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Cassandra's Daughter
MICHAEL HARLOW
A new collection of poems by Michael Harlow, his first since Giotto's Elephant, a finalist in the New Zealand National Book Awards (1992), Cassandra's Daughter comprises a series of lyric poems and prose-poem texts: in which the 'persistent imaginal' goes in search of a language to articulate something of the curious and surreal strangeness of the everyday. Poems that through the micro-worlds of art, the circus, theatre, and dreams look around corners and behind the mirror to explore how it is we are so mysterious to ourselves and others; whose clarity is in the nature and manner of the questions asked, rather than in the easy answer given. Characteristic of the curve of Harlow's imagination, it is a poetry 'where the world becomes writing and language becomes the double of the world' (Octavio Paz).
'Poems packed with image and thought that stride boldly between the world as we know it and the world with its so-called civilised top layer scraped off. Love poems that are profound on several levels, and prose-poems as always splendid and authoritative' -- Elizabeth Smither
'Excellent. Such fine writing, such fine poems.' -- Brian Turner
from Cassandra's Daughter
Cassandra's Daughter
Cassy for short.
We're discussing the colour green
and shy. And how last night
in her dreamtime a wooden-horse
appeared. And look how the wind
puts shivers in the water, shaking
the keys in their locks.
Only five years old, she is
already in love with how
one word wants another
with astonishing ease.
Inside the alphabet now,
inside the lining of a word
she asks me as we sit
on the garden wall
under a plum-coloured sun: why
were you born at seven o'clock
that night? I was a morning baby
my mum says, the best kind.
I was born with my eyes open,
you see? Would you like to
hear me sing? I can almost dance ,
too. Would you? I can hear
that she knows, Priam's daughter,
all her years to heaven --
that every word was once
a poem, isn't it?
Conversation
Anything better than
nothing? did I hear you
say to the ceiling, dreaming
on those quiet constellations,
happy to be busy lighting up
the world: the Sisters Seven
and their long dancing affair
with the rain; those jug-eared
Twins trying to hold up the sky.
Is it true that you are waiting
for the mathematics of heaven
to put in a good word? to save
some part of a crazy conversation
gone missing? Well, my love,
let us be content then, to talk
about the way in which
we say nothing.
About the author
Michael Harlow was born in the United States in 1937 of a Greek father and American-Ukrainian mother. He travelled extensively in Europe and lived in several other countries before arriving in New Zealand in 1968.
He first published his poems in book form in New York (Poems, 1965), in Greece (Events, Greece, 1967-1974, 1974) and in England (The Book of Quiet, 1974) and he continues to publish poems in magazines in the United States, Australia, Greece and Britain as well as New Zealand. Collections he subsequently published in New Zealand reveal his cosmopolitan outlook and his familiarity with modern poetry and poetics of both America and Europe. His book Nothing But Switzerland and Lemonade (1980) was the first book of prose poems published in New Zealand. Other titles include Today Is the Piano's Birthday (1981), Vlaminck's Tie (1985) and Giotto's Elephant (1991), which was shortlisted in the 1992 national Book Awards.
Although known primarily for his poetry, he has also been an influential literary editor and has achieved success as a librettist and a screenplay writer. While in New Zealand in the 1960s he edited Frontiers, which was 'one of the harbingers of a general quickening of poetry in that period' (Peter Simpson, the Press). He was an editor of the Caxton Press poetry series in the 1980s and was for 10 years the poetry editor of literary magazine Landfall.
He co-wrote the script for a short film Heavy Traffic in the Dark (1991) and has collaborated as a librettist with composer Kit Powell, now living in Switzerland: Powell's scores appear in Harlow's collection Vlaminck's Tie; their pieces together include Texts for Composition, performed in Switzerland in German (1981); Nelson Songs (1986); Les Episodes, Conversation with Questions, commissioned by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra to celebrate its 40th anniversary, and The Tower of Babel, commissioned for the Kykart II Festival, St Petersburg (1995).
Michael Harlow held the Australia-New Zealand Literary Exchange Fellowship in 1991, has been awarded Literary Fund Bursaries in 1977 and 1990, the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship in Menton in 1986 and was the 2004 Randell Cottage Writer in Residence where he is finished a new book, Completing the Real. He won the Takahe poetry prize in 1998 and his poem 'Cremation Blues' was selected for Best New Zealand Poems 2002.
Michael Harlow usually lives in Alexandra and is a practising Jungian psychotherapist, another manifestation of his 'persistent engagement with the workings of the unconscious' that has been such an enduring theme of his poetry. His web page at the New Zealand electronic poetry centre was launched in April 2005 during the Fugacity 05 poetry symposium and he also has an author page at www.nzbookcouncil.org.nz.
March 2005, 240 x 170mm, 320p, paperback with flaps, colour and b+w illustrations, 1 86940 333 9, $49.99
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