Feeding the Fire: Poems

Feeding the Fire retains the virtue of Jeffrey Harrison's earlier work—accessibility and clarity, without sacrifice of complexity—while branching into new territory. There are love poems, lyrics entwined in metaphor, and a number of elegies for the "unfamous," those indelible characters met in any life who shape individual consciousness. Most significantly there are poems of recollection, in which the charged moments of youth, dimly understood at the time of occurrence, return to the poet in flashes of brilliant clarity and passages of intense reminiscence. These new poems affirm the restorative mystery of our own innocence and articulate our complex, stumbling passage toward experience.

"Harrison's language is exact, sinuous, and compelling, and leads to places we may not have seen before, but know when we arrive. This is a beautiful book."—Henry Taylor


"This is a book that can be read from start to finish with ever-heightened expectations that are never disappointed, and with sustained delight."—Anthony Hecht


"Here are hauntingly composed poems of remembrance, of happiness and eagerness and regret—of life lyrically embraced, all beautifully rendered by one of our finest poets."—Robert Coles


Jeffrey Harrison is the author of two previous books of poetry, The Singing Underneath, selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, and Signs of Arrival. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. He currently lives in Andover, Massachusetts.