The Orchid Boat

Overview

The Orchid Boat is a weave of stories: some personal, some historical, some real, some imaginary. Often these may co-exist in a poem just as they do in one's everyday mind, as a collage mirroring our own perception of the world. It is a mix that can include Alexandria or China or Brighton or North Wales. These interwoven stories insist on the acceptance of contradictions and complexity in people and in life; a recognition characteristic of Harwood's poetry and shaped by his acknowledged influences: Gide, de Montherlant and Cavafy, John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara. In Harwood's poems the richest material and tone is found in "the ordinary," and in The Orchid Boat this focus is thrown into even greater relief as he explores the power and weight of memories.

Reviews

"Harwood's poems are carried across many horizons by his lightness of touch . . . he zooms in and out, from the intimate and immediate to more distantly viewed landscapes and panoramas involving dream, memory, historical incident, all of which freely, and somehow effortlessly, intermingle." —August Kleinzahler, London Review of Books

"A gatherer of fragments, Harwood's writing is a mode of slow accretion, of building blocks of poetry (and prose), and presenting them in relationship with others, to allow them to resonate with one another." —Robert Sheppard, Stride Magazine

"The poems remain open and inviting – they evoke the private thoughts we often suppress, ignore, are ashamed of, or embarrassed by." —John Yau, hyperallergic.com

"By such moves the poetry is almost constantly held to a sense of intimacy, as if forming one half of a private conversation." —Peter Riley, fortnightlyreview.co.uk

Author Biography

Lee Harwood was born in 1939 and grew up in Surrey. He has spent the majority of the past 35 years living in Brighton. In a writing career that began in the early 1960s he has published over 20 volumes of poetry and prose, as well as translations of Tristan Tzara. His work has been widely anthologized and his Collected Poems appeared in 2004.