The Harry Poems

This collection of Michael Newell's Harry poems is something special and long overdue. It is a life-long project that, poem by poem, builds up a complex and distinct persona who endures life's trials and undergoes all sorts of moods. Newell expresses Harry's unique and trenchant sensibility in verses of many forms, in the precise and condensed diction of poetry. Taken together, they achieve the scope of a novel. Harry's sadness is more than cheerless, his bitterness beyondbiting, his joy the more jubilant for being hard-won and rare. The collection offers an advanced course in the awareness of the self and the world, lessons in consciousness that are sometimes harsh but unfailingly human and humane.