Drift

by Caroline Bergvall

Caroline Bergvall's Drift retraces the language and maritime imagination of early medieval North Atlantic travels from the sagas to quest poems to today's sea migrancies. Its centerpiece is the song cycle, "Drift," which takes the anonymous 10th century Anglo-Saxon quest poem The Seafarer as its inspiration. Both ancient and contemporary tales of travel and exile shadow the plight and losses of wanderers across the waters in this haunting new book. Drift is the second of Bergvall's explorations of historical English language.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Grad School, Read For School, School, Art

190 pages, Paperback

First published May 6, 2014

About the author

Caroline Bergvall is an award-winning poet and sound artist, of French-Norwegian background based in London, UK. She works across artforms, media and languages; and outputs alternate between books, collaborative performances and language installations. Her pieces and essays have been translated into many languages.

Reviews

[Jacky Chan · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The sea is history' (Derek Walcott).

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for my Bachelors in English Literature, context: Contemporary. I must say, it is quite the challenging read, both actually linguistically but also thematic wise. I'd say it is not for the faint of heart - not in a horror-like sense, but rather because it is aggravatingly and disgustingly sad. I recommend this to anyone that is interested in learning about contemporary issues such as the crisis of the refugees, but also for anyone that is interested in Old English literature as well as poetry in general.

[Claire Bodry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting read. Sometimes hard to follow but definitely interesting. It is a collection of poems, songs, abstract images and a refugee tale all happening on sea.
It seemed to me that it was written how a Scotsman would speak, if that makes any sense haha
The middle is the most impactful and truly saddening to imagine being in their shoes.

[Maryam · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sick of people writing literal gibberish and then passing it off as poetry... no offense.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

So I'm only on page 46 and I've never marked a book as "read" before I finished it until now but I AM SO IN LOVE WITH THIS BOOK I COULDN'T WAIT.

Update: I finished it. I am still in love. "Relentlessly it rips the heart out of all rest and any refuge."

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Major Tom hafville
Li Bai hafville
Rimbaud hafville
Shelley hafville
Amelia Earhart hafville
Jeff Buckley hafville
Spalding Gray hafville
Virginia Woolf hafville
Albert Ayler hafville
Reinaldo Arenas hafville
Hart Crane hafville
Ingeborg Bachmann hafville

When you rise from the dead
when I rise from the dead
the hangman will hang at the gate
the hammer will sink into the sea"

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetr...

[Margaryta · Rating 3 out of 5]

By no means an easy read, there is something about "Drift" that is compelling. I always struggle with reading poetry that is very much rooted in translation and the interplay between languages, mostly because I always try to understand it on a basic level without just going along with it and enjoying it on a broader level. Maybe I'm not the ideal reader for "Drift" but I can't say that I didn't like it, despite how confused and lost it often made me.

[Jake Porter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ehhhhhh. Had some really cool and striking parts, but that's it. Lines here and there. The book as a whole was just plain baffling, even knowing the context. Not in a generative way either. Just baffling. I found the explanations in the "Log" section more self-absorbed and masturbatory than helpful.

[Jeneva Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot say enough good things about DRIFT: A compelling emotional experience that blends prose and poetry, contemporary English and Old English, 20th century events with early modern tales. Even the passage of pure orthography marred by scribbling tells a story.

[Charlotte Iannone · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hate to give a book a mediocre review, but alas. I understand the aims of Drift’s form — intentionally creating a sense of disorientation in the reader so that they too are thrown into the migrant’s errant ship, lost at sea. Regardless, I only felt that this worked in a select few spots. Her project fully came into perspective after I read the logs of the migrant ship, but still, I could not engage with the first section as much as I’d hoped.

This was my first introduction to The Seafarer, which I read a few translations of after, including Pound’s iteration. It is a piece that I will grapple with for a long time. A few lines have been ringing in my head this past week:

“My heart is restless within me,
my mind is dwelling on the sea-flood,
over the whale's domain.
My mind fares widely over the face of the earth,
but returns unsatisfied.
The lone-flier screams, urging my heart
to the whale-way over the stretch of seas.”

[AK Painter · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good. I felt adrift at sea the whole time, but also held by Caroline's writing/art. I love that the table of contents is in the back of the book; this choice seems to me to speak to the way the book is organized, a sort of working within itself, raising ideas and then circling back around to them, riding out different energies like waves on the ocean.

Drift feels like it is a piece that is meant to be performed: spoken, sung, emoted. The imagination of this performance was a strongly present with me as I read, which added to my enjoyment, imagining what dimensions would be added hearing the words spoken aloud.

[Astrid-Smilla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vet inte om den är bra men den är absolut intressant. Men den är nog bra också. Exempel på vad man kan göra med språk(en) och utformning, eller snarare ett experiment. Nästan audiovisuellt fast i text om det makes sense. Audiotextovisuellt. Inte ett ord men visst. Blandning av språk (norska tyska engelska), grammatiska/språkliga funderingar, språkets och textens rent materiella förutsättningar, konsekvenser och möjligheter. Blandat med personliga anekdoter som endast skymtas genom allt det andra.

[musa b-n · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a really intense read. I read it for class in tandem with:

http://www.forensic-architecture.org/...
as well as Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, and the Seafarer trans. Ezra Pound.

There's a really cool audio performance of a portion of this here:

https://vimeo.com/133971915

I think it's really lovely.

[Eurydactyl · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bizarre collection of ergodic poetry, photographs, scribbles, essays, short stories, a captain's log and a maritime accident report. This sounds exactly like the kind of book I would love, but it seemed to go directly over my head. I took a picture of an unreadable page and sent it to my friend saying "I can't tell if I'm enjoying this or not". Having finished it, I still can't tell.

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

First read in 2015, I just returned to this wonderful work today and read it from start to finish without break. A fantastic addition to her trilogy, which remains as powerful today, 5 years after its initial publication.

[Sam Mauro · Rating 4 out of 5]

wonderful. decolonialized experimental literature will be wild, tho - hope someone retries this project without the Anglo-Saxon centric bits. not offensive in its current state, really, just limited.

[⏺ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterpiece

[svalleballe · Rating 3 out of 5]

delen "log" förstörde allt. älskade den tills dess

[Barney Nuttall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Experimental mediations on drifting languages and threads of history knotted with contemporary politics

[The_J · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps just too impenetrable for me to appreciate the glory of its creation, but the original piece the Seafarer was a joyful relic of time.

[Ri Or · Rating 5 out of 5]

shake!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Simone · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first part of medieval-influenced seafaring poetry is marvellous. I will return to it again and again.

The middle part, concerned with Mediterranean refugees, was moving, but the writing of it has nothing to do with the first part. The third part, a confessional contemplation, did not interest me.

[Carrie]

"Living the life of the death you want."

[Tobias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fantastic.

[Katrine Solvaag · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are no words sufficient to describe how much I love this collection.

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

i rlly liked comparing certain pages to the supplementary media avail online by Bergvall - offers a new insight for the pages and makes the tone of the book more clear