Everyone loves a circus, and Michael Harris’s first collection since his much-acclaimed Selected Poems (2002) offers readers the chance to run away and join a project of great originality and distinctiveness.
Stocked with colourful personalities who earn their living under the Big Top—from clowns to acrobats, tightrope walkers to lion tamers—Circus recreates the drama and mystique of the centre ring with enough peek-behind-the-curtain moments to ground this secret society in the nitty-gritty of marriage, parenthood, old age, and death. And, like a high-wire act in itself, Harris’s poems put on a show to be marveled over: carefully choreographed, death-defying, full tumble and daring.