Blue Pearl (New Directions Poetry Pamphlets)

orca / in a sea blue room, / breathing pearls that rise to the surface ―from Blue Pearl.

What does northness sound like? The music of Iceland, Greenland, the Svalbard archipelago. Songs of birds and ice and wind. In Lesley Harrison’s Blue Pearl, her first collection to appear in the United States, northern landscapes come alive through an intimacy of language that forms a collective sense of place through weather, history, local myths and customs, and childhood fairy tales. Dogs on the shale, eels in the current, a ship strains as it’s pulled up by a needle, a whaler unwinds the skin―Harrison’s poems voyage forth with visible breath, “as snow falls as light is in paper.”