Overview

In her first book-length collection of poems to appear in the US, Lesley Harrison looks North to the sea, with the heat of the land at her back, to bring us meditations on whale hunts and lost children, Manhattan sky towers, and the sound of the gamelan in the Gulf of Bothnia. A poetry of spareness in multilayered depths, of textural silence and aural place, Kitchen Music plunges deep through the strata of language where “weather is body” and an Iceland poppy is “as delicate as birch.” In poems and sequences of poems, Harrison spins folktales into threads of family and gender, engages with the work of the artists Roni Horn and Marina Rees, transcribes John Cage and Johannes Kepler into song and litany, pens a hymnal of bees, and turns to storms, glaciers, and the lapwing life in a field of young barley. As the novelist Kirsty Gunn writes in the foreword, Harrison has “taken up the old white whale of the fixed and masculine narratives and made of its seas and weathers her own Moby Dick, a female poetry ‘in praises / repeated, repeating.’”

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9780811235037

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Reviews

"""Praise for Blue Pearl: It is full of whalebones and wind and melting ice, and it left me breathless."" -- Nina Powles - Poetry ""You cannot help thinking that this is what all poetry should do—find the truth in things, not beneath them—and how it should be produced: sensitively and with love."" -- Andrew McCulloch - Times Literary Supplement"

Praise for Blue Pearl: It is full of whalebones and wind and melting ice, and it left me breathless. -- Nina Powles - Poetry You cannot help thinking that this is what all poetry should do-find the truth in things, not beneath them-and how it should be produced: sensitively and with love. -- Andrew McCulloch - Times Literary Supplement

"""Praise for Blue Pearl: It is full of whalebones and wind and melting ice, and it left me breathless."" -- Nina Powles - Poetry ""You cannot help thinking that this is what all poetry should do—find the truth in things, not beneath them—and how it should be produced: sensitively and with love."" -- Andrew McCulloch - Times Literary Supplement ""With meditations on whale hunts and lost children, Manhattan sky towers, and the sound of the gamelan in the Gulf of Bothnia, this collection is both expansive in scope and beautifully sparse in its language. Every word is savored, creating moments of stunning lyricism and powerful silence."" -- Michael Welch - Chicago Review of Books"

Author Information

Lesley Harrison, born in Ayrshire, Scotland, has published six collections of poetry, including the poetry pamphlet Blue Pearl, published by New Directions. She has lived and worked in Istanbul, West Africa, Mongolia, and Orkney, on Scotland’s northern coastline. Harrison has held writing residencies in Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard, and the Harvard University Center for Hellenic Studies. She lives in the small fishing village of Auchmithie on the Angus coast of Scotland. Kirsty Gunn, born in New Zealand, is the author of several novels and collections of short stories, including the internationally award-winning novel about the Highlands of Scotland and the musical form of piobaireachd, The Big Music. She is Research Professor at the University of Dundee and Associate Member of Merton College, Oxford.

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