Disappearance is Lesley Harrison's first full-length collection, bringing together new work which examines the coastline and our uneasy, unresolved relationship with the waters that surround us. Around the northern North Sea rim, the coastal margin is constantly being made and unmade by vast weather systems and currents that begin thousands of miles away. Drawing from archives, folk myth and cultural memory, these poems make real our sense of living at the edge of an older, sub-polar world, and the ongoing human process of negotiation with, of giving meaning and scale to, this unstable and ultimately unknowable space.

Prizes

Short-listed for Michael Murphy Prize 2021

Lesley Harrison was born in Ayrshire, Scotland. She has lived and worked in Istanbul, West Africa, Mongolia, and in Orkney, on Scotland's northern coastline. Her poems have been published in Poetry Ireland Review, the Antigonish Review, Ice Floe, Magma, the Island Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry pamphlets include Ecstatics: a language of birds (Brae Editions, 2011), a collaboration with Orkney artist Laura Drever which won the 2012 National Library of Scotland pamphlet competition, and One Bird Flying (Mariscat, 2009), a response to the journals of Marco Polo. She has held writing residencies in Iceland, Greenland, and Svalbard. She now lives on Scotland's Angus coastline. Blue Pearl was her most recent publication, from New Directions, New York (2017).