Feeding the Fire

Jeffrey Harrisons third collection, Feeding the Fire, sustains itself on the fuel of memory. In these new poems, the charged moments of youth, dimly understood at the time of occurrence, return to the poet in flashes of brilliant clarity and passages of transporting reminiscence. Its the transitions / Ive always loved, that sense of being / two places at once and in neither one, Harrison says in a poem that recaptures youthful exuberance. In other poems, a calmer, surreally precise rendering returns past scenes to their inchoate mystery. Harrison recreates the gravity, as well as the levity, of small events, finding words for both the ineffable and the embarrassing encounters of the pastinnocence seen through the eyes of experience. The result is provocative and intense. The poems make a kind of suspension bridge between our own amorphous younger selvesall perception and desireand the no less mysterious vantage of midlife.