Growing Young: Poems and Lyrics
These poems don't sit still. They stride. They skip. Sometimes they kick you in the shin.
Paul Harland writes with the eye of a man who has spent a lifetime noticing - swans postponing a kiss on still water, a blackbird's silent kill on a suburban lawn, the wreckage left behind when love curdles into ghosts kept in a heart-shaped pocket. He is just as unflinching with the bigger targets: the priests and politicians who preach one thing and do another, the cities that dress greed up in neon, the wars that "normal people" keep starting and never seem to fight themselves.
Across nearly fifty poems and lyrics, Growing Young moves between tenderness and fury, memory and desire, the sacred and the seedy - often within the same breath. There is a thirty-year love still catching its breath. There is a stranger in a railway station, quietly accused of murder by nothing but Harland's imagination. There is a lonely woman by the corner, always waiting for a call.
This is not a comfortable collection. It is an honest one - funny, angry, aching, and alive to the strange dignity of ordinary things. Read it slowly. It asks you to.
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