Jennifer Harrison

Colombine selects from Jennifer Harrison’s four previous collections and adds a book-length group of new poems. In keeping with current practice, the new poems precede the selections, so that anyone wanting to consider Harrison’s twenty-year poetic career in terms of development has to begin ...

This accessible new anthology collects the work of 125 women poets writing on the theme of motherhood. As well as having general appeal, it will introduce younger female readers of poetry to topics close to their own bodily, emotional futures.

Folly & Grief, Melbourne poet Jennifer Harrison’s third collection, reads on one level as a playful enquiry into the centuries-long association of folly with innovative live performance. Lizard men abseil down gallery walls; an extreme body artist creates a living sculpture of bees; a ventriloquist’s dummy stirs to life; New Age travellers toss firesticks, knives and chainsaws high into the sky. While the danger lurking in such displays is often what retains our interest (‘He juggles a chainsaw … even the fine patinating rain / feels like sprayed blood on my face and lips’), Harrison is equally concerned with the challenging apprenticeships these unusual skills demand. The road to becoming a master entertainer is explicitly connected to the craft of writing: ‘a juggler first conquers clumsiness / then writes the same poem, over and over.’

I’ve been trying to place love
in the exhibit for inspection
but there are fees to be perfected.

Since the publication in 1995 of her first collection, Michelangelo’s Prisoners, Jennifer Harrison has continued to impress readers and to broaden her repertoire. Her fourth collection in as many years, the intimately entitled Dear B, consolidates her reputation and demonstrates sufficient difference and intensity to satisfy admirers of this sensitive, likeable poet.