New and Selected Poems

Roger Nash is Academic Vice-President of Athabasca University and author
of Night Flying.

This collection divides into eight sequences of poems. Several of these
sequences show Harris to be among the very best English-language poets
in the world today. “Turning Out the Light,” an extended elegy on
the death of a brother from cancer, is remarkable for the way in which
it balances uneasy acceptance with a stubborn rejection of false
consolation; extends language to the intolerable details of suffering;
and captures the deeply perplexing ambiguity of such passings for the
patient, for whom hope itself is self-destroying. “A Visit to the
Galleries,” a meditation on paintings and sculptures, deepens our
understanding of the sense that poetry can make, thereby demonstrating a
rare marriage of visual and poetic reveries. “Death and Miss Emily”
delights with its delicate but acute imagistlike observations of nature
and its moods, and its creative play with language.

However, amid its impressive strengths the collection presents some
puzzles. “Death and Miss Emily” does little to probe Dickinson’s
questioning sense of her own life, so characteristic of her work. In
fact, Harris’s sequence is hardly about Dickinson at all. Perhaps his
imagism, like Monet’s impressionism, seeks to capture truths about
atmosphere and light, not about the individual; but then why (unlike
Monet) make an intensely distinct individual central to his work? A
parallel evasion of inwardness seems present in “Spring Descending.”
Here the speaker seeks to regain imaginative vitality. His awakening
poetic eye focuses on quiet details in nature. However, he avoids the
cliché of “making love” only by a reformulation of love that
doesn’t mention feelings at all.

The selected poems in this book were drawn from collections published
over the past 15 years; the new poems include two prize-winners from CBC
literary competitions.