Stereopticon by Pamela Harrison

Stereopticon is Pamela Harrison's first full-length collection. The cool elegance of her poems does not signify a detatchment from their subjects but instead a cold, probing eye into their deep interiors. As with the stereopticon of her book's title, no dimension of her poetic subjects escapes Harrison's intent gaze.

Sample Poems by Pamela Harrison

Pamela Harrison was named the PEN Northern New England Discovery Poet for 2002. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal.

"On the cards slipped into the old stereopticons were two separate images that were supposed to merge as you adjusted your eyes. Pamela Harrison infuses this metaphorical idea with the unique wisdom of her experiences in her rich collection of poems, Stereopticon. Stanza by stanza she shows us how each moment is alive with the past and the present, the cloaked and the revealed. The whole book shines with this blended magic, each poem worldly, yet fresh."--Molly Peacock

"Pamela Harrison's poetic landscape is as intimate as her own corner of Vermont and as exotic and alien as Uganda in the first year of Idi AminÍs brutal reign. The accuracy of her images, the sharpness of her senses, her acute and inclusive observation earn our confidence. Specifically and gravely, Ms. Harrison has rendered wide-ranging, profound experiences into poems that fulfill a need in her listeners. Though it be, inevitably, an act of faith, they feel themselves changed by her song."--Sydney Lea

"In Stereopticon, Pamela Harrison proves, as she says in one of her poems, that 'Some kinds of knowing change all the rules of sight'--for the knowledge revealed here in writing that is as economical as it is graceful, as unstintingly honest as it is imaginative--enriches and deepens the landscape of the inner life. So few of today's contemporary poets concern themselves with this shift in the ground of knowing, this epistemological function, and yet it is one of the supreme purposes of poetry. But, lest you think the writing here dry, let me say the poems sparkle and flare, and venture, as Yeats would have it, to the deep heart's core, quietly unfolding the passionate intensity that braids them tonally to an aesthetically-charged vision that is about as pure and crystalline as any one might encounter in this art."--Gray Jacobik

"There is nothing soft and blurry or merely decorative about the deeply etched, beautifully wrought poems in Pamela Harrison's Stereopticon. Here is a jeweler peering through her loupe at the hard edges and dazzlement of the daily. And she has a God's-eye-view."--Jack Myers

ISBN 193233923x, 92 pages

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