Locations
Pages: 62
|Published: 1 Jan 1968
Description
To get the intensity of the lyric into poems whose subjects and length tend to resist the lyric mode, Mr. Harrison has moved to longer forms, and particularly to the suite form. In Locations, which represents his work since the publication of Plain Song three years ago, Mr. Harrison employs the suite to attain a diversionary, circling effect, by which he drives many wedges into the total metaphor of the poem. The result is a clustral, rather than geometric or linear, development of the poem—a succession of variations on a single theme which stalk rather than present the poem.
Most of the poems in Locations concern themselves with the natural world, although not in the usual manner of the "nature poet. " The central figure is human; the poems are immersed in a sense of man violently coexisting with nature and with the physical world he has built for himself. Though many of the poems are personal, they reflect a feeling of a nearly exhausted planet.
"My direction," writes Mr. Harrison of this second volume of poems, "seems toward a more open form while attempting to keep the tension of the construct. My sympathies, which are reasonably humble, run hot and cold to the great impurists Whitman, Rilke, Neruda, among others. "
Most of the poems in Locations concern themselves with the natural world, although not in the usual manner of the "nature poet. " The central figure is human; the poems are immersed in a sense of man violently coexisting with nature and with the physical world he has built for himself. Though many of the poems are personal, they reflect a feeling of a nearly exhausted planet.
"My direction," writes Mr. Harrison of this second volume of poems, "seems toward a more open form while attempting to keep the tension of the construct. My sympathies, which are reasonably humble, run hot and cold to the great impurists Whitman, Rilke, Neruda, among others. "
