Harrison's books, especially, for me, The Dominion of the Dead, remind me of most of those books imaginative writers love more than academics; those odd, obsessive inquiries made by maverick minds who pick out a theme and make from it an intriguing lace: Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, Diane Ackerman’s The Natural History of the Senses, Charles Sprawson’s The Haunts of the Black Masseur, WG Sebald’s ghostly fiction-cum-essays, or Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space: revelatory, spirited works whose true effect is not to persuade but to promote deeper, more imaginative modes of thought.
The American poet, Mark Doty, said of Bachelard’s book that every page contains the matter for a poem. The same could be—and will be—said of The Dominion of the Dead. A review of The Dominion of the Dead can be found at Cercles and as a pdf at my website
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