Terrain

Reviews / Votes

Praise for Jean Harrison's first collection, Junction Road:
Of the many poems in this strong collection my favourite is 'A look', about the custom of viewing the dead. There's not a word out of place. Read it carefully, read all the poems carefully. You will be rewarded.
Patricia Pogson

Jean Harrison is haunted by the past and by the natural world, which weaves through these poems like rivers, roots, wind - illuminating, questioning, processing. With 'total see-through clarity' ('Hilda'), her glancing eye casts new light in detail on everyday objects and events: 'a stillness with uncertain edges' ('Waking'). But she is not seduced by blether: her well-laced shoes are firmly planted in the soil of her adopted lands of Ghana and the Yorkshire Dales. Even when she writes of sadness and tragedy she is always borne up by an underlying sense of hope and resurrection.
Janet Fisher

Bursting with incisive wit, with a deft tenderness that defies sentimentality, as when her 'thoughts slip / through the walls to a friend / who struggles to hold on...' Jean Harrison invites the reader to become with her, 'porous to greens, black, pinks, reds that flame off walls'; to savour places that are 'desolate in a satisfactory way' and to finally, 'Go home / shut your eyes, remember the silence / of a day without wind.'

Terrain is a moving, sharply focussed, multi-layered treasure trove from an accomplished writer. -- Publisher: Cinnamon Press
 
Praise for Jean Harrison's first collection, Junction Road:
Of the many poems in this strong collection my favourite is 'A look', about the custom of viewing the dead. There's not a word out of place. Read it carefully, read all the poems carefully. You will be rewarded.
Patricia Pogson

Jean Harrison is haunted by the past and by the natural world, which weaves through these poems like rivers, roots, wind - illuminating, questioning, processing. With 'total see-through clarity' ('Hilda'), her glancing eye casts new light in detail on everyday objects and events: 'a stillness with uncertain edges' ('Waking'). But she is not seduced by blether: her well-laced shoes are firmly planted in the soil of her adopted lands of Ghana and the Yorkshire Dales. Even when she writes of sadness and tragedy she is always borne up by an underlying sense of hope and resurrection.
Janet Fisher

Bursting with incisive wit, with a deft tenderness that defies sentimentality, as when her 'thoughts slip / through the walls to a friend / who struggles to hold on...' Jean Harrison invites the reader to become with her, 'porous to greens, black, pinks, reds that flame off walls'; to savour places that are 'desolate in a satisfactory way' and to finally, 'Go home / shut your eyes, remember the silence / of a day without wind.'

Terrain is a moving, sharply focussed, multi-layered treasure trove from an accomplished writer. -- Publisher: Cinnamon Press