Out of Silence, Poems by Pamela Harrison

Pamela Harrison’s unsentimental and unsparing portrait of her parents makes Out of Silence a compelling and memorable collection, one that redeems a rich story from silence.

Sample Poems by Pamela Harrison

“Half a century ago, with Life Studies, Robert Lowell offered American poetry a whole new climate of thought, a means to write about self, family history, and especially about the deaths of parents, that still sets an immensely high standard. In Out of Silence, Pamela Harrison tries with a keen ear and equally keen self-appraisal to meet that standard. Hers is an elegiac poetry of depth and heartbreak, of the struggle to, as one of her poems puts it, ‘[hear] again the world's pulse freed from loss.’ This is work that arises from necessity."—David Wojahn

“A young man pays for medical school by scrubbing toilets in buildings his father owned before losing everything in the Depression. A young woman from the plains studies nursing and yearns for a life of beauty and texture. What results when they meet is a love that is adventurous, prideful, destructive, and abiding. In her new collection, Out of Silence, Pamela Harrison goes down into the darkness of her parents’ love story and returns, not with a child’s pity or blame, but with poems that are frank, compassionate, tender and shocking. How rare and how moving to encounter Harrison’s clarity, acceptance and resolution. She’s the real thing.”—Barbara Dimmick

ISBN 978-1934999608, 92 pages

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