The Book of Endings

by Leslie Harrison

Overview

Short-listed for the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry

The poems in The Book of Endings try to make sense of, or at least come to some kind of reckoning with absence - the death of the author's mother, the absence of the beloved, the absence of an accountable god, cicadas, the dead stars arriving, the dead moon aglow in the night sky.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781629220659
Publisher:	University of Akron Press, The
Publication date:	01/06/2017
Series:	Akron series in poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	528 KB

About the Author

Leslie Harrison holds graduate degrees from the Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Irvine. Her first book, Displacement, won the Bakeless Prize and was published by Mariner Books. She lives and teaches in Baltimore.

Editorial Reviews

12/04/2017
Harrison (Displacement) reveals a psyche made strange through grieving in this luminous and musical collection. Here, the self is seen as other, an art object to behold at some degree of remove. “I test the reality of this slippery day/ already easing out of reach,” Harrison writes. Each section of this book, which is framed as a triptych, represents part of the visual field Harrison is attempting to render in language. The poems are uniform in their delivery and use of the page as a canvas: “When the hay wain wound its way across the hill/ you failed to follow because winter meant/ fallow meant cold frozen fields.” Like this winter imagery, the voice feels frozen in the same set of forms, either lyric fragments or uniformly lineated strophes. Harrison’s self-imposed constraints startle only with their consistency: “I want to know how to strip the griefstorm from the flesh/ flense the spirit scrape it down to the clean bone unbreaking.”Her formal and rhythmic strictures foreclose the possibility of transformation within the book’s narrative arc, music, and thinking. The book’s complete sequence cultivates a similar constancy when considering the relationship between text and reader. Is this a “form of prayer or arcane mathematics”? Harrison leaves readers to decide. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

In the alchemy of these darkly fluid poems, grief and solace meet. There is also the clash between isolation and the profound solitude encountered in the natural world. The result is an ongoing prayer for consolation, even if such prayer flies into the heavens without answer. Yet these predicaments leave us this absorbing book, an island in the sea of the human spirit, and a claim for the transcendent value of art.

Maurice Manning

It’s often snowing in these inconsolable poems of beautiful refusal . . . refusal to accept death, refusal to be silent in the face of ever-accumulating loss. Almost always, the poems unfurl using a line that feels continuous, like a sustained exhalation, making each poem an emotional river. While the poems have delicacy of image, they are relentless in their momentum. The gradual erosion and dispersal of our physical selves, our decomposition into the elements, these perpetual disappearances mortality insists on, are sung of here, along with the fact that spiritually and scientifically, all this leave-taking is also a form of fecundity. These are incantatory and hypnotic poems.

Amy Gerstler

The poems in Leslie Harrison’s The Book of Endings test for themselves Wallace Stevens’ assertion, “There is no wing like meaning.” Each poem takes up the challenge “to attempt meaning” in a world marked by loss, “to unfold the dead hawk’s wing and ask it about flight.” The reader first feels the musical delicacy of these lines—and then their ferocity. Part prayer, part protest, these poems both wish for and—necessarily—resist the desire to mend the world.

Jennifer Clarvoe