Random Unisons

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.