James Harpur

Harpur is essentially an interior poet with a fascination for spirituality, and his poems are full of references to Christian as well as to other religious traditions. Stylistically, he has a deep sympathy with the mythopoeic strand of poetry, from Homer, Virgil and Dante to the Romantics and Yeats, Eliot and Ted Hughes. His non-literary influences include Carl Jung and J. Krishnamurti. Although many of his poems are clothed in the trappings of the past, his concerns – the human condition, the nature of the psyche, the yearning for spiritual meaning – are both contemporary and timeless.

Harpur is concerned with poetic craft and often displays regular metrics and rhymes and half-rhymes. One stylistic hallmark is the use of first-person voices to articulate psycho-spiritual states of being. This can be seen in his second book, The Monk’s Dream, where the ‘voice’ of Lazarus recounts the mysterious process of dying and coming back to life, only to eke out an existence of infamy and listlessness. Oracle Bones takes this fascination with monologue further. A range of diviners, visionaries and soothsayers (including an Assyrian extispicist) explore the nature of inspiration and prophecy. At the heart of the book is ‘Dies Irae’, Harpur’s most ambitious work, in which a Dark Age churchman laments the end of the world as he knows it, gaining consolation from the memory of a moment of ecstasy he was once graced with.

The Dark Age, Harpur’s fourth book, continues the theme of spiritual darkness. A central sonnet sequence about early medieval Irish saints is balanced by more overtly personal poems about love, birth and death. A long poem, spoken by the Syrian pillar hermit, Symeon Stylites, voices the internal struggle of the religious ascetic (and, by implication, of the artist) seeking seclusion, despite an inevitable need for humanity. Two poems extracted from a work-in-progress about the Book of Kells suggest that Harpur’s focus is shifting to the nature of sacred art, the mystery of inspiration and the artist’s tension in trying to articulate the Inarticulate. Selected Bibliography

Poetry
A Vision of Comets, Anvil Press Poetry, London, 1993
The Monk’s Dream, Anvil Press Poetry, London, 1996
Oracle Bones, Anvil Press Poetry, London, 2001
The Dark Age, Anvil Press Poetry, London, 2007

Translation
Fortune’s Prisoner: The poems of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Anvil Press Poetry, London, 2007

Non-fiction
Love Burning in the Soul: the Story of the Christian Mystics, Shambhala, Boston, 2005 

Links

James Harpur’s website

Irish radio interview with James Harpur about The Dark Age

Review of The Dark Age by Grace Wells