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Synopsis
'Joseph Harrison's new volume is a wonderful leap in his poetic development. Harrison fuses formal control with a rich interiority and composes many poems that deserve to become canonical.' — Harold Bloom ‘The title poem of Joseph Harrison's second book is a witty and headlong discussion of how one's self, if any, is constituted. We are a patchwork, it develops, and the same might be said of Harrison's book, which makes continual and expert use of Spenser, Wordsworth, Horace, Villon, and other predecessors. If this makes Identity Theft seem a three-ring circus, the important point is that Harrison is a superlative ringmaster: his book throughout is governed by that playfulness and performance which, as Frost said, are required in poetry however impassioned or serious. I found myself particularly moved by "Who They Were," which recalls the poet's mother and father in the stanza of Tennyson's In Memoriam.’ — Richard Wilbur Joseph Harrison was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1957, grew up in northern Virginia and Alabama, and took his BA from Yale in 1979 and his MA from Johns Hopkins in 1986. His poems have appeared in various journals, amongst them The Antioch Review, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review, as well as in The Best American Poetry 1998. His first book, Someone Else's Name, was published by Waywiser in the UK in 2003 and by Zoo Press in the USA, and was a runner-up for the 2005 Poet's Prize. Earlier in 2005 he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The subject of the title poem expands out of the specifics of computer jargon to a far greater contemplation the nature of identity. This theme runs through the book, sometimes overtly, sometimes underground, until at the end of the volume George Washington stands on his column to survey what the country and its inhabitants have becomeThe verse is formal and highly accomplished, though not flashy. Harrison can be wry, funny and ironic by turns; the regularity of blank verse can allow jokes to emerge from its structure, or disappoint by the random jerks / and stumblings of what's merely chopped-up prose / meandering, or bored past sympathy. (On rereading some lines of poetry.) The reader is sped along through Terza Rima, ballades and Sapphics, scarcely noticing it.Perhaps the most moving piece is Who They Were, an extended elegy whose pattern on the page points directly to its forbear, Tennyson's In Memoriam. It is more than just a new take on Tennyson, it has authority in its own right; like most of the poems in the book it makes the reader want to go and reread its antecedents.Harrison's work is rooted in the history of poetry; acknowledgements are implied (as with previous example) or sometimes explicit, as in the poem for Anthony Hecht: 'You put us younger poets through our paces / With terms both strict and kind'.This is a volume whose fascination grows to expand beyond its cover, leaving the reader hungry for more poetry.
Simon Rees-Roberts
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