“Shakespeare’s Horse is Joseph Harrison’s full emergence as his own poet, still in the eloquent and formal tradition of Richard Wilbur and Antony Hecht but with an accent now pitched in a new mode. Among the book’s triumphs are Wakefield, the wonderful Dr. Johnson Rolls Down a Hill, Damon, and Harrison’s Clock. Yet I take a particular joy in the brief and enigmatic Hamlet and the remarkable title sonnet. The kind of comedy that Harrison works into his subtle meditations is refreshingly original. Should he further refine his already agile art, there will be no one in his American generation who so challenges the eye and the ear to come together.” Harold Bloom, American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University.
Joseph Harrison was born in Richmond, Virginia, and grew up in Virginia and Alabama. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1998, 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, The Library of America’s Anthology of American Religious Poems, the Penguin Pocket Anthology of Poetry and the Penguin Pocket Anthology of Literature.