Paper Bark Press
The Partiality of Harbours
Manfred Jurgensen
1989, 120 pages, hardback, 215x150mm
ISBN 0 9587801 3 7
Cover photograph by Ian Dodd
'These are poems woven from an elevated and passionate rhetoric. In a world which he recognizes as fallen and broken, Jurgensen clings to his sense of poetry as a sacred art. as a high calling. In poem after poem he is driven by a sense that "the word still makes us in its image" or that the words which have slipped away from us were "lost entries to another life".
'We live in a little age of linguistic analysis, linguistic scepticism, baffled secular gestures. But to Jurgensen it is only language which can be adequate to life's presences and to its absences. Only through language, orchestrated into a musical order, can we begin to come to terms with displacement, loss, pain and the sexual mysteries.
'Many of Jurgensen's poems are couched in a spacious, original blend of the modern prose poem with old alliterative measures, others are essentially lyrical. But they all come out of European traditions of poetry as an elevated, stubborn and impassioned art. What he variously calls voice, name, the sovereign code, love's counter-speech and the vintage of song is for him a kind of magic which recurrently redeems our damaged lives.'
~ Chris Wallace-Crabbe