Paper Bark Press
The Kangaroo Farm
1997, 80 pages, softcover, 215x150mm
ISBN 0 958648 24 7
Cover photograph by Ian Dodd
Martin Harrison has lived in Sydney for the past twenty years. Born in England, he has also lived at various times in New Zealand and Spain. Besides writing poetry he teaches radio and writing at Sydney's University of Technology. His books have been widely praised for the poetry's unique attractiveness to the sensory world and to ways of seeing and hearing. This latest collection of his poetry contains poems of travel, landscape, movement, household movements and the remembered voices of friends and strangers met along the way. It is a writing at once passionate and ironic, at once talkative and musical.
'There are not too many poets who can manage a hawk soaring and things going really crook and get away with it ... Harrison is clearly a poet who is not content with simple solutions and easy effects.'
~ Geoff Page, The Canberra Times
'Harrison is concerned with the "magic" of poetic sight and sound; with our everyday perception being stretched almost to the point of non-perception ... Harrison is constantly going over his tracks to find the objective – the thing in itself – amid the subjective...'
~ David McCooey, Australian Book Review
'Harrison re-creates "liveable" locales in his poems, utterly convincing places where ordinary happiness might reside.'
~ Nigel Wheale, London Review of Books
'... these luminous new poems marry the lyric and the essay and, in doing so, lead us to see, think and feel new physical and spiritual landscapes that are Australia...'
~ Kevin Hart