Subtle and sharply lyrical, these poems shimmer on the eye while being deeply held at the back of the mind. Martin Harrison has been described as a writer whose poetry is a meeting place between the immensity, and intensity, of the Australian environment and the hi-tech world of everyday life. Collected here is the poet's own re-casting of his work since the early 1990s, setting accomplished poems from earlier books in the company of recent poems and prose poems. Martin Harrison's Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems marks a place of arrival and a new departure.
Wild Bees is a volume laced with a complex sensuousness and moral keenness... This book like the bees of its title, collects essence and song, it's a great pleasure to read and a major work of art. -Robert Adamson
These are poems where the pleasure of earthly distance becomes a pact with the human trouble that everybody knows, delicately acknowledged in the reverberations of particulars. -Peter Riley
...a book of unusual beauty and of original insight. -Robert Gray
Utterly convincing places where ordinary happiness might reside. -Nigel Wheale, London Review of Books