Kitchen Music

The Scottish poet Lesley Harrison writes with timeless phrases and a spare language of “bright morning air,” of “sound / like the sea inside a shell,” of “chill early March breezes,” of a “privacy […] / deep and complete,” of “a dream of music // almost inaudible, more thought than sung.” Noun-heavy lists sketch the mythical seascapes of northern Europe, while copious epigraphs from TV documentaries, art exhibitions, and reference works gesture to the author’s inspirations; maps, drawings, and landscape photographs decorate some pages. In her introduction, fiction writer Kirsty Gunn remarks on how “the voice we’re hearing is unsettled, tilted, restless. As though… as though… it does not belong. And yet how this poetry does belong!”

The poems evoke a color palette of slate, sea glass, and silvered green, and float in a soft-focus reverie: “the story is told / of an island / invisible in rain or sunlight […] like a boat, far out / weightless and emptied.” One exception comes in the long poem “Hailuoto,” which mentions “a / forgotten war in a small, hot country / a market a mosque gouged out all limbs and bloody bandages”—a striking contrast to the piece’s naturalist bent.

The final poem, “Hansel and Gretel in Photos,” adds a tonic sharpness, with an eeriness that galvanizes Harrison’s language. The fairy tale is storyboarded in ekphrastic takes, as if viewed through oddly angled surveillance cameras:

this photograph was shot from below.
she poses, towering like a goddess.
the sky is bare, almost absent.
her blouse is emitting its own light.
a tree holds the clouds quite still.

The tension builds:

she waits on the sofa for us coming,
turning live coals in the grate
telling and retelling the future.
her eyes are blank as pebbles.