Feeding the Fire: Poems

Jeffrey Harrison's third collection, Feeding the Fire, sustains itself on the fuel of memory. In these new poems, the charged moments of youth, dimly understood at the time of occurrence, return to the poet in flashes of brilliant clarity and passages of transporting reminiscence. "It's the transitions / I've always loved, that sense of being / two places and once and in neither one," Harrison says in a poem that recaptures youthful exuberance. In other poems, a calmer, surreally precise rendering returns past scenes to their inchoate mystery. Harrison recreates the gravity, as well as the levity, of small events, finding words for both the ineffable and the embarrassing encounters of the past?innocence seen through the eyes of experience. The result is provocative and intense. The poems make a kind of suspension bridge between our own amorphous younger selves — all perception and desire — and the no less mysterious vantage of mid-life.

Harrison is the author of two highly praised previous collections of poems, one a winner in the National Poetry Series. Feeding the Fire retains the virtue of the earlier work — accessibility and clarity, without sacrifice of complexity — while branching into new territory. In addition to the poems of recollection, there are love poems, lyrics of the here-and-now, poems entwined in the doubleness of metaphor, as well as a number of elegies for the "unfamous," those indelible characters met in any life who shape individual consciousness. In all these poems, Harrison is a superb maker — the skill and intelligence of every line coaxes out the potential of language. In this new collection, Harrison affirms the restorative mystery of our own innocence and articulates our complex, stumbling passage toward experience.

"It is rare to encounter poetry that is suffused with a calm technical assurance and, at the same time, tense with the potential to surprise convincingly. Harrison's language is exact, sinuous, and compelling, and leads, as in the memorable 'Our Other Sister,' to places we may not have seen before, but know when we arrive. This is a beautiful book." Henry Taylor

"This is a book that can be read from start to finish with ever-heightened expectations that are never disappointed, and with sustained delight. The poems move with the fluidity of a mind's swift and graceful agility, full of darts and surprising turns, alive with leaps, sprints, and spirals. They wind through luminous galleries of the past, antechambers of memory or the obscure outskirts of recollection, always discovering astonishments." Anthony Hecht

Third, highly accessible collection by this lyric talent.

Feeding the Fireretains the virtue of Jeffrey Harrison's earlier work-accessibility and clarity, without sacrifice of complexity-while branching into new territory. There are love poems, lyrics entwined in metaphor, and a number of elegies for the "unfamous," those indelible characters met in any life who shape individual consciousness. Most significantly there are poems of recollection, in which the charged moments of youth, dimly understood at the time of occurrence, return to the poet in flashes of brilliant clarity and passages of intense reminiscence. These new poems affirm the restorative mystery of our own innocence and articulate our complex, stumbling passage toward experience.

"Harrison's language is exact, sinuous, and compelling, and leads to places we may not have seen before, but know when we arrive. This is a beautiful book."-Henry Taylor

"This is a book that can be read from start to finish with ever-heightened expectations that are never disappointed, and with sustained delight."-Anthony Hecht

"Here are hauntingly composed poems of remembrance, of happiness and eagerness and regret-of life lyrically embraced, all beautifully rendered by one of our finest poets."-Robert Coles

 

Marketing plans for Feeding the Fire:

Author tour in Northeast area (New York City, Boston).

Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings.

Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines.

Jeffrey Harrison is the author of two previous books of poetry, The Singing Underneath, selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, and Signs of Arrival.He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. He currently lives in Andover, Massachusetts.

Feeding the Fire retains the virtue of Jeffrey Harrison's earlier work — accessibility and clarity, without sacrifice of complexity — while branching into new territory. There are love poems, lyrics entwined in metaphor, and a number of elegies for the "unfamous", those indelible characters met in any life who shape individual consciousness. Most significantly there are poems of recollection, in which the charged moments of youth, dimly understood at the time of occurrence, return to the poet in flashes of brilliant clarity and passages of intense reminiscence. These new poems affirm the restorative mystery of our own innocence and articulate our complex, stumbling passage toward experience.

Jeffrey Harrison is the author of two previous books of poetry, The Singing Underneath, selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, and Signs of Arrival. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and in many other magazines. He has taught at several universities, and at Phillips Academy, where he was the Roger Murray Writer-in-Residence for three years.