Sussex Coils and Loops by Paul Holman
Description
“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.
Limited Hardback.
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