What does northness sound like? The music of Iceland, Greenland, the
Svalbard archipelago. Songs of birds and ice and wind. In Lesley
Harrison's Blue Pearl, her first collection to appear in the United
States, northern landscapes come alive through an intimacy of language
that forms a collective sense of place through weather, history, local
myths and customs, and childhood fairy tales. Dogs on the shale, eels in
the current, a ship strains as it's pulled up by a needle, a whaler
unwinds the skin--Harrison's poems voyage forth with visible breath, "as
snow falls as light is in paper."