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Showing posts from November 3, 2019

The Gang of One : Selected Poems, by Robert Harris

The Gang of One : Selected Poems, by Robert Harris (Grand Parade Poets, 2019) Reviewed by Philip Harvey and published in The Melbourne Anglican, November 2019 Those of us who attended the memorial for Robert Harris at Holy Trinity, Balaclava in 1993 recalled the life of a hard-working man, both in terms of manual jobs and his first vocation as poet. He was only in his early forties: “Go home and suffer employment, write. / There are so many greys you cannot fight.” Anglicanism in its many forms is an unintended running theme of this book, as we follow chronologically Harris’s evolution as a questioner after experience, through charismatic encounters, to gradual conversion steeped in Scripture and sacrament. He called his discovery of church a homecoming. Many readers of these pages will recognize well the places he’s gone. He takes to task the lazy and dismissive attitudes to religion he finds pervading our society. Harris engages in extended argument with Austra