Terrain

This second collection from Jean Harrison features an increasingly mature and confident poet, able to take in the terrain and map every detail with precision. Here is a poet 'sitting and watching', taking in the 'full details' 'as a hunter might, or a surveyor'; a poet who can merge into the background, as though 'half-asleep' yet be 'alert the moment a mouse scratches'; a poet who senses the smallest of disturbances and who 'seems to know something most of us don't, but what?'Bursting with incisive wit, with a deft tenderness that defies sentimentality, as when her 'thoughts slip / through the walls to a friend / who struggles to hold on ... ' Jean Harrison invites the reader to become with her, 'porous to greens, black, pinks, reds that flame off walls'; to savour places that are 'desolate in a satisfactory way' and to finally, 'Go home / shut your eyes, remember the silence / of a day without wind.'Terrain is a moving, sharply focussed, multi-layered treasure trove from an accomplished writer.