Dichter
Martin Harrison
Martin Harrison
(Verenigd Koninkrijk, 1949 - 2014)
Biografie
A poet and critic, Martin Harrison lives in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales. He teaches poetry and poetics at University of Technology, Sydney. The recipient of numerous Australia Council Fellowships (including residencies in Italy and the USA), his most recent collection Summer was shortlisted for the 2002 New South Wales Premier’s Award for Poetry and won the 2002-3 Wesley Michel Wright Award. A collection of essays on writing, contemporary criticism and issues in recent Australian poetry, Who Wants To Create Australia? is due in 2004. <!-- oude Pp
Poet and critic, Martin Harrison lives in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales.
He teaches poetry and poetics at University of Technology, Sydney. Recipient of numerous Australia Council Fellowships (including residencies in Italy and the USA) his collections of poems include The Distribution of Voice (University of Queensland Press 1993) and The Kangaroo Farm (Paper Bark Press 1997).
-->
(‘Late Western Thought’, from Summer)
You’ll see none of this clearly till later.
(There was your own looking, walking to account for.)
The pigeons, the horse, the crickets, the swamp-gums were just there,
scarcely visible,
secretly communicative in
every direction like a place where paths, meandering, at last meet.
Harrison’s lines often seem to follow the meandering trajectory of this last line. It’s difficult to interrupt Harrison’s speakers, to draw out a simple and single quote, as each line comes to form a path in a nexus of paths. Harrison’s poetry is remarkable for the wholeness of its thought and expression, as though each line presented a neural pathway of a single system of thought, balanced and focused, able with ease and an at times deliciously fecund relation to the world, to cast off the shadows of both world and language, the negativity that inhabits each, and give it as an almost physical presence.
While closely attuned to the fluidity of temporality and perception, memory is a constant concern in Harrison’s work, and traces a backbone to an otherwise shimmering world of creation in process and perception. Narratives from errant travelers or drawn from family history, lend a very human edge to a poetry often closely engaged with the difficult terrain of phenomenology and perception. Harrison’s keen use of narratives, keeps his poetry from drifting too far into the abstract or conceptual, from becoming too much about language at the cost of experience. Take for example, the movement from narrative to the conception of narrative, from nostalgia to a dissection of nostalgia, from memory to cognition, where each point of departure cleanly defines and is defined by its point of return:
(‘Letter from America’, in Summer)
In my mid-teens,
my father, bored with his business,
used to take me driving with him on his
rounds across the north of England: he was
drumming up trade for his imported
Spanish wines – Alellas, rich Riojas, and my
still favourite green ones, vino verde or
verdelho. In the glove compartment, there
were the poets he’d always liked – Eliot, bitter
Larkin and the Welshmen, Vernon Scannel
and Thomas (R.S.). He took them out at
roadside stops. Back home at night, he jotted screeds
of ‘nature poetry.’ He called it doing the accounts.
Sincerely, he hoped I’d do more, with more success:
but “study money, not poetry” was his long-lived, bleak
advice. In his 80s now, his steady observation:
“I’ve given up making sense of things. Work only
for yourself.” A palimpsest is what’s scraped away:
a scraping which reveals a trace, a ‘beneath’ that’s covered
over with new scrawl. Are memories like that trace?
It could be so, but they are more like waves, a
patterning of dots, invasive, darting, spacious.
Like dominoes, they fit together, fall apart. Like
stories, too, you have to think them out, make them work.
This notion of work runs throughout Harrison’s poetry. There is a sense that each poem is a hard-won moment of perception even while offering to the reader an enviable translucence, a clear vision of the world in its contingency and temporal flux. At the heart of these profound and ever-meticulously crafted poems, this long meditation into the mechanics of conception and perception, is the warmth and flesh of the complexity of life and being plainly spoken.
© Michael Brennan
BibliographyPoetry
The Distribution of Voice (University of Queensland Press, 1993)
The Kangaroo Farm (Paper Bark Press, 1997)
Summer (Paper Bark Press, 2001)
Gedichten
Gedichten van Martin Harrison
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère