When Claire Harris published Translation into Fiction (Goose Lane, 1984), she was hailed by Martin Ware in The Atlantic Provinces Book Review as "a powerful new voice." In 1985, Claire Harris was selected as the Best First Time Published Poet for the Americas region in the British Airways Commonwealth Prize competition. Her poems are charged with imaginative excitement and amplitude: "I dream of a new naming / new words new lines / shaping a new world / I ride it / as at a durbar / barelegged through wide fields / of baobab soaring in the wash / of midnight" - drawing upon an exotic yet personal sense of history while discovering a truly contemporary idiom. Claire Harris can invoke the drama of ideas and the ironies of immediate events with both intellectual confidence and human compassion.