Table of Contents

Table of Contents Introductory Note Poems Index of Titles and First Lines A Note About the Author

About the Author

Born in 1957 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Jeffrey Harrison is the author of three books of poetry, The Singing Underneath (1988), selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, Signs of Arrival (1996), and Feeding the Fire (2001), as well as the chapbook An Undertaking (2005). His fourth book, Incomplete Knowledge, will be published in fall 2006 by Four Way Books (New York). He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two Pushcart Prizes, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Poets of the New Century, and in many other magazines and anthologies. He has taught at several universities and schools, including George Washington University, The University of Maryland, Phillips Academy (Andover), where he was the Roger Murray Writer-in-Residence, and College of the Holy Cross. He is currently on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.

Reviews

"The poems in Jeffrey Harrison's new collection, Feeding the Fire, chronicle our growth from the cluelessness of childhood to that slightly greater state of awareness called adult life... Harrison's best poems... open doors to the place in the heart where we come closest to knowing who we really are." --The New York Times Book Review "It's thrilling to read an entire book of poems written with such pleasure and gusto. Harrison writes with remarkable confidence about a range of ordinary things--salt, rowing a boat, discarded books, a stinking pond--and he gets more out of his subjects than seems possible. How does he do this without every being pretentious? He's an artist." --Philip Levine, Ploughshares "Harrison... writes so musically that ordinary occurrences take on the tones and luster of extraordinary art." --Booklist "In Harrison's work, the commonplace, the incidental, the exotic, and the miraculous all present themselves as the occasion for... unflinching meditation and the knotting of lyric intensity." --Partisan Review "It is rare to encounter poetry that is suffused with a calm technical assurance and, at the same time, tense with the potential to surprise convincingly. Harrison's language is exact, sinuous, and compelling, and leads... to places we may not have seen before, but know when we arrive. This is a beautiful book." --Henry Taylor "There is no one else for whose poems--their tone and wording and overall approach to things--I feel greater sympathy and admiration." --James Merrill "This is a book that can be read from start to finish with ever-hightened expectations that are never disappointed, and with sustained delight. The poems move with the fluidity of a mind's swift and graceful agility, full of darts and surprising turns, alive with leaps, sprints, and spirals. They wind through luminous galleries of the past, antechambers of memory or the obscure outskirts of recollection, always discovering astonishments." --Anthony Hecht