Poems: 1990-2003

Author: Harriet Tarlo

Publisher: Shearsman Books (2004)

This volume of poems spans over a decade of writing and includes all of the author's short poems and shorter sequences considered worthy of collection. It is a book in three parts, each section following a roughly chronological trajectory from 1990–2003. Read in order, the three sections overlap in time and space, while allowing the reader to follow the development of the writing. The first two parts of the book include short poems, most under a page in length, and cover two discrete areas of writing. 'Writing outside' consists of short poems engaged with language and landscape, while 'Voices' brings other perspectives into the work and is concerned with speech patterns and sounds. The third section of the book shows the poet's development of the sequence form in which shorter units of writing are strung together, allowing for longer patterns of sound and language. The latter two sections incorporate found or "heard" fragments of speech, indicated by the use of italics.