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The Seasons of Wilson Harris

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Citation

Robinson G (2022) The Seasons of Wilson Harris. The Poetry Review. 2022, pp. 50-57. https://poetrysociety.org.uk/publications/vol-112-no-2-summer-2022/

Abstract
First paragraph: It took Wilson Harris two poetry pamphlets, a self-published poetry collection, numerous essays, an unperformed play, and at least three discarded novels before he felt he had found his creative voice. Working as a surveyor in Guyana (then British Guiana) in the 1940s and 1950s, his route to becoming a writer was not obvious. When he died four years ago at the age of 96, his name had become synonymous with a visionary artistry that is dazzlingly, even bewilderingly, crosscultural. His twenty-four novels (all published by Faber from 1960 to 2006) pose an extended challenge to the limits of narrative realism and, as he would put it in the essay ¡®The Writer and Society¡¯, are an attempt to write fiction as a ¡®drama of consciousness shared by animate/inanimate features¡¯. Starting with Palace of the Peacock, Harris, whose centenary was observed last year, honed a genre-defying language that experiments with myths and histories to reveal how ¡®apparently eclipsed voices and cultures¡¯ can re-emerge with renewed relevance for the past, present and future.

Keywords
Wilson Harris, Poetry, Guyana, Caribbean, Ecopoetry

StatusPublished
Publication date31/12/2022
Publication date online31/12/2022
PublisherThe Poetry Society
Publisher URL
Place of publicationLondon

People (1)

Dr Gemma Robinson

Dr Gemma Robinson

Senior Lecturer, English Studies