Description

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orca / in a sea blue room, / breathing pearls that rise to the surface —from Blue Pearl.

What does northness sound like? The music of Iceland, Greenland, the Svalbard archipelago. Songs of birds and ice and wind. In Lesley Harrison’s Blue Pearl, her first collection to appear in the United States, northern landscapes come alive through an intimacy of language that forms a collective sense of place through weather, history, local myths and customs, and childhood fairy tales. Dogs on the shale, eels in the current, a ship strains as it’s pulled up by a needle, a whaler unwinds the skin—Harrison’s poems voyage forth with visible breath, “as snow falls    as light is in paper.”

About the Author

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Lesley Harrison, born in Ayrshire, Scotland, has published six collections of poetry, including the poetry pamphlet Blue Pearl, published by New Directions. She has lived and worked in Istanbul, West Africa, Mongolia, and Orkney, on Scotland’s northern coastline. Harrison has held writing residencies in Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard, and the Harvard University Center for Hellenic Studies. She lives in the small fishing village of Auchmithie on the Angus coast of Scotland.