Displacement

I am in awe of poetry that cuts right through and hits the mark inside. Because I am a lover of poetry, not a writer of poetry, I do not have the skill set to describe how or why this happens. But when it works, it works. This volume of poems by Leslie Harrison hits me deeply. In her introduction to the poems, Eavan Boland captures much of my response: "There is a poise and presence about this book---and a poignance about its traffic between secrecy and disclosure---that allow it to have unusual force, and a true grip on its reader. This is a real lyric journey: and the reader will take it too." Secrecy and disclosure: That tension is brilliantly and beautifully rendered in these works. This is a writer who I will be following.

This is a book that works a steady, careful hand upon its reader, building a story that is extraordinary in its insistence that our attention remain on sharp but ordinary details. We are moved through the thickest stuff of being--longing, restlessness, loves that carry both sweet possibility and disaster--in language so exquisite that it echoes long after reading. As hopelessly narrative as I am, I can't ignore Harrison's gift for lyric, the way her syntax swings in its lines. They are lines that make you feel everything, both what's articulable and what isn't. They give you back your own small anemic heart. And in poem after poem, as the losses accumulate and the answerless questions mount, I am left awestruck by the unmistakable confidence with which she lands each poem's ending. This is one of my favorite poems from the book: Dusting This morning a dusting of snow this morning twittering flakes flakes clumping convocations of them on the lawn sun winter pale sideways without force lacking a certain substance if he died where he lives no one would think to tell me not right away my father gone into the long raveling of sidereal years was gone into coffin three days before someone remembered he had children somewhere and like the milky way finally arriving overhead called me and absence was made flesh and brought low into ground though none of his children know where this thin snow comes fragments of the cold cold stars and somewhere he wakes or does not and in this white dusting he like the starlight the snow stubborn resisting dissolution continues for now to shine