Recovering the Naked Man

Peter Baltensperger is the editor and publisher of Moonstone Press and
the author of Arcana.

Hailed as “an important step in a new direction in male writing,”
Harrison’s second book presents a poetic approach to the age-old
relationships between men and women in the light of the
twentieth-century developments of feminist movements and, now,
masculinist reactions. “I am writing this,” Harrison proclaims,
“because a woman and I / are writing poems about men and women / and
the possibility of real speaking / between us” (“Left Out”). Yet
in Harrison’s world, the women are plagued by memories of sexual
abuse, incest, and rape, and the men by anger and pain; communication
doesn’t seem possible at all, because “We spend our time hunting for
words, / the old language dying on our lips” (“Recovering the Naked
Man”). Nor is love possible any more, only a kind of friendship the
poet seeks to “make things last” (“Left Out”), since ultimately
“inside there is no love” (“The Fielder”). What is left is
words, poems on the page, and the act of writing the words, but no
“real speaking.” Love cannot be experienced, only described, like
the naked man himself, “piece by piece.”

Permeated by profound sadness and existential emptiness, these poems
grapple with the problems of a man faced with himself, with all his
guilt and that of his fellow men, with his inability to break through
the barriers between the sexes. The absence of love generates nothing
but loneliness and despair; in the end, there can be no redemption,
because the wounds are too deep and, in the context of the poems,
impossible to heal.