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The Magic Theatre

1976: just as the Sex Pistols are about to release 'Anarchy in the U.K.', James Harpur arrives at Trinity College, Cambridge, to read Classics. As if stepping onstage in the strangest of theatres, he finds himself acting in a play without knowing what his part is to be. Changing to study English, the poet finds an education in unlikely places: a broken love affair; excruciating meetings with professors (and his father); initiations into Brahms and Rubens; writing a play about computer dating; and gatecrashing May Balls. Compelling, humorous and poignant, The Magic Theatre is an enthralling rite of passage amid the 'full catastrophe' of university life.

'A terrific, moving homage to an invincibly formative period.'Nicholas Shakespeare

'I get more out of Harpur's Cambridge than Tennyson's. Whether he writes about revising or punting or amateur acting ('the tinnitus of humiliation') or lost love, he places his young self in those strange three years granted to you in that (then) small town where your life is more imagined than real, and the better for it. The Spectator

'Harpur possesses a seemingly effortless lyricism... the poems retain a strong universal appeal because the rites of passage described in The Magic Theatre... are presented in an engaging, imaginative, and often humorous fashion.' Tim Murphy, London Grip

These are poems of rare subtlety, of heartbreaking poignancy and laugh-out-loud humour, of pitch-perfect craft and the most marvellous music. Mark Roper, author of Beyond Stillness

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The Examined Life   Winner of the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize

This collection is quite brilliant oscillating as it does between the comic and the tragic   Enda Wyley, Dublin Review of Books

A serious success a subtle account of adolescence, friendship, confinement, the fashions of the 1970s, a meditation on the phrase in loco parentis , and a brilliant exercise of memory.   Charles Moore, The Spectator

  Haunted and haunting  a terrific examination of homesickness the Odyssey a vibrant framework for Harpur s five years away at school . Martina Evans, The Irish Times

  It haunts me still, this whole collection, months, nearly a year later the details carry something of the soul of England.   Jonathan Davidson, The North

Completely wonderful to read. I was amazed, amused, horrified, and so very moved.   Keggie Carew (Author of Dadland, winner of the 2017 Costa Biography Prize)

It s an unflinching account of an unholy initiatory ordeal moving, funny, tender, lyrical and exact Terrific stuff.   Lindsay Clarke (Author of The Chymical Wedding, winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize)

  A quite marvellous work an Odyssey, a Ulysses shaken up in the snow-dome of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. From the foreword by Stephen Fry.

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With Sappho in the Antipathies: An Irish Poet's Love Letter to Melbourne (and Sydney)

'A jewel of a book – engaging, humorous, profound, and beautifully balanced, a mixture of Bill Bryson and Bashõ. It reads like a love letter to a distant friend and shows how human empathy can bring the best out of the citizens of our troubled world. And goodness knows, we need that now.'

Ian Wild, author and playwright

'Here we see the tourist's delight at seeing some of Australia's unique fauna: a kangaroo, an emu, a sleepy wombat and a Tasmanian devil that he thinks looks rather cute until he learns that its demonic tag comes from its horrendous screech, as well as powerful jaws and a ferocious appetite. Sweet little piggy is actually the 'Rottweiler of marsupials'.'

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