Into Daylight: Poems (Dorset Prize)
"This book gets better each time I read it. Harrison is very skillful in a way that's almost passed out of existence: only a handful of writers can do what he does in handling the line and understanding how syntax and line work together employing the plain style with great virtuosity."Tom Sleigh"The book is called Into Daylight, and the title is wonderfully right. Jeffrey Harrison brings what he sees and experiences into the light of what they are: the look of a flower, or a rabbit that John Clare might also have seen, or the subtle blooming of a witch hazel branch, but also a death -- the remembrance of a death, the death of a brother -- and a childhood game of sliding down a banister telling its delight and foretelling of things to come. There's darkness in the light of these singularly intelligent and moving poems, written in perfectly managed lines, in a measured verse that never loses its  poise. The human being speaking these lines is one whose speech is wonderfully worth knowing, quietly and vividly observant and sympathetic in judgment of things seen in the daylight of their beauty and their vulnerability."-- David Ferry, author ofBewilderment: New Poems and Translations, winner of the National Book Award "Naturalness is the quality I most admire in Jeffrey Harrison's restrained and deeply affecting poetry. It's a quality achieved through great art, the eliminating of everything superfluous, easy, or artificial. What remains is utterly convincing, flawlessly right."-- Jonathan Galassi--Advance Praise