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Subtle and sharply lyrical, these poems shimmer on the eye while being deeply held at the back of the mind. Martin Harrison has been described as a writer whose poetry is a meeting place between the immensity, and intensity, of the Australian environment and the hi-tech world of everyday life. Collected here is the poet's own re-casting of his work since the early 1990s, setting accomplished poems from earlier books in the company of recent poems and prose poems. Martin Harrison's Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems marks a place of arrival and a new departure.
Wild Bees is a volume laced with a complex sensuousness and moral keenness... This book like the bees of its title, collects essence and song, it's a great pleasure to read and a major work of art. -Robert Adamson
These are poems where the pleasure of earthly distance becomes a pact with the human trouble that everybody knows, delicately acknowledged in the reverberations of particulars. -Peter Riley
...a book of unusual beauty and of original insight. -Robert Gray
Utterly convincing places where ordinary happiness might reside. -Nigel Wheale, London Review of Books
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Born and educated in England, Martin Harrison (1949-2014) emigrated to Australia in the late 1970s after a period living in New Zealand. He had already published a slim collection with Ferry Press, and further chapbooks with Hawk Press in New Zealand. His first full-scale poetry collection, The Distribution of Voice (University of Queensland Press), was published in 1993. Throughout the 1980s Harrison worked as a literary journalist and reviewer, as well as a producer for ABC Radio.
The first edition of The Kangaroo Farm (Paper Bark Press, 1997) was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Award, and the follow-up, Summer (Paper Bark Press, 2001), won the Wesley Michel Wright Prize in Poetry from the University of Melbourne. His new and selected poems, Wild Bees, was published by the University of Western Australia Press in Perth, and by Shearsman Books in the UK in 2008. The Australian edition was shortlisted for two major Australian prizes. UWA went on to publish his posthumous collection, Happiness, in 2015. Martin Harrison also wrote essays on Australian literature, some of which were collected in Who Wants to Create Australia? (Halstead Press), a volume which was a Times Literary Supplement book of the year selection for 2004.
