| JEREMY HARMAN (Canada/Ireland)
Dublin-born Jeremy Harman spent his childhood in Madison, Wisconsin, returning at the age of 11 to Ireland where he attended Clongowes Wood College, Clane, Co. Kildare and then studied medicine at University College Dublin. After graduate work in molecular biology at McGill University in Canada, he worked for a time in a cottage hospital in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland. From there he moved to Toronto where he completed a residency in psychiatry, a field in which he has since worked for thirty years, mostly with children and adolescents. He is also a qualified psychoanalyst.
Harman’s poems and translations have appeared in Canada, Ireland, Australia and the United States. Interested in the visual world captured through the lens, his photographs often reveal a correspondence to his poems.
Most recently, “Too Soon” and “Words Without Sound” were long listed for The Bridport Prize (England, 2006), his entry was awarded Highly Commended status of the START Chapbook Competition (South Tipperary Arts Centre, Ireland, 2006), and he is currently working on a second collection of poems.
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“Jeremy Harman’s debut collection, Echoes of Shadow, is extraordinarily moving and extremely accomplished stylistically. The predominant mode works with issues of deep insubstantiality, memory, meditation, presence, and the need to bear witness to the ways that our lives and the lives of others enter into being and slip through and beyond it again. What is required is not esoteric knowledge or huge abilities to decode metaphoric structures, but rather to attend to each poem as it unfolds with something of the same patience and contemplative quietness inherent within each poem.”
Ann Dooley (Canada/Ireland)
“These are gentle poems within which is considerable strength. What impresses me most is their restraint, a restraint so taut sometimes one thinks of it as a meniscus over a depth we can only guess at. The not-said is powerful here. Harman’s spare and simple images have the quality of a fine lace-work made of iron, that one peers through toward a loss so deep it is hard not to see it as elemental and communal, and close to the source of poetry itself.”
David Brooks (Australia)
“Throughout this deeply accomplished, deeply significant collection, Jeremy Harman offers us a profoundly satisfying conversancy between the movements of nature and those of poetry. Illuminating our losses and holding us, the poems in Echoes of Shadow are poems to hold onto."
John Reibetanz (Canada) |
