Elizabeth Robinson is a winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series.

Elizabeth Robinson is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her other books include In the Sequence of Falling Things, Bed of Lists, House Made of Silver, and Apostrophe. She won the National Poetry Series for Pure Descent, and was the winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series for Apprehend. She co-edits EtherDome Press, 26 Magazine, and Instance Press.

Praise for Harrow

"Linguistic and architectural construction join forces... to provide sites from which the poet investigates the place of the abstract in a world concretized on every front by those who inhabit it. Harrow is... luxuriant, present[ing] us with verse at its most salient."
--Beth Anderson, Poetry Project Newsletter

"...I wouldn't change a word of Harrow... Robinson's compressed style makes for astonishing effects. She works allusions and gemlike images together into poems that resemble the divine creatures in Ezekiel.... They're taut, ardent, precise poems."
--Catherine Wagner, Interim

"In ... Harrow, an exploration of the concept of faith in god(s) and goddesses plays out in carefully spun language that constantly gives one the sense of the divine hovering just beyond the page."
--David Hadbawnick, Electronic Poetry Review

"... Harrow... [is] like the work of Brancusi and Henry Moore--intense meditations on fundamental forms."
--Ken Rumble, Rain Taxi

"I could not admire it more."
--Paul Hoover

"Harrow is a beautiful book."
--Claudia Keelan

from Harrow (page 30)

Happenstance: Landscape

i.
Perfect arch
that tugs air and
ground into each other’s mouth.
No need to breathe now.    A memory
of that great river trained through the awning.

No permission for memory
but doubt and confidence
loiter.    Two winged creatures
make a spiral over the dead lawn.

Years later
grief can be molded
into a waxy figure, not enormous,
but able to bear weight.

A green hill, huge, I imagined
never existed.    Its arts overtook me
then I overturned it.    Exotic boat.
I could.    Who could hold something in
hand, torturing space.

ii.
You see the sails.    I want you
to see the masonry.    Removed
geography makes these hived
arches watertight.    You see
how precisely you will become
my equivalent.

Nothing decorative can remain,
but still the pleasure, the singing, even
flawed sounds.    Boom and clatter.

Something warm surges
around my shins.    Then, the ground rubbed
hard would yield.    Brazen.
I would not yield.
Debt’s tide
a seeming finality--the crown.