cover image of the book Kitchen Music

You cannot help thinking that this is what all poetry should do—find the truth in things, not beneath them—and how it should be produced: sensitively and with love.

Andrew McCulloch, TLS

A cosmology of place written in the songs of whales and birds, folktales, city streets, and the glass-green sea

Kitchen Music

Poetryby Lesley Harrison

With a contribution by Kirsty Gunn

and the end of the street / is the limit of the world / where the ocean retreats and retreats

In her first book-length collection of poems to appear in the US, Lesley Harrison looks north to the sea, with the heat of the land at her back, to bring us meditations on whale hunts and lost children, Manhattan sky towers, and the sound of the gamelan in the Gulf of Bothnia. A poetry of spareness in multilayered depths, of textural silence and aural place, Kitchen Music plunges deep through the strata of language where “weather is body” and an Iceland poppy is “as delicate as birch.” In poems and sequences of poems, Harrison spins folktales into threads of family and gender, engages with the work of the artists Roni Horn and Marina Rees, transcribes John Cage and Johannes Kepler into song and litany, pens a hymnal of bees, and turns to storms, glaciers, and the lapwing life in a field of young barley. As the novelist Kirsty Gunn writes in the foreword, Harrison has “taken up the old white whale of the fixed and masculine narratives and made of its seas and weathers her own Moby Dick, a female poetry ‘in praises / repeated, repeating.’”

Paperback(published May 2, 2023)

ISBN
9780811235037
Price US
18.95
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
96

You cannot help thinking that this is what all poetry should do—find the truth in things, not beneath them—and how it should be produced: sensitively and with love.

Andrew McCulloch, TLS

It is full of whalebones and wind and melting ice, and it left me breathless.

Nina Powles, Poetry