THE GANG OF ONE – SELECTED POEMS by Robert Harris

Grand Parade Poets are pleased to be publishing THE GANG OF ONE - THE SELECTED POEMS of Robert Harris, edited by Judith Beveridge with an introduction by Philip Mead. Though well represented in anthologies, Harris (1951-1993) is a major writer who has until now missed out on the Selected Poems milestone. Unaligned with any ‘faction’, though a close friend to many in the poetry/literary community, Harris is a very fine poet with this for an important hallmark: the variety of his subject matter and inspiration. Consider this for starters: you turn the page from a suite of poems fired by the World War 2 sinking of HMAS Sydney and then you are in Tudor England, with all the plots and counter-plots surrounding Lady Jane Grey, the ‘nine day queen’ and martyr. And beyond even the variety there are two things which truly anchor the Harris opus: his commitment to writing of and about Australia (though never to the exclusion of others, nor in any phoney nationalist manner) and his Christian faith, which probably was his poetry’s bedrock. Here is a volume of verse both gritty and humane, by a decided ‘one off’. Both his memory and Australian literature deserve it.