Dear B

Jennifer Harrison

Before I review this interesting little book, a few words on idiots.

Some people have absolutely no idea how to treat a book. I'm not talking about your quotidian page-benders, spine-crackers, etc. No, I'm talking about buffoons like the bonehead who last owned my copy of Jennifer Harrison's collection Dear B. This book is a signed, hand- numbered copy (186 of 500, for the trivia mavens in the audience). You don't buy signed, hand-numbered copies of ANYTHING except as investments. So what does this prattling namby-pamby do? He WRITES in it. The margins of many pages are covered with critical remarks and the like. Worse, the whole title page is scrawled on. He only barely managed to miss writing over the signature and numbering! (Note: I'm assuming the previous owner was male from looking at his handwriting.)

I don't care if it's a signed and numbered edition of Dame Barbara Cartland's My Collected Crappiest Poetry. Someone will find value in it. You do not, ever, ever, ever mark up a signed, hand-numbered edition. Of anything. EVER.

Okay, now that that's out of my system, onto the book itself.

Jennifer Harrison's Dear B could well have ranked in my top 10 reads of the year. In fact, I was pretty sure that was going to be the case for the first twenty pages. Line after line of scintillating image, marred here and there by bad word choice or clunky diction, but still one of the finest treasure troves of pleasurable images I'd found in a very long time:

Shale heaps picked clean of opal chips.
Children pan for potch in an ocean of rubble.
Sprinklers create an oval of green
for the dogs. And the sun drinks colour from fences.
(“Lightning Ridge”)

Who cares that most Americans will have no earthly idea what “potch” is? It sounds glorious. The whole scene comes together in the finest of ways, everything's grand, and all (at least as far as the construction of the poetry goes) is right with the world.

Somewhere along the way, something happens to this book, and some of the poems start losing direction. I'm not terribly sure why this is, but it seems as if a few towards the end are more hastily constructed, with not as much attention to either detail or sound as the earlier works in the book:

I'm a woman who wears her jaguar tooth
sealed in silver, I tumble over rocks.
I live underground. Mountains of the Moon.
(“Mountains of the Moon”)

Ghosts of the image selection and sense of sound from ”Lightning Ridge” are still here, but they are only ghosts; nothing substantial builds from them because they're too shaky. And the rhythm, structure, and diction die slow, painful deaths in that last line.

The early poems make this worth seeking out, and the long poem (“Casino”) that ends the book almost reaches those heights, but be prepared for something of a rollercoaster ride.