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Jennifer Harrison

Jennifer Harrison

Jennifer Harrison’s latest poetry collection is Anywhy (Black Pepper, 2018). She is Chair of the World Psychiatry Association’s Section for Art and Psychiatry.

Jenny Harrison reviews 7 books of poetry

October 2000, no. 225 01 October 2000
The new books from Ron Pretty’s Five Islands Press are impressive début collections. Importantly, where are the poets taking us? Are there discernible trends? Without generalising excessively, violent themes recur and the poets are interested in how societies transgress their limits. The collections have a narrative or developmental thrust often well served by the ordering of the poems. There i ... (read more)

Jennifer Harrison reviews 'Slack Tide' by Sarah Day

March 2023, no. 451 25 February 2023
This is Sarah Day’s ninth collection and one of her most thematically diverse to date. She brings to the poems a thoughtful mix of environmentalism (particularly the unruly yet quiet presence of Tasmania’s natural beauty), her British roots (some of the best poems in the collection refer to the poet’s grandmother’s incarceration in an asylum), and a teacher’s precision with free verse. T ... (read more)

Jennifer Harrison reviews 'languish' by Marion May Campbell and 'And to Ecstasy' by Marjon Mossammaparast

August 2022, no. 445 28 July 2022
The title of Marion May Campbell’s third poetry collection, languish, conjures ideas of laziness, daydream, failure to make progress, ennui, lack of enthusiasm, anhedonia. Campbell’s poetry is concerned with the excitement of language, but also its debasement. Several reviewers have commented on the work’s intertextuality (Campbell often employs compositional strategies such as parody, allus ... (read more)

Jennifer Harrison reviews 'In the Room with the She Wolf' by Jelena Dinić and 'Beneath the Tree Line' by Jane Gibian

April 2022, no. 441 23 March 2022
In an impressive first collection, the South Australian poet Jelena Dinić incorporates her Serbian heritage and memories of war-affected Yugoslavia into an Australian migration narrative of clear-sighted beauty. William Carlos Williams wrote in the introduction to Kora In Hell: Improvisations (1920): ‘Thus a poem is tough … solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken thi ... (read more)

Jennifer Harrison reviews 'Whirlwind Duststorm' by John Hawke

September 2021, no. 435 19 August 2021
In the epigraph to this collection, a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre on Edmund Husserl suggests that we are entering a poetic that challenges the possibility of conscious knowledge; consciousness is itself a maelstrom that extrudes the intruder and has ‘no inside’. What follows is both a refutation and embracement of this assertion in chatoyant language that is as thoughtful and melodic as it is ... (read more)

'Explorer', a new poem by Jennifer Harrison

May 2021, no. 431 26 April 2021
after Eavan Boland’s ‘New Territory’   The world closed in, but it was fortunatethere was her own interior to explore:the prayer books a captain might have readon long voyages, now small with gossamer pagesof tiny print, so interesting, myths really,of rise and fall, pride, hedonism and fate,the farmer who could not turn water into wineno matter how hard he tried. And then there weree ... (read more)

Miles Ahead

ABR Arts 15 June 2016
'If you are going to tell a story, come with some attitude, man' Miles Dewey Davis III (26 May 1926 – 28 September 1991) After a ten-year gestation, actor Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda [2004], Crash [2004]) has realised his dream to produce a film on the legendary jazz musician Miles Davis. Cheadle who directs, co-writes, and plays the central role eschews the usual linear narrative in Miles Ahead ... (read more)

Jennifer Harrison reviews 'Ecstacies and Elegies: Poems' by Paul Carter

August 2014, no. 363 01 August 2014
It may seem strange to begin a review of Paul Carter’s extraordinary poetry collection by quoting the words of another writer, but these lines of Boris Pasternak’s – taken from his essay in The Poet’s Work (1989), a collection of writings by twentieth-century poets on their art – seem particularly pertinent: By its inborn faculty of hearing, poetry seeks out the melody of nature amid ... (read more)
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