Paper Bark Press
Summer
2001, 90 pages, softcover, 215x150mm
ISBN 1 877004 84 7
Cover photograph: 'Summer, Queenscliff 1975' by Roger Scott
Martin Harrison's new book of poems, Summer, offers a poetry which is subtly and sharply lyrical and at the same time a reflection on how we live in the hi-tech world. This is a book whose poetry is a response, as he puts it in a poem entitled 'Letter from America', to the question which "speaks beyond ourselves" – the question of what nature can still mean to us at the turn of the millennium.
This new book from one of Australia's leading poets has many new poems which typify the sensory richness for which his work is well known. Portraits, conversations, stories from the world of global travel and information, glimpses of Australian place and plainly delineated things – these are poems which hover at the edge of vision while being deeply held at the back of the mind.
'Harrison is concerned with the 'magic' of poetic sight and sound; with our everyday perception being stretched almost to the point of non-perception.'
~ David McCooey, Australian Book Review
'Harrison re-creates 'livable' locales in his poems, utterly convincing places where ordinary happiness might reside.'
~ Nigel Wheale, London Review of Books