"The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems"
from Jeffrey Harrison's
The Names of Things

Jeffrey Harrison:

Jeffrey Harrison is the author of four books of poetry, The Singing Underneath (1988), selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, Signs of Arrival (1996), Feeding the Fire (2001), and Incomplete Knowledge, forthcoming in October 2006 from Four Way Books (New York). His chapbook An Undertaking was published in 2005. 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, Phillips Academy, 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.

The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems

Praise for the poetry of Jeffrey Harrison

"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

"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... 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

"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

"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."
— Henry Taylor

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