Lee Harwood's work defines the poetry of an era that saw poetry
itself at its most exciting, expansive and innovative. His
achievement runs through the very core of these qualities and has
enriched the possibilities of poetry through to the present. As a
leading British poet well known for his unique but flexible voice,
speaking in a variety of forms, from direct lyric to elaborate
fictions, from notebook poems to conceptual found texts, from
complex cut-ups to assembled fragments. A restless innovator across
the decades he delighted in working in such a multiplicity of forms
and with a disarming directness that appeared to escape whatever
poetic rules may have been favoured on occasion. His voice is by
turns gentle and erudite, erotic and funny, moving and even
faux-sentimental. Discussions of contemporary poetry are left
incomplete without recognition of his considerable achievements.
From his earliest pamphlet 'title illegible' (1965) to his last
collection 'The Orchid Boat' (2014), 'New Collected Poems'
assembles all the poems (and creative prose) Harwood published in
pamphlet or book form, in broadly chronological order, fashioned
upon the ordering of Harwood's own 2004 'Collected Poems'. Some
excised poems have been restored and fugitive texts that appeared
in an exclusive edition have been included. Brief uncollected
material from the end of his career completes this rich body of
work. 'This new collection is a generously considered gathering of
resistant and supple fragments, hard evidence of a life truly
lived. We are the beneficiaries of these dazzling transfusions of
personality and circumstance. Of remembered and newly encountered
detonations of affect. "The clarity of such moments," Harwood
confesses, can never stay still, even when that seems to be the
required task. Love moves and shifts. Through repeated acts of
making, it coheres and continues.' -Iain Sinclair 'Lee Harwood's
English is like American English in that it lacks a strong sense of
possession. At the same time it has a pearly, soft-focus quality
one rarely sees in American poetry [...] The "great" poetry I like
best has this elf-effacing, translucent quality. Self-effacing not
from modesty but because it is going somewhere and has no time to
consider itself.' -John Ashbery 'Harwood's work returns to local
habitations and names, the lives of family, elegies for friends, to
direct communication among intimates. These vividly rendered,
plain-style evocations, intercut with speculation and emotion,
construct improvised holding environments where the home world and
the safety of loved ones is primary' -Peter Robinson, Times
Literary Supplement
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