Michael Harman’s new book of poetry, Plumbing Techniques, is a marvel of Emersonian Whim embraced by some serious attitude and thinking beyond the usual kind about where and who we are. The opening poems follow his training and introduction to the vicissitudes of the Plumbing Trade, a kind of detailed education in the manner of Henry Adams.

He gives us the truth, but following Ms. Dickenson’s advice, tells it slant.

Success in Circuit lies, she goes on, and the circuit of Harman’s slant vision takes us through word-blazed energy passages that deliver us to surprise after surprise in the midst of the ordinary. Harman’s language/mind dances in and out of daily chores and jobs—refracted through a lens of wonder—and into a world of thoughtful entanglement with death, writing, love, all those miraculous dimensions that open our ordinary time into eternity, and does it with humour and a sharp intelligence.

Who could ask more from their plumber? Michael BoughnMichael’s work beautifully negotiates a complex territory between lyric utterance and a more experimental, intertextual or ‘open’ mode of composition. I am struck by the fineness of his ear and of his syntactic timing, and by the interplay of intelligence and feeling.

Malcolm WoodlandWhile Michael’s style is produced to a certain extent by method, its beauty can only come from his talent selecting, arranging, and perhaps intervening in the results of that method, as an essential contributing factor in the process and product. He is a serious, informed, talented poet.

Albert Frank MoritzMichael Harman has sewn together the voices of other writers, Daedalus-like. And like Daedalus’ creations, his poems walk about mechanically and mechanically sing in their own Frankenstein voices .

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and what voices! Who knew the monster could be so mellifluous, so honeyed!David Tinmouth. .