Jeffrey Harrison

It’s always a good thing when poetry offers surprises (it’s rarer than you might think—if in fact you think about poetry at all). It’s also a good thing when poetry offers lucidity, music, and mystery in something like equal measure (also rarer than you might think). Jeffrey Harrison’s poetry offers all of those things with impressive regularity. The Singing Underneath was selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series in 1987. And since then, Harrison has had a very nice career, at least as far as careers in poetry go, with scads of prizes, fellowships, and teaching gigs, and the publication of his poems in such esteemed periodicals as The New Yorker and The Paris Review. His fourth book, The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems, was released last year, and we’re assuming that, like many poets of his stature, Harrison has a small but ardent cult of admirers. We’ll also assume that the rest of you have never heard of the fellow, which seems like a shame.

Walter Library.