Transatlantic or nomadic? Lyric voice in Lee Harwood’s The Man with Blue Eyes (1966)

This article focuses on The Man with Blue Eyes (New York: Angel Hair Books, 1966), the second collection of poems by English poet Lee Harwood. Although it is one of the few Harwood publications to appear outside the UK, it signals a vital, long-term interchange between his poetry and that of the New York School. The article begins by considering this transatlantic connection and how it might relate to the book's homosexual subject matter. The poems of the collection are shown to fundamentally destabilize ideas of self, text, and place - a destabilization which characterizes Harwood's modernist sensibilities, but which is paradoxically accompanied by a fundamental commitment to lyrical love poetry. Harwood's unstable depictions of America are read in terms of the internationalist love affair the book relates. However, it is shown that transatlanticism does not fully account for the poetry's complexities and contradictions. The application of Pierre Joris's sense of 'nomadic poetics' offers a way forward, and the article concludes by revealing a fundamental spatial uncertainty in Harwood's poems, where nearness and distance are irreconcilably present in romantic statements of intimacy