J.S. Harry

J.S. Harry Poems

J.S. Harry Biography

J. S. Harry (or Jan Harry; born 1939) is a contemporary Australian poet who has been described as “one of Australian poetry’s keenest satirists, political and social commentators, and perhaps its most ethical agent and antagonist.” J. S. Harry was born in South Australia, but soon moved to Sydney where she has remained. She has worked as an editor for Radio National and has held a residency at Australian National University. A recurrent character in her work is Peter Henry Lepus, a rabbit who name-drops philosophers such as Bertrand Russel, Ludwig Wittgenstein and A. J. Ayer while popping up in the midst of topical events such as the Gulf War. His satirical “clear-eyed vision of the world, and the humans that inhabit it, is that of an Everyrabbit, with its endless simplicity, trepidation and curiosity.” Among other accolades J. S. Harry has won the Harri Jones Memorial Prize for Poetry, the Poetry Society’s Book of the Year, the PEN International Lyne Phillips Poetry Prize and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. Her most recent work is Not Finding Wittgenstein (2007) a ‘collected works’ of Peter Henry Lepus.)

The Best Poem Of J.S. Harry

They

They use a pronoun called I
all the time. It seems to hop around
with them.
But you can’t see it properly
not all of it. Not like you can see
ears or whiskers,
or paw or a sun shadow.

This is what Peter tells the flowerbed rabbit
who lives deep in dark leaves
that grow straight to a sky of apple-red flowers.
She can’t read.
He shows her the straight line
her paw scraped
on the rained-on damp
green-growing ground: that’s “I”; he puts
two short, stiff twigs – one each – same length –
at the line’s
head & foot: that’s their
Capital I. But it doesn’t MOOOVE,
she objects: those twigs, that scrape
will NEVER hop.
Peter’s ears twitch – but he has to agree. Goes on.
Struggles – how to explain: “I’s written representation”?

It’s a picture,
he says at last, it’s a stand-for
what lives in each of them, it’s common
to all of THEM – as the earth beneath our paws
is common to all of us (including them)
who run, hop, walk,
fall, lie, or die on it.
She doesn’t know what die is. It’s a word,
he says, like I is: nobody knows what it’s like
inside it.
I die, you singular die, he dies, she dies, it dies,
You plural die, we die, they die –

He’s given her a lecture
when all he wanted to do
was follow the white
bobs of her tail
disappearing
into the scarlet flowers.

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