Ian Harrow was born in 1945 in Northumberland, of Scots-Irish extraction. He was Head of School of Art at Lancashire Polytechnic before taking early retirement in 2002. Since the mid-70s his work has appeared in a wide range of publications. His latest book Words Take Me (Lapwing Press 2013) is his fourth collection. He lives in York.
 
Words Take Me is available from Lapwing Poetry
 
Ian can be contacted via his website: www.ianharrow.com
 

Ian Harrow’s poems of obsessive love and lost love are strange, stark, profound parables in classic brief forms. They are not consolatory, but neither are they pessimistic because they have what one of the poems calls ‘the taste of truth’. When they are painful, it is because reality is painful. Words Take Me is an utterly absorbing book that stays hauntingly in the memory. It is a major achievement.

 

Bernard O'Donoghue