“ 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. "This study alone successfully illuminates the long and winding journey of a folk-cultural corpus, as its narratives are embroidered, patched or excised by the vicissitudes of time, fashion, and inclination. It illustrates how folk legends are not inert historical artefacts but living, evolving entities in their own right; initially shaped by, then helping to shape, a specific place, identity and set of customs. These are the things providing a bulwark against cultural homogenisation, and alienation from the land. They should be cherished." - Mark Nemglan, In the company of dragons: experiments in parafolklore "I strongly recommend this book [...] it's full of wonders and surprises; a magical book." - Mike O'Leary, author of Sussex Folk Tales "... a book treading the path of folklore, pilgrimage and praxis." - David Wenborn (Dagenham Dave), The Western Gate Paul Holman has been engaged for some twenty years upon The Memory of the Drift, a shifting but ultimately circular work which is both a record of operations and a process in itself. Four previously issued sections were gathered in paperback by Shearsman Books in 2007. Tara Morgana is Book Five, but stands alone as a work.He co-edited the Invisible Books imprint with Bridget Penney through the 1990s, publishing work by Bill Griffiths, Stewart Home, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and others. He has read in the SubVoicive, Blue Bus and Xing the Line series, at the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry, and Scarlet Imprint's Pleasuredome. A setting of his writing has also been performed by the loop-based vocal group Askew and Avis.He has been working intermittently on a side project based around contemporary expressions of the oracular: while some of this material has been separately published, rather more than he intended has been absorbed into the mainstream of his writing. He is a long-standing member of the Field Study mail art group. Much of the material contained in The Memory of the Drift has its origin in Field Study manifestations, which have both supplied an occasion for his work and offered it a testing ground. His website can be found at: http: //taramorgana.com"This is a poetry of returning, returning from the occult subterranean as a kind of echo. It requires to be read as a kind of translation, as if everything in each word echoes a place from which the word is coming back in a different language that nevertheless sounds the same. Like an echo, it is imperfectly rendered, misheard sometimes, headless at other times. There is no possibility of tidying the thing up, of housekeeping it into a finished, rounded up equation. It has the quality of sounds reverberating with other powers, places, tongues yet these occur without the taint of overblown rhetorical flourish that can sometimes ruin occult poetics and turn them into obscurantist rantings and self regard. This is a poetry that is tempered and disciplined but by energies that are older than the poet's own experiences and knowledge." Richard Marshall, 3: AM Magazine"His poetry is indefinable but is laconic, occultist, and attached to the line of revolutionary and subversive yearnings." Andrew Duncan, Angel Exhaust"... it's the worlds of magick and of Late Modernism, apparently diverse, yet both system-dependent operations. What brings them together is that also both employ the language of spe