Collected Poems

This volume brings together the four mature collections of a modern master: Someone Else’s Name (2003), Identity Theft (2008), Shakespeare’s Horse (2015), and Sometimes I Dream That I Am Not Walt Whitman (2020).

It is an eloquent, stirring, and peerless body of work, one which, to quote from the very first poem in Someone Else’s Name, has inscribed The signs of a single heart // That gave its love to art / And wore that on its sleeve.

Harrison’s art is worthy of comparison to the great art of the past but it is also startlingly reflective of the upheaval of the present. Few could have written poems so persuasively responsive to such a range of figures—from Shakespeare to Swinburne, from Whitman to Frost, from Victor Hugo to Charles Dickens—and no-one else could have written poems so wildly inventive on such a span of subjects—from internet identity theft to robotic volcanology, from military balloons to Afghan kite fighting, from Emily Dickinson’s zombies to the Mandaean demon Dinanukht (to name but a few).