Everyone loves a circus, and Michael Harris’s first collection since his much-acclaimed Selected Poems [2002] offers readers the chance to run away and join a project of great originality and distinctiveness.
Stocked with colourful personalities who earn their living under the Big Top-from clowns to acrobats, tightrope walkers to lion tamers-Circus recreates the drama and mystique of the centre ring with enough peek-behind-the-curtain moments to ground this secret society in the nitty-gritty of marriage, parenthood, old age, and death. And, like a high-wire act in itself, Harris’s poems put on a show to be marveled over: carefully choreographed, death-defying, full tumble and daring.