Jeffrey Harrison

“Absent one, how I miss you on this shore
that conjures you and fades . . . ”
—Eugenio Montale
A wall topped with shards of broken bottles
runs along the lane that winds up the hill
to this house above the Ligurian Sea
not far from where the great poet lived.
One of his lizards visits my balcony.
And that mysterious “you” of his,

during my time here, has become you.
I’ve looked for you among the lemon trees,
in waves flashing through canopies of pines,
in upper windows fluttering with sheets,
and on a small beach below rocky cliffs,
its gray stones crisscrossed with white lines.

And there I found these tiny, glinting beads
of colored glass hidden among the pebbles—
most in shades of green, but some amber
like drops of honey, and some between, the color
of your eyes, and two or three the pale blue
of inlets where foam has clouded the water.
from the bookBETWEEN LAKES / Four Way Books
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"I wrote this poem during a residency at the Bogliasco Foundation near Genoa, Italy. I was reading the poems of Eugenio Montale, who was from that area, and I was missing my wife, so it’s not surprising that I ended up with a Montale-influenced love poem. Details from Montale’s poems were all around me—lemon trees, lizards, etc.—as if superimposed on the landscape. He ends one of his poems with the image of a wall whose crest is imbedded with broken glass, whereas my poem starts with that image and ends with the colored beads of beach glass I became obsessed with while I was there, as though the poem itself, like the sea, had worn those jagged shards smooth."

Jeffrey Harrison on "Beach Glass"
30th Annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize

Enter the 30th Annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize from the Missouri Review. Winners in each category receive $5000, publication, promotion, and a virtual event to be determined. Submit one piece of fiction or nonfiction up to 8,500 words or up to 10 pages of poems. Enter online or by mail. All entries considered for publication. Deadline: October 15.
 
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"My work deals a lot with the passage of time, with memory and experience. Perhaps experience in even a Blakean sense....I'll publish an early version of a poem in a magazine, but I might totally change it by the time it's in a book. I like that experience because it helps me understand the poems to see them in print and see what I don't like about them." 

viaCOLUMBIA SCHOOL OF THE ARTS
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“Is there an objective world? One of the older, modern philosophical questions. Yes, well….yes and no, is my answer to that question and my poetry’s answer. Whatever objective world there may be, I have only limited access to it as it does to me. What is most real abides not in an independent, verifiable place outside myself nor somewhere hidden deep inside me; rather, what is most real grows in the meeting place."
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