The Kangaroo Farm (Shearsman Library) (2ND)

The Kangaroo Farm first appeared in Australia in 1997 and confirmed Martin Harrison's (1949-2014) reputation as one of Australia's finest poets. His poems of landscape and nature (and above all, Australian nature, in all its weird glory) offer the reader glimpses of an underlying meaning that mere tourism never can offer: "calm, intelligent, long-lined verse letters that engagingly bring us to a world where the 'sea-dusks are sea-dusks flowing far inland'", as Nigel Wheale pout it when reviewing the first edition for the London Review of Books. "Harrison should be read as substantial Australian poet. His poetry is something new, something that opens up what poetry can be." -Petra White, Cordite Poetry Review "This notion of work runs throughout Harrison's poetry. There is a sense that each poem is a hard-won moment of perception even while offering to the reader an enviable translucence, a clear vision of the world in its contingency and temporal flux. At the heart of these profound and ever-meticulously crafted poems, this long meditation into the mechanics of conception and perception, is the warmth and flesh of the complexity of life and being plainly spoken." -Michael Brennan