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‘Sussex folk seem ever to have had a leaning towards snaky things.’ Sussex Coils and Loops is a work of parafolklore on the great serpents encountered in the land of south-east England. The book describes a series of ritual actions performed between the winter solstice of 2017 and the summer solstice of 2022 at sites with serpent or dragon legends associated with them. We explore hidden woods, secret pools and lonely churches, find clues in stained glass windows, graveyards, fading murals, tattered pamphlets and video games. There are hermits and saints, headless horsemen, mighty oaks and giant puddings. Shrines are constructed, encounters logged. Each generation is seen to have added to the recursive legend, and the sources range from Anglo-Saxon and medieval Latin accounts to contemporary storytellers. All seek to plumb the depthless knucker holes and reveal their great and terrifying wyrms. In Sussex Coils and Loops, Holman deploys a number of strategies to demonstrate and report on these workings. The writing is in turn experimental, documentary, and scholarly. This is unashamedly contemporary landscape magic. Holman resists any characterisation of folklore that privileges a notion of authenticity as inherently conservative. Rather, he sees it as a dynamic and unstable process which is constantly taking on provisional, dare we say, snaky, forms Through its careful scholarship, field investigations, and experiments with form, Sussex Coils and Loops offers a variety of entry points into this living tradition, honouring its unruly, indefatigable nature, and curious to see where it might go next.Illustrations by Harriet Holman Penney Softcover, 162pp Scarlet Imprint, 2026

paul holman – sussex coils & loops

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Still sourcing and exploring two massive, braided streams of retrospective invention—‘Mu’ and Song of the Andoumboulou—Mackey’s liturgy falls and sprays and pools in Double Trio. Bottomless, modal, modular as McCoy Tyner’s matched, augmented threes, surfaces bloomed with turbulent, recombinant bottom like Bill Dixon’s double-bassed ensembles, Double Trio doesn’t culminate: it promises. —Fred Moten Three new books in a spectacular limited edition box carry the tradition of the long poem far into the 21st century with a “low-lit, slow-drag ebullience” For thirty-five years American poet Nathaniel Mackey has been writing a long poem of fugitive making like no other: two elegiac, intertwined serial poems--"Song of the Andoumboulou" and "Mu"--that follow a mysterious, migrant "we" through the rhythms and currents of the world with lyrical virtuosity and impassioned expectancy. In a note to this astonishing box set of new work, Mackey writes: "I turned sixty-five within a couple of months of beginning to write Double Trio and I was within a couple of months of turning seventy-one when I finished it.... It was a period of distress and precarity inside and outside both. During this period, a certain disposition or dispensation came upon me that I would characterize or sum up with the words all day music. It was a period during which I wanted never not to be thinking between poetry and music, poetry and the daily or the everyday, the everyday and the alter-everyday. Philosophically and technically, the work meant to be always pertaining to the relation of parts to one another and of parts to an evolving whole." Structured in part after the last three movements of John Coltrane's Meditations--"Love," "Consequence," and "Serenity"--Double Trio stretches the explorations and improvisations of free jazz into unprecedented poetic territory. --- Trim Size - 6x9 Page Count - 1080 Hardback - 3 books

Nathaniel Mackey – Double Trio: Tej Bet, So's Notice, Nerve Church : Limited Edition Box Set

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