Martin Harrison

Martin Harrison Contents page

Martin Harrison started publishing poems in London in the mid-70s. Living for three years in New Zealand, he settled in Sydney in 1978. He has been a leading ABC radio producer and broadcaster associated equally with drama, poetry and criticism on radio and with the promotion of innovative forms of sound-feature and sound-work. He has written widely as a reviewer and critic, mainly on contemporary Australian literature. He currently teaches writing, poetry and sound studies at the University of Technology in Sydney. He has been a visiting writer at San Diego State University, at the writers’ and artists’ colony Yaddo and was recipient of the B.R.Whiting Library residency in Rome in 1995. He was awarded an Australia Council Established Writers Fellowship 2003-2004 and won the Wesley Michel Wright prize for poetry in 2002. His collections of poems include The Distribution of Voice (University of Queensland Press 1993), The Kangaroo Farm (Paper Bark Press 1997), Summer (Paper Bark Press 2001) and Music (Vagabond Press 2005). A collection of essays mainly about contemporary poetry, Who Wants to Create Australia (Halstead 2004), was selected as one of the Times Literary Supplement’s “International Books of the Year” for 2004.
    His work has been praised for its lyrical and metaphorical richness of vision as well as for the essayistic, many-sided nature of some his longer poems. Reviewers comment on how his poems are located in intense, momentary experiences and yet are often interwoven with an upfront sense of a world of technology, media and electronic information. He has been described as a writer whose poetry is both a meditation and a meeting place between the immensity of Australian environment and the hi-tech urbane world of everyday Western life — whether travelling, weekending or just watching TV.

Some of what the critics have already said about Martin Harrison’s poetry:

“Harrison is concerned with the ‘magic’ of poetic sight and sound; with our everyday perception being stretched almost to the point of non-perception.”

                    — David McCooey, Australian Book Review

“Harrison re-creates ‘livable’ locales in his poems, utterly convincing places where ordinary happiness might reside.”

                    — Nigel Wheale, London Review of Books

In (Harrison’s) disentangling the strands of contemporary sensory experience it can become apparent that there is a genuine and mysterious encounter to be had with presence, something akin to a religious sense of depth.”

                    — John Mateer, Heat

“...These are the materials of poetry itself.”

                    — Oliver Dennis, Times Literary Supplement

“Like Elizabeth Bishop, Harrison knows that eventually the extraordinary is likely to become manifest, and describable.”

                    — Peter Rose, Sydney Morning Herald

Books published

Music: Poems and Prose, Vagabond Press, Newtown, NSW, 2005

Who Wants to Create Australia: Essays on Poetry and Ideas in Contemporary Australia, Halstead Press, Sydney 2004

Summer — Paper Bark Press, Sydney, 2001

The Kangaroo Farm — Paper Bark Press, Brooklyn, NSW 1997

The Distribution of Voice: Poems — University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland 1993

1975: Poems — Limited Edition, Ferry Press, London, 1980

Truce: Poems — Limited Letterpress Edition, Alan Loney’s Hawk Press, Wellington, New Zealand, 1979

Leisure: Poems — Limited Edition, illustr. Denise Riley, Great Works, London 1978

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