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What to Make of It, Poems by Pamela Harrison
What to Make of It is
a tour through personal and external history, tracing the
development of a relationship against the backdrop of the later 20th
century. Pamela Harrison’s powerful poems give narrative and lyric
voice to larger forces, tracing how they intertwine through individual
lives.
Sample Poems by Pamela Harrison
“This collection gives voice in haunting, acute language
to the wages of experience. The tones run a great gamut—from ruefulness
to awe to misery to loving joy—but they are all convincing. Quite
literally this is a book that covers the planet as it imaginatively
records the narrator’s coming and going in diverse societies and
climes. Pamela Harrison braids hard outcomes and beautiful moments, the
nonchalance of the natural world and the yearning of the human one.
These poems do not moralize yet they offer genuine, at times profound,
lessons from a thoroughly lived life.”—Baron Wormser
“In What to Make of It, Pamela
Harrison travels with her doctor husband from Canada’s arctic to
Central America, and to points far east and west between, as they do
what she is too modest to name good works. (How refreshing in our
time!) The collection—whose extraordinary formal suppleness matches its
spiritual—shows this affecting author’s genuine maturity: like us all,
she’s tempted on one hand by ‘A Dream of Eden’ and on the other
occasionally discouraged by the world’s rawness. Harrison’s poems see
life steadily and whole, including the moving and evolving relationship
between this admirable wife and her admirable spouse. The title of the
final, wonderful poem might perfectly fit the book’s themes at large:
‘Love’s inventory.’”—Sydney Lea
“Lusciously descriptive and unerringly musical, Pamela Harrison’s book, What to Make of It, plumbs the depths of how beauty and suffering, fecundity and frailty, the exotic and the intimate, conspire to illuminate nature and culture and our own bruised and bruising human part in their complexities. These poems dive deep, again and again deeper, to express longing for a better world.”—Barbara Ras
ISBN 978-1936370900, 88 pages