Kirjahaku

Continental Drift is a book about place, about the attachments and appropriations that shape our relationship with the land. Transcending the border of country and continent, these poems search out ways that language balances the demands of location. This is a poetry of shifting localities and the forces that make them. Continental Drift is Nancy Gaffield's second collection. Tokaido Road, published in 2011, won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize.

This is the Libretto to Nicola LeFanu's opera, Tokaido Road. In 1832 the young Hiroshige sets out on Japan's great Eastern Sea Road, the Tokaido, linking Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto. The paintings he creates along the way reveal the secrets of a hidden country. As the young artist, Hiro savours all his adventures - not least the amorous ones - and his paintings bring to life everyone he meets: old men and beautiful women, samurai and geisha, pilgrims, porters and passers-by. Hiroshige in old age is present in the opera too, reflecting on what had gripped his imagination twenty-five years earlier. Behind every welcoming teahouse ('station') on the Tokaido, there was another story: poverty, persecution, famine. Hiroshige braved the government censor by publishing prints that show the horror of death through starvation. His work reminds us of the power of art to bear witness.