'When J.S. Harry died in 2015 she was acknowledged as one of the great women poets of her generation. This commemorative volume gathers poems from all of her collections, as well as new poems written in the last years of her life.
'As the use of initials in her writing name suggests, J.S. Harry was a very private person. She was also gentle, kind, solicitous and endlessly curious – she would probe, enquire, pursue – everything seemed interesting to her. And she had another quality which was extraordinary, and which, along with her shyness and curiosity, is such a powerful presence in her poetry: this was her attentiveness to the life of the natural world and its creatures. Her poems typically take a quizzical stance, which holds a strange or complex moment up to scrutiny, and then pursues its implications. Her attention is caught by the smallest effects of nature and the delicate responses of animals – and also by the gestures and words of human beings, finely observed, with a sense of the mystery or menace they contain. The effect is often comic or surreal, but it can also be fierce, in its condemnation of oppression. It is enhanced by her mastery of the poetic line – the pause, the variation in length, the sudden shift in emphasis or perspective – and above all by her awareness of language.
'The poems included in New and Selected Poems were chosen by J.S. Harry herself, in collaboration with her long-time friend, the poet Nicolette Stasko.'(Publication summary)
'J.S. Harry was a member of the poetic generation that grew up in the shadow of World War II and did so much to change the poetic landscape as they tried to make sense of the postwar world. Murray was born in 1938, Tranter in 1943, Adamson in 1944 and Robert Gray in 1945. J.S. Harry was born in 1939. Although she made less noise than some of her contemporaries, she created an impact from the beginning of her career. Her first book, The Deer Under the Skin, was published in 1971, as part of an important UQP series under the direction of Roger McDonald, and was immediately praised. Also unlike some of her contemporaries, she knew how to do it from the start: whatever difficulty individual poems might have caused her—she was a careful and meticulous craftsperson—she never had to struggle to develop a style.' (Publication abstract)
'J.S. Harry and her lapin alter ego, Peter Henry Lepus, would assuredly have had ‘words to say’ about the war in Ukraine and its manufacture by a group of human beings. Peter, a Wittgensteinian, would have pondered hard the nature of the war ‘games’ that preceded use of arms: games in which each ‘move’ was a crafted piece of language and (dis)information, known as ‘intelligence’ or ‘diplomacy’, but where the ‘endgame’ and ‘stakes’ would involve the disposition of human flesh and blood. ‘The dead do not have a world ... / A human’s world is language: “logic” & “words”, Peter thinks’ (‘After the Fall of Baghdad’).' (Introduction)
'One of the really distinctive voices among those poets whose careers begin in the 1970s belongs to J.S. Harry. She shows no particular allegiances among the groups, anthologies and received influences (usually American) of that period, doing her own thing in her own way. This new, posthumous collection forms a kind of companion piece to Giramondo’s earlier Not Finding Wittgenstein – a gathering of her Peter Henry Lepus poems – and together the two provide an ideal introduction to an unusual and fascinating voice. In addition, this New and Selected has a valuable introduction by Nicolette Stasko which, although it provides little in the way of standard biographical information (dates, occupations, travels, correspondence, etc), does give a strong sense of what the author was actually like as a person (something lacking in the most scholarly of recent literary biographies, built out of months spent in a library among the subject’s papers).' (Introduction)
'One of the really distinctive voices among those poets whose careers begin in the 1970s belongs to J.S. Harry. She shows no particular allegiances among the groups, anthologies and received influences (usually American) of that period, doing her own thing in her own way. This new, posthumous collection forms a kind of companion piece to Giramondo’s earlier Not Finding Wittgenstein – a gathering of her Peter Henry Lepus poems – and together the two provide an ideal introduction to an unusual and fascinating voice. In addition, this New and Selected has a valuable introduction by Nicolette Stasko which, although it provides little in the way of standard biographical information (dates, occupations, travels, correspondence, etc), does give a strong sense of what the author was actually like as a person (something lacking in the most scholarly of recent literary biographies, built out of months spent in a library among the subject’s papers).' (Introduction)
'J.S. Harry and her lapin alter ego, Peter Henry Lepus, would assuredly have had ‘words to say’ about the war in Ukraine and its manufacture by a group of human beings. Peter, a Wittgensteinian, would have pondered hard the nature of the war ‘games’ that preceded use of arms: games in which each ‘move’ was a crafted piece of language and (dis)information, known as ‘intelligence’ or ‘diplomacy’, but where the ‘endgame’ and ‘stakes’ would involve the disposition of human flesh and blood. ‘The dead do not have a world ... / A human’s world is language: “logic” & “words”, Peter thinks’ (‘After the Fall of Baghdad’).' (Introduction)
'J.S. Harry was a member of the poetic generation that grew up in the shadow of World War II and did so much to change the poetic landscape as they tried to make sense of the postwar world. Murray was born in 1938, Tranter in 1943, Adamson in 1944 and Robert Gray in 1945. J.S. Harry was born in 1939. Although she made less noise than some of her contemporaries, she created an impact from the beginning of her career. Her first book, The Deer Under the Skin, was published in 1971, as part of an important UQP series under the direction of Roger McDonald, and was immediately praised. Also unlike some of her contemporaries, she knew how to do it from the start: whatever difficulty individual poems might have caused her—she was a careful and meticulous craftsperson—she never had to struggle to develop a style.' (Publication abstract)
