Incomplete Knowledge: Poems [Paperback]

Jeffrey Harrison (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 30, 2006

This collection consists at its core of a sequence of poems that speak to the loss of the writer's brother to suicide. These poems stun us by their restraint and simplicity, and by their astonishment that this life, so important to so many, could be extinguished in such a manner. Harrison's poems are impeccably crafted and move through narrative seamlessly--dry, naive, vulnerable, always accessible.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Determinedly affable, chatty and low-key even when his subjects are bleak, Harrison's fourth volume stakes almost everything on the winning tone that pushes his almost prose-like, free verse poems. Often that gamble succeeds: viewing Manhattan on New Year's Eve, 2000, Harrison (Feeding the Fire, 2001) muses, "I wish I could give you/ this pale blue city under the glass/ of a plane window like a snowglobe," the sweet wish barely ruffled by the specter of 9/11. "Fork" recalls a decadeslong revenge against a malevolent writing teacher; "To Kenneth Koch" elegizes a great one, while seasonal verse discusses baseball ("Sometimes this is all it takes, moving a pile/ of screened loam"). These lighter subjects lead up to weighty poems about the poet's brother's suicide and his grandmother's dementia, topics which together occupy perhaps a third of the volume, including the moving sequence "An Undertaking," which narrates the day-to-day aftermath of the brother's death. These memoirlike poems have the bizarre details real grief always includes (the brother had "Enough socks/ for several lifetimes"), along with the sadness no verbal talent can assuage. (Oct.)
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From Booklist

A scribbly abstract expressionist painting adorns Harrison's new collection, but don't judge the book by it. Harrison's poems aren't abstract; they are full of definite actions, clear thoughts, and real things. They aren't expressionist, either--never histrionic or formally eccentric. Their content comes out of Harrison's own reasonably average life, but they are never just about Harrison. He is always eager to communicate what experiences mean to him and, he hopes, to you, who could easily have had their like. Driving with a friend to see Vermeers in Washington, visiting another friend in New York who's become unemployably strange, and walking out to appreciate the world's abundance despite knowing next to nothing, it seems, about it are typical of the experiences Harrison shares. He also relives, in the sequence that makes up the second half of the book, a rarer occurrence: living on after--and, really, with--a suicide in the family. Like a fine playwright, Harrison brings us into his experiences so artfully that we feel their weight and their truth as ours. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 97 pages
• Publisher: Four Way (October 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1884800734
• ISBN-13: 978-1884800733
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #408,954 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended!, January 14, 2007

By 

D. G. Mcmillan "Grant McMillan" (Auckland, New Zealand) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Incomplete Knowledge: Poems (Paperback)

Jeffrey Harrison writes what appear to be effortlessly simple, straightforward poems about the most complex subject possible - ordinary life - but in them he offers the most profound insights into the lives of all of us.

He writes about friends, mentors and people who have all been part of his life. He writes seriously and with humour, but always with an insight into something more...

The poem entitled, "Incomplete Knowledge" is just a delight for anyone who feels overwhelmed by all the facts they could (should?) know but don't. And yet somehow this lack does not really seem to matter.

The poems in the second half of the book are about the death of his brother (by suicide) and of the resulting feelings of pain, grief and loss. There are resonances aplenty here for anyone who has lost someone close to them and wondered "why?"

I do not read a great deal of poetry but I would definitely reccomend this book.

Grant McMillan, Auckland, New Zealand

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jeffrey Harrison's Latest Book "Incomplete Knowledge"..., January 1, 2007

By 

WB (Ivoryton, CT USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Incomplete Knowledge: Poems (Paperback)

is a thought-provoking collection of poems in two parts. Part I contains poems of observation, humor, things-familiar, homage and reflection (some are amusingly devious). Part II is a partial recasting and continuation of Harrison's stunning chapbook entitled "An Undertaking"--a very personal journey through great tragedy.

As with Harrison's previous books, his poems are extremely accessible and make one stop and think about life and the influence that we have on one another and our circumstances (and coincidences). The two seemingly disparate parts of this fine book are brilliantly tied together by the first and last poems, "Incomplete Knowledge" and "The Names of Things".

5.0 out of 5 stars highly recommended, November 26, 2011

By 

N. Wong (HONG KONG, HONG KONG Hong Kong) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Incomplete Knowledge: Poems (Paperback)

Picture
It's been quite a long time since I read a collection of poems that touch me. Very often, there are books that publish quality poetry which demonstrates the poet's sense of craft and control of the work. We are amused by the juxtaposition of images and experimental language play. But what about the emotional connectedness? How close are we to the pieces in the book? Every now and then, I thank myself for buying a book (almost randomly) that moves me and I will stop after reading a few poems, not that they are not good, but that I do not wish to finish it too soon. This, in some ways, is almost like dating someone you really like. You are almost consciously reminding yourself of not to know him or her too thoroughly too early, as if knowing the whole would kill the purpose of falling in love.

I got to know Jeffrey Harrison's work in one of the recent issues of New Ohio Review. I was so impressed by the humour of the poet and the accessibility of the piece. Then I purchased the book online, trying to see what more he can offer. Incomplete Knowledge does not disappoint me, though the poems in it speak to me more emotionally than intellectually. The opening poem immediately questions what can be 'known' in this world and the inability to complete knowledge:

I am of those whose knwoledge will always be
incomplete, who know something about the world
but not a whole lot, who will forever confuse
steeplebush and meadowsweet
but know at leasdt by the shape of the flower
that it has to be one or the other.

Don't ask me the difference between
a pitch pine and a red, or even a Jeffrey,
though I know it's pine, not a spruce or tamarack
(a.k.a. hackmatack, but what's a larch?).
The differene between a sycamore
and a plane tree? It's beyond me.

While the first poem taps into inpossibility of knowing the world (and the fault of language which fails to provide the vocabulary for all sorts of existence), the last piece echoes the theme and brings readers back to this. In "The Names of Things", Harrison attempts to describe the exterior world with a number of less common nouns, trying to portray the world he sees through the precise use of language, with the hope that when we are reading it, we also know what sort of world is being written. The poet says "[it's] a pleasure to name things/ as long as one doesn't get/ hung up about it." This ironically illustrates the whole point of writing Incomplete Knowledge. Traumatized by the suicide of his elder brother, the poet attempts to explore the blurred boundary between the knowable and the unknowable. Whereas the poetic language accurately serves its purpose by capturing the world, it also wraps up the entire book in sorrow:

And I remember the hawk
in hawkweed, and that it's also
called devil's paintbrush, and how
lupines are named after wolves...
how like second thoughts the darker
world encroaches even on these
fields protected as a sanctuary,
something ulterior always
creeping in like seeds carried
in the excrement of these buoyant
goldfinches, whose yellow bodies
are as bright as joy itself,
but whose species name in Latin
means "sorrowful."

The sorrow of naming and recounting things is present in the second half of Incomplete Knowledge, which is a poetic sequence that deals with the poet's elder brother's unexpected suicide. It opens with "Saint" that speaks of the poet's urge to seek protection after the tragedy happens:

I find you where I found you years ago,
stone saint from 15th century France
whom I can count on always to be there
in this church-like corner of the museum.

Forgive me for not visiting in so long.
Now I want to tell you everything
that has happened to me since I last saw you,
but I can see by your deeply shadowed eyes

that you already know. I place myself directly
in your warm and comprehending gaze.
I want to lose myself in the thick folds
of your stone robe, in the ripples of your beard.

The smooth dome of your bald head
is the firmament of your compassion.
Put down your heavy book and lay your hand
gently on top of my head. Pray for me.

Then subsequent poems in this section slowly unfold the impact of the suicide on the poet and how much the poet wishes it had not happened. "An Undertaking" introduces how the poet gets to know the news over a phone call from his father: "and he (not wanting/ my mother to hear)// told me to guess/ I got it on my second guess// and he said 'unh-hunh'/ as if it was a normal conversation." "The Note" beautifully and painfully shows the poet's reaction upon reading his brother's death note:

I've had a really
good life. Thank you
to everyone who was
a part of it.

-- in his big, innocnent
unconnected letters.
Like a note saying
he'd gone out for a walk

and would never be back...
that shift in tense
from something ongoing
to something gone.

There are other moving pieces that describe how the poet cleans up the brother's house after the burial, how hard he tries to look for clues to rationalize the killing. The poet's brother is a fanatic of socks: "Starting with the tumulus/ on the floor beside his dresser,/ clean but not yet put away/ (now never to be put away),/ a cairn of soft rocks/ at least two feet hight,/ though many of them were not/ balled up into pairs/ but loose, or tied to their mates." He also wears a ring that used to belong to the brother as if it was a memento that reminds him of his existence. Note, however, the choice of objects in these two poems convey successfully two distinctive tactile images that speak powerfully on the embodiment of life and death, the dead and the living:

I'd like to believe the words that were spoken
at your memorial: that you are safe
in heaven. But we are here, heartbroken.
Even if there is an afterlife,
it's closed to the living, whatever our belief. ("Plea")

Some other pieces in the second section also mentions what the suicide means to other family members. For example, "Happiness" describes how the grandmother, due to her dementia (or madness?), is envied therefore unable to comprehend the loss in the family:

In a strange way she seems happy --
"happier than she's ever been," we say.
She used to get upset and cry so easily.

"Tell me who that nice-looking young man is,"
she asks about my other brother
for the fourth time. Each time we answer

as if for the first time, knowing it won't be the last,
and she no longer notices
her mistake, or gets embarrassed.

So it surprises us when she says, "Someone's missing."
We look at one another and at her,
and at our empty plates, the moment passing

swfitly into vacant wordlessness.
Is this what it takes to be happy, to live
in the present, as all the sages suggest?