"These are bearish poems which embrace the reader. They are alert to life’s amazing moments as well as its dangers and they are warm, sensuous and delighting in detail. concerned with the big matters of life; death and love, these are brave poems which spring from compassion and kindness.
AF Harrold is an inspired performer: these poems show that his poems have a life of their own on the page as well as retaining the music of the spoken word."
POLLY CLARK
Somewhere inside the labyrinth
that is constructed from the
thought of love
there is a doorway
"Written with all the metrical energy and wit familiar to audiences of AF Harrold’s work as a performance poet, these sensuous love poems speak also with an impressive delicacy and resonance. Inhabiting that threshold world between the material and the dream, thought and feeling, logic and the heart, Harrold charts with true musicality love’s loss and gain, its twilight ‘in the silence between breathing."
Jane Draycott
"There are places where I am moved, drawn in, amused, although I do quite often get lost. I like the poems having numbers."
John Hegley
"‘These poems are true more than half the time."
Leonard Cohen
Private Language Argument
Don’t turn on the tv.
There’s nothing there. There never was.
Whatever was before was never something much.
No. Switch the wireless to silence.
Leave the record player unplugged.
Forget the music that fills the days with its insistencies.
Come close this afternoon. Put down the books.
Do not concern yourself with the bookmark.
There is little difference from page to page.
Draw the curtains over the windows.
Turn the paintings to the wall.
Hold out instead for the message of this body.
Do not expect the telephone to ring.
Listen only to the movements of this mouth.
Ignore the poems, they are true only half the time.
On Love
It is night now. This is moonlight. That the Evening Star.
And here, the side of the tip of my index finger would move lightly
on the naked flesh that shows at the nape of your neck.
You are wearing your hair short these days.
*
Through this merest of tendernesses are communicated things,
as you lips would open to acknowldegte, that would otherwise be lost,
strangled and stranded in the twin mazes of language and thought.
But I let this pass. The night is too short for philosophy.
I watch a patch of moonlight on the bedclothes.
Now the winder grows cold and tonight my little heart seems sure of itself.
All love, it says, can be contained in the keening of a single thin fingertip.
AF Harrold is an inspired performer: these poems show that his poems have a life of their own on the page as well as retaining the music of the spoken word."
POLLY CLARK
Somewhere inside the labyrinth
that is constructed from the
thought of love
there is a doorway
"Written with all the metrical energy and wit familiar to audiences of AF Harrold’s work as a performance poet, these sensuous love poems speak also with an impressive delicacy and resonance. Inhabiting that threshold world between the material and the dream, thought and feeling, logic and the heart, Harrold charts with true musicality love’s loss and gain, its twilight ‘in the silence between breathing."
Jane Draycott
"There are places where I am moved, drawn in, amused, although I do quite often get lost. I like the poems having numbers."
John Hegley
"‘These poems are true more than half the time."
Leonard Cohen
Private Language Argument
Don’t turn on the tv.
There’s nothing there. There never was.
Whatever was before was never something much.
No. Switch the wireless to silence.
Leave the record player unplugged.
Forget the music that fills the days with its insistencies.
Come close this afternoon. Put down the books.
Do not concern yourself with the bookmark.
There is little difference from page to page.
Draw the curtains over the windows.
Turn the paintings to the wall.
Hold out instead for the message of this body.
Do not expect the telephone to ring.
Listen only to the movements of this mouth.
Ignore the poems, they are true only half the time.
On Love
It is night now. This is moonlight. That the Evening Star.
And here, the side of the tip of my index finger would move lightly
on the naked flesh that shows at the nape of your neck.
You are wearing your hair short these days.
*
Through this merest of tendernesses are communicated things,
as you lips would open to acknowldegte, that would otherwise be lost,
strangled and stranded in the twin mazes of language and thought.
But I let this pass. The night is too short for philosophy.
I watch a patch of moonlight on the bedclothes.
Now the winder grows cold and tonight my little heart seems sure of itself.
All love, it says, can be contained in the keening of a single thin fingertip.