J.S. Harry
J.S. Harry was an Australian poet (1939–2015). Her poetry collections included The Deer Under The Skin (1971), one of the first titles in the historic UQP Paperback Poets series, Hold, for a little while, and turn gently (1979), A Dandelion for Van Gogh (1985), which was shortlisted for the National Book Council and the Adelaide Festival Poetry Awards, The Life on Water and the Life Beneath (1995), Selected Poems (1995), winner of the NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry, Sun Shadow, Moon Shadow (2000) and Public Private (2013). Her collection of Peter Henry Lepus poems, Not Finding Wittgenstein (Giramondo, 2007) won the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award.
Max remembers the first time they made love
when she arrived travel-dusty & sweaty
after complications
getting from Basrah to Baghdad. Much afterwards
while they were lying together very close
she’d told him of a pet she’d had, when small:
had given it its scientific name – Macropanesthia rhinoceros.
... (read more)
He meets a man with an icicle voicewho says it is ‘Mind’s disease’to act impulsively; this man elevates‘Reason’ to a pedestal, where he worshipsat a cold, stony chiselled face, from afar(& sometimes Peter sees him go up close, to peer,at something old, cold, & slushy, underneath it –which, he tells Peter, is a high I.Q.-edpickled brain, in a jar).The cold man reads Peter, from ... (read more)
We were gone from each other;we were throwing out small talk,half-sent smiles, unmeant like mist.
I have always loved water and praised it.I love my work and my children.I have lived it and lived it …
I am the long lean razor shellI have already come to the verge of.
I rise like a sunken boat from China.I sing. Ah! What shall I write?
I recall her by a freckle of gold.If I close my eyes, I c ... (read more)