Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Anywhy
Author: HARRISON JENNIFER
Format: PAPERBACK
Publication date: 15/11/2017
Imprint: BLACK PEPPER
Price: $24.00
Publishing status: Active
If birds could fly free from ornithological books
and from watercolour illustrations
if they could fly free from taxidermy
agitated aviaries and roseate oil paintings
they’d leave us more earth-bound than ever before
but we might find a way to rise with them transmogrified
and see for ourselves their world of ultraviolet night
Like the great grey owl, we might hear the scratchings of a mouse
running under deep snow
Jennifer Harrison’s Anywhy is exceptional. The depth and lightly carried learning of the author, as we embrace each poem, is startling. We are philosophically shaken. Her title Anywhy may suggest the cool shrug of `whatever’ but Harrison’s neologism is a steady-eyed consideration of the world: its ecology, its history, its fragilities and resilience. Her insight is subtle but never vague, inviting our imagination to consider the inner life of birds, the emotive pull of hardware, Emma Hamilton, a reverie at Blackwood Village (from which the title emerges), DNA or Absolute Zero. Above all, it scintillates with human sorrow and human response.
Harrison is a challenging and significant poet, the quality of whose work needs defining and celebrating.
Martin Duwell
With its subtle but inventive lyrical strategies and masks, poetry like Jennifer Harrison’s addresses poetry-which means it addresses us, quietly, as readers who enter its space as observers and who are active, and who feel its presence within us, not in our faces. Philip Salom
ISBN: 9781876044190
Dimension: 222mm X 140mm
Pages: 96