Creative Conversations: Lesley Harrison
Poet Lesley Harrison in Conversation (Collaboration with UPenn Modern Poetry)
CreativeConversations
Date: Monday 09 October 2023
Time: 13:00 - 14:00
Venue: Memorial Chapel
Category: Public lectures
Speaker: Lesley Harrison
Lesley Harrison was born in Ayrshire, Scotland. She has lived and worked in Istanbul, West Africa, Mongolia, and in Orkney, on Scotland’s northern coastline. Her poems have been published in Poetry Ireland Review, the Antigonish Review, Ice Floe, Magma, the Island Review, and other places. Her poetry pamphlets include Ecstatics: a language of birds (Brae Editions, 2011), a collaboration with Orkney artist Laura Drever, and One Bird Flying (Mariscat, 2009), a response to the journals of Marco Polo. She has held writing residencies in Iceland, Greenland, and Svalbard. She now lives on Scotland's Angus coastline. Blue Pearl was published in 2017 and Disappearance in 2020.
Kitchen Music is her most recent collection. Lesley Harrison looks North to the sea, with the heat of the land at her back. In her striking inventive arrangements of sound and page, Harrison bring us meditations on whale hunts and lost children, on cities seen and remembered, and the sound of the gamelan in the Gulf of Bothnia. A poetry which negotiates, line by line and page by page, with white space and silence, Kitchen Music plunges deep through the strata of language where "weather is body" and an Iceland poppy is "as delicate as birch." Drawing on folktales, she threads together images of family and gender, 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.