In his sixth book of poems Joseph Harrison further refines his already agile
art. His characteristic metrical and syntactic ingenuity are on display here
again, as is the surprising capacity of his figurative imagination. Poems in a
variety of forms, some elaborate and nonce, display a range of mood, mode, and
matter: there are political poems, ekphrastic poems, poems on the metaphoric
implications of scientific terms. At the heart of the book, though, is an
astonishing advance in Harrison’s explorations of intertextuality: these poems
risk a kind of poetic shamanism, a lyric ventriloquism that channels the voices
of precursors American and English. The uncannily resonant music that results
is both his and theirs, contemporary and traditional, idiosyncratic and
familiar. Joseph Harrison has written a book that challenges our notions of
poetic identity, a book where the present and the past sing to each other, and
to the future.