Collected Poems

Collected Poems

Joseph Harrison takes his place with the great formal poets of our time. Classically minded, romantically inclined, he has used his dazzling wit and preternatural skill to deepen our understanding of ourselves in a fraught, ever-changing world. His Collected Poems is a sustainment of life. — Edward Hirsch

Joseph Harrison’s poems prove a remarkable devotion to the art they practice. For one thing, their formal expertise shows the refinement of a great natural gift: no matter how ornate their form, they always speak to the subject (and vice versa) in ways that seem graceful and natural. For another, the poems are constantly in dialogue with their predecessors (Shakespeare, predominantly, but also Spencer, Whitman, Tennyson, and Dickinson—to name just a few), but never in ways that compromise their own authenticity. How does Harrison manage this? By grounding his work in the belief that poetry is a quintessential part of life, by leavening his seriousness with wit, and by setting the rewards of his reading at the center of his experience as a whole. It means that for all its steadfast intelligence and learning, his work is constantly animated by its association with the startling vagaries of life, and by an unusually acute sense of the sometimes-humorous, sometimes-plangent interplay between the surfaces and the essences of things. Collected Poems is a distinguished book: clever, humane, and vigilant. — Andrew Motion

‘But why complain / About not being self-possessed?’ asks the protagonist of Joseph Harrison’s ‘The Compromised Ventriloquist.’ Au contraire: Harrison is an uncompromising ventriloquist, not complaining about, but celebrating his fantastical range of voices. The titles of his books proclaim as much: Someone Else’s Name, Identity Theft, Sometimes I Dream That I Am Not Walt Whitman … His Collected Poems gathers in one volume this splendid plenitude, this chorus of beloved ghosts ringing down the centuries from Chaucer to our digitally dinging day. All of it Harrison translates into his own wit, panache, panegyric, satire, and elegy: a composite love song to the whole art of poetry. — Rosanna Warren

To read Mary Jo Salter’s enthusiastic short essays about five of the poems included in Harrison’s Collected Poems, please visit David Lehman’s blog at Best American Poetry

Reviews of Joseph Harrison: Collected Poems

Alabama Writers’ Forum (March 20, 2024)

Poetry in the 21st century is very much alive, and here is a volume to prove it. Joseph Harrison’s Collected Poems, which will be generally available in April 2024, gathers poems from four of the poet’s previously published volumes: Someone Else’s Name (2003), Identity Theft (2008), Shakespeare’s Horse (2015), and Sometimes I Dream That I Am Not Walt Whitman (2020). Throughout the collection, Harrison delights in the poetic forms of the past, and invents intricate new forms that highlight his verbal virtuosity. ‘Runaway Blimp,’ for example, is a poem of one sentence that winds through ten tightly rhymed stanzas of eight lines each. By contrast, Harrison’s poems in the style of Emily Dickinson are short, direct, and spare. The opening poems in Someone Else’s Name (2003) remind us that love reveals our shortcomings yet enables us to forgive ourselves for some portion of them. ‘As If,’ a series of twenty-two sonnets, is wry and passionate by turn. Phrases from Shakespeare, Donne, Marvel, and other Renaissance poets appear, yet Harrison makes their romantic dilemmas his own. In sonnet 7, Harrison trashes his rival: ‘I know I cannot match his gift, his scope / (He frequents prostitutes, he peddles dope).’ Anthony Hecht calls this sequence ‘as fine a tour of the conundrums of identity, love and doubt as any I know.’ The book ends with the magnificent ‘Mobile Bay Jubilee,’ which describes a rare evening when oxygen-starved fish crowd the shallows and are harvested by excited residents.Identity Theft (2008) deals with the malleability of personal identity in the digital age. The title poem consists of seventeen nine-line stanzas, each one rhymed ababbcbcc, one message of which is, ‘No, you can’t win the game, and, yes, you have to play.’ In ‘Trajectory’ Harrison notes that ‘The person jabbering in the street alone / Was certainly deranged. / Now he’s just on the phone.’ Perhaps the sweetest poem in this section is ‘On Rereading Some Lines of Poetry,’ in which Harrison revisits Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ and finds refreshment for his soul there. However, ‘Who They Were,’ a meditation on the poet’s childhood, is equally tender, as is the concluding poem, ‘To My Friends,’ which advises us, ‘Don’t spend too much time grieving.’ Shakespeare’s Horse (2015) is musical, brilliantly crafted, and has, according to critic Harold Bloom, comedy that is ‘refreshingly original.’ In ‘To Riccardo Duranti’ Harrison congratulates his friend on his luxurious situation on a ‘farm in the Sabine Hills,’ but concludes by warning that ‘your nasty old neighbor . . . cheats at pool like a little Berlusconi.’ In ‘Damon’ Harrison shows that ‘alizarin’ can rhyme quite sensibly with ‘zeroes in.’ Who knew? In Sometimes I Dream That I Am Not Walt Whitman (2020) Harrison considers the sources and varieties of poetic excellence. ‘Orogenesis’ compares poetic inspiration that rises from the unconscious mind with the ‘compressed volcanic agony’ that moves beneath tectonic plates. In other poems he channels the voices of Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, and others. ‘Mark Strand’ is a gentle remembrance of a poet Harrison knew and admired. — Steve Harrison (no relation)

To read the whole of this review, please go to: https://writersforum.org/collected-poems/