Creature

by Jerry Harp

This collection engages with traditional forms and carries out various kinds of experimentation centering on the physical meaning of life. The poems confront issues of cognitive, spiritual and erotic experience, and address longing and desire in the material world. The Creature yearns for new language in which we can all more truly live.

Genres: Poetry

98 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Marcus · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Jerry Harp's inventive series, the speaker shifts vocal and tonal registers from poem to poem (often within the space of a poem) as abruptly as a clutch of starlings over the roof-lined horizon. Creature gives voice to the collective (un)conscious as it moves in and out of the nouminal world. In that Creature speaks for Everyone, these poems work to examine the interplay between the world as it is experienced, recalled and imagined.

What I like most about these poems is Harp's integrity as an experimental poet. His complex epistemological experiment never sacrifices clarity of language. Even when the clear lines waver, they are like light and wind over the water, the images distorted then shifted back just beneath the surface of our senses.