Robert Harris

And poetry? Well, I don’t think you can go past Robert Harris’s Jane, Interlinear and Other Poems. So much guff gets talked about this ‘n that these days. Harris’s book is the real deal.

He is the subject of a poem by Tim Thorne, The Living Are Left with Imagined Lives, and also Et in Arcadia Ego. He is a subject of a poem in Weeping for Lost Babylon by Eric Beach. He is a subject in a poem The Ghost of John Forbes by Dorothy Hewett. Noting a poem by Robert Adamson (Cornflowers - in memorium Robert Harris), a critic wrote in 1994 "Can the anthology of elegies for Robert Harris be far off?"

Robert Harris (1951 – 24 March 1993) was an Australian poet, who also wrote as Orson Rattray Der.

Harris died in Summer Hill, New South Wales on 24 March 1993 of a heart attack. His obituary in The Sydney Morning Herald stated that "he followed his own poetic path with little regard for the niceties of a literary career." A friend wrote "Robert Harris had only known two things in his short life: poverty and poetry. He knew poetry would get him, and it did."

In around 1990, he traveled to England to study Lady Jane Grey and visit the original locations.

Harris received four literary grants in the 1970s.

Robert Harris was born in Melbourne. He was educated in Doveton High School. He enlisted in the Australian Navy in 1968 during the Vietnam War. During the 1970s he spent time in a commune. He was married but separated from his wife in the 1980s with no children. He lived in Sydney in the later part of his life.