Martin Harrison

Martin Harrison is the author of Summer.

Poem: ‘Winter Solstice’

Martin Harrison, 25 September 2003

A vague mood, a sadness, a feeling as when recovering from illness, a kind of ‘whatever it is which is going on at the time’ mode –

a defile bulldozered between trees where the power-lines go through on a ridge top, their suspended wires as out of place as a street’s tramwires would be,

while, momentarily, the cut-out shape on the skyline (a trough shape on the crest...

Poem: ‘January’

Martin Harrison, 20 January 2000

For Robert Adamson

A blue smear bulges over the ridge; there’s the counterpoint as well of shine on white-hot duco glimpsed on the ute

parked outside on the driveway. It blinds its surrounds with a surfboard beach-effect. It’s as ominous as the Mary Celeste – it looks

lonely, isolated parked there, brilliant in tinfoil sharpness of afternoon light. If this were Ireland, it...

A tear caught in a mussel shell turns to pearl, the Ancients believed. Barry MacSweeney’s The Book of Demons begins among the living with ‘Pearl’, a 22-poem sequence evoking a...

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