings of transformations and balances that happen in the environment all around us. And as creatures and forces become clear in the writing, they change again, from tern to merlin to many gods. All this, by the waves and winds of a gorgeous great lake, as if by a sunning clock, an hourglass filled with dune sand that the poems abide in good, measured, sifting time. 'There is a dense other that pulls, it seems. Why is that? / There is another body that pulls so you are not flung away.' I wish everyone open enough, lucky enough, to be pulled into the seiche of this fathoming book." - Moheb Soliman

"Drift Gestures uses incantation, the phases of the moon, hymns, a star chart, a Greek chorus, Celtic holy days, and ritual as poetic devices to move us away from the cacophony of the made world, breaking down the membranes of the cells between all living things into an explosive elemental connectedness to the natural world. In Mills' poems, we are not cast out of nature, but experience its kinship intimately." - Kathleen Willard