These edgy poems push the themes of separation and community---the stretch between people, between us and our natural world, the few times of possible unison. These rare moments play out in poems about birthing, education, late-life phases of marriage,fresh meditations on Jewish culture---and a sequence on dance, whose disciplines our roughneck world disrupts. As in Loose Parlance, Harris' first volume of poems, the wars of this decade, sexual abuse, terrorism hover nearby. Poems on Goya, Caravaggio, and the monumental Callanish Stones (in the Outer Hebrides) give mythic and historical context for our petty scale, and frame the temptation to dissolve into mist. A plain style, whether rugged or tender, blends wry satiric tonalities with the pulse of lyric need. The commitment to varieties of form, the workings of rhythm and rhyme, pervade these gestures towards glimpses of wholeness, justice, a coming to rest.

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Daniel A. Harris

Daniel A. Harris / Hulls Falls Publications

Grief, disruption, anger: these themes emerge in tightly crafted poems that evoke empathic images through precise diction and roughened rhythms. Taut stanzas and calculated rambles offer the hard pleasures one wants from poems whose speaking 'voice' contemplates social violence, conflicts between cultures. Poems about death and love are simultaneously embroiled in struggles with race, colonialism, Jewish identity and patriarchy. Impersonations of Moses caught in a cleft, or of the nude in a Manet painting, give historical density to individual utterance. Whether about later-life sex and marriage, or family dramas recalled to be reworked, these poems have an edge, a tough energy that comes from the drive to find an intelligible self-knowing--even as they also seek, more elusively, justice and healing in times of war and torture.

Loose Parlance: Poems

Ragged Sky Press

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Books by Daniel A. Harris

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Daniel A. Harris. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

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Loose Parlance: Poems