120 pp, ISBN 10: 1-904130-20-8,  ISBN 13: 978-1904130-20-8, £9.95 (paperback only),  
Publication, June 22nd 2006

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A note about The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems Selected from two decades of work, this volume gathers poems from Jeffrey Harrison's three books published in the United States and also includes a section of more recent poems. Since James Merrill chose his first book for the National Poetry Series in 1987, Harrison has been writing poems whose verbal precision and lyricism allow clarity and mystery to co-exist. Those early poems displayed an attentive affection for the natural world which has not diminished, but since then Harrison has increasingly explored the complexities of the human realm. Attuned to both the lyric and narrative impulses, Harrison possesses a gift for fresh description, a way with metaphors that are both understated and slyly complex, and an ability to tell a story that is at once inevitable and surprising in the turns it takes. These well-made poems range from the celebratory to the grief-stricken, chronicling our difficult, recurring passage from innocence to experience.

A note on Jeffrey Harrison 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. To visit the poet's own website, please click on thelink below: http://home.comcast.net/~jeffrey.harrison/index.htm

Praise for the poetry of Jeffrey Harrison "Harrison ... writes so musically that ordinary occurrences take on the tones and luster of extraordinary art." – Booklist "Here are hauntingly composed poems of remembrance, of happiness and eagerness and regret – of life lyrically embraced, all beautifully rendered by one of our finest poets." – Robert Coles "This is a book that can be read from start to finish with ever-heightened 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 "I take enormous pleasure in Jeffrey Harrison's descriptive acuity and verbal precision, his nourishing exactitudes. Here is a poet who is always arriving, travelling far and wide to see the world anew, freshening its perceptions, deepening its memories, welcoming its mysteries." – Edward Hirsch "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 "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 "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'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 ever being pretentious? He's an artist." Philip Levine, Ploughshares The Singing Underneath is a remarkable and refreshing first book of poems – as though the landscapes of Fairfield Porter, the quiet wisdom of Elizabeth Bishop, and the indomitable good humor of Guillaume Apollinaire had all found their way inside one unspoiled imagination. This is not a young poet trying 'to find a voice,' this is a poet who – in the rarest sense – was born with one." – Sherod Santos "Jeffrey Harison has a rage for coherence, and each poem resolutely faces issues of landscape, family, and representation." – David Shapiro "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

Reviews of The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems Booklist, November 15th 2006 "Harrison has always been gifted at communicating the significance of his experiences and observations, both ordinary and special. In this he recalls Robert Frost, and like Frost's, his poems expand in meaning as they are read, reread, and closely considered. Like Frost, Harrison is a traveler, but whereas Frost in his poems roams close to home, Harrison jaunts far afield as well as around the neighborhood, speculatively as well as bodily (see 'Brief History of an Atlas' and the two poems adverting to Arabian explorer Alexander Kinglake). His language is chaste and precise, he is formally modest, and he is as natural a poet as any writing in America." – Ray Olson PN Review, Summer 2007 "It has taken a while for Jeffrey Harrison's poetry to reach this country ... He is a civilised, understated poet who from volume to volume has refined the characteristic American parlando to his own private purposes ... [He] writes of the personal without being ostentatiously confessional, finding his subjects in items of daily life, memories of childhood and youth, or his wife and children ... Jeffrey Harrison is now a poet of substance, and, in a period when it can take an effort to recall the best that America can offer, his gentle firmness and independence of spirit are worth more than whole libraries of noisier writing." – Michael Hulse

From The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems The Names of Things Just after breakfast and still waking up, I take the path cut through the meadow, my mind caught in some rudimentary stage, the stems of timothy bending inward with the weight of a single drop of condensed fog clinging to each of their fuzzy heads that brush wetly against my jeans. Out on a rise, the lupines stand like a choir singing their purples, pinks and whites to the buttercups spread thickly through the grasses – and to the sparser daisies, orange hawkweed, pink and white clover, purple vetch, butter-and-eggs. It’s a pleasure to name things as long as one doesn’t get hung up about it. A pleasure, too, to pick up the dirt road and listen to my sneakers soaked with dew scrunching on the damp pinkish sand – that must be feldspar, an element of granite, I remember from fifth grade. I don’t know what this black salamander with yellow spots is called – I want to say yellow- spotted salamander, as if names innocently sprang from things themselves. Purple columbines nod in a ditch, escapees from someone’s garden. It isn’t until I’m on my way back that they remind me of the school shootings in Colorado, the association clinging to the spurs of their delicate, complex blooms. And I remember the hawk in hawkweed, and that it’s also called devil’s paintbrush, and how lupines are named after wolves. . . how like second thoughts the darker world encroaches even on these fields protected as a sanctuary, something ulterior always creeping in like seeds carried in the excrement of these buoyant goldfinches, whose yellow bodies are as bright as joy itself, but whose species name in Latin means “sorrowful.” Gift for James Merrill, in memory This helix of wheat has hung by a thread from the windowframe for years now, almost weightless, spinning sometimes when a breeze comes through the screen. A token of fertility, you brought it back from the Peloponnese and passed it on to me because, seeing it among the oddments on your mantelpiece, I marveled at its ingenuity – also, I think, because it answered my wish for a child. The sun, some mornings, plays on your gift, turning it into a spiral cage of light; other times it hangs in shadow and takes on the weight of your death – and yet the thread still holds. These months I’ve felt the pull of this wheatstalk whorl again and again and, thinking of you, looked up to see it suspended there between two worlds, in the changing light. ©