Kitchen Music

In her first Carcanet collection, Lesley Harrison looks north to the sea, the heat of the land at her back. In inventive arrangements of sound and page, Harrison meditates on whale hunts, lost children, cities seen and remembered, and the sound of the gamelan in the Gulf of Bothnia.

Reviews of Kitchen Music

'A book of poems, a book of voices. A book that is also a map, an almanac, a report – of histories, of stories, of lands and waters. A book of poems made and arranged in such a way as to create harbours and enclosures: the contained order of narrative brought to a wild scattering of events; a careful arrangement of whale bones on a gallery floor to tell the tale of that great singing creature now stilled to silence.' –Kirsty Gunn

'This is a book of precise and uncompromisingly beautiful writing about northern place: Orkney, Iceland, far seas of the imagination. A few words, brilliant and disquieting in choice and cadence, transport the reader to distant islands and their weather. As you read, you are alone in a remote stone house at nightfall, with the wind rising from the sea below the windows.' –Peter Davidson

'A great poem consists of alternate measures of words and silence; and in the greatest work the silence is as important as the words to which it gave birth. Lesley Harrison is a writer of consistent brilliance, who with just a handful of words can conjure song from silence. These are warnings, elegies and celebrations… Kitchen Music is a meticulously crafted Northern Hymnal – a brilliantly conceived orison to the flora and fauna of the higher latitudes. This collection is essential reading for anyone keen to understand why poetry remains a unique force for change on this planet.' –John Glenday