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Kitchen Music

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In her first Carcanet collection, Lesley Harrison looks North to the sea, with the heat of the land at her back. In her striking inventive arrangements of sound and page, Harrison bring us meditations on whale hunts and lost children, on cities seen and remembered, and the sound of the gamelan in the Gulf of Bothnia. A poetry which negotiates, line by line and page by page, with white space and silence, Kitchen Music plunges deep through the strata of language where "weather is body" and an Iceland poppy is "as delicate as birch." Drawing on folktales, she threads together images of family and gender, transcribes John Cage and Johannes Kepler into song and litany, pens a hymnal of bees, and turns to storms, glaciers, and the lapwing life in a field of young barley. As the novelist Kirsty Gunn writes in the foreword, Harrison has "taken up the old white whale of the fixed and masculine narratives and made of its seas and weathers her own Moby Dick, a female poetry 'in praises / repeated, repeating.'"
Lesley Harrison, born in Ayrshire, Scotland, has published six collections of poetry, including the poetry pamphlet Blue Pearl, published by New Directions. She has lived and worked in Istanbul, West Africa, Mongolia, and Orkney, on Scotland’s northern coastline. Harrison has held writing residencies in Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard, and the Harvard University Center for Hellenic Studies. She lives in the small fishing village of Auchmithie on the Angus coast of Scotland.
* Harrison’s first Carcanet collection brings us meditations on whale hunts and lost children, on cities seen and remembered, and the sound of the gamelan in the Gulf of Bothnia. * Drawing on folktales, Harrison threads together images of family and gender, and transcribes John Cage and Johannes Kepler into song and litany. * Striking inventive arrangements of sound and page, negotiating with white space and silence * The novelist Kirsty Gunn writes in the foreword, Harrison has “taken up the old white whale of the fixed and masculine narratives and made of its seas and weathers her own Moby Dick, a female poetry ‘in praises / repeated, repeating.’”
'It is full of whalebones and wind and melting ice, and it left me breathless.' - Nina Powles, Poetry on 'Blue Pearl'
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