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Selected Poems David Harsent
In an illustrious career, David Harsent has published eight collections of poetry, from A Violent County in 1969, to Legion, winner of the Forward Prize in 2005. This selection, made by the author himself, draws upon the full arc of his career and offers an outstanding concentration of, and introduction to, the full range and powers of this distinguished poet.
Fire Songs
The poems in David Harsent's new collection, whether single poems, dramatic sequences, or poems that 'belong to one another', share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone. Throughout the book - in the stark biography of 'Songs from the Same Earth', the troubling disconnects of 'A Dream Book', the harrowing lines of connection in four poems each titled 'Fire', or the cheek-by-jowl shudder of 'Sang the Rat' - Harsent writes, as always, with passion and a sureness of touch.
Salt
Salt is a distinctive new assembly of poems by the multi-award winning David Harsent. Resting somewhere between fragment and exposition, these intense and primal pieces stretch out across the measure of the page in brief utterances. One extends sonnet-length, one consists of a single line; but each piece uniquely completes its own world, and at the same time shades on to the next as a succession of frames and stills and imaginings that lends light and colour in the round. 'The poems in this book are a series, not a sequence,' the author explains. 'They belong to each other in mood, in tone, by way of certain images and words that form a ricochet of echoes - not least the word "salt".' Mineral, eerie, sensory, spine-tingling, the poems in the collection are experienced as encounters - some with the surety of daylight, others in dream-life - that refresh with the turning of each page. Like a set of shared notes or little fictions passed through space from hand to hand, the writings build powerfully to make Salt an unforgettable volume from this most visionary of writers.
Night
Among the poems that open Night, David Harsent's follow-up to his Forward Prize-winning collection Legion, is a startling sequence about a garden - but a garden unlike any other. It sets the tone for a book in which the sureties of daylight become uncertain: dark, unsettling narratives about what wakes in us when we escape our day-lit selves to visit a place where the dream-like and the nightmarish are never far apart. The book culminates in the seductive and brilliantly sustained 'Elsewhere', a noirish, labyrinthine quest-poem in which the protagonist is drawn ever onward through a series of encounters and reflections like an after-hours Orpheus, hard-bitten and harried by memory.
Loss
The city never sleeps. Silence would weaken it. When all else fails it talks to itself: seamless thrum of machinery: dark undertone. It is 00:00 and the full of the night yet to come.A haunting twenty-part sequence that captures the rich psychological depth of a mind at night, filmic in quality. Each poem should be read in numerical order and consists of an unrhymed sonnet, followed by a 60-line column, sealed with a rhymed quatrain. Between the sections, a fragmentary account of a series of white nights endured by the male protagonist unfolds. They speak of a world outside seen from inside (a window vigil) and tell of a recurring dream that takes place in a white landscape.We learn of the man's life, his childhood, a doomed love-affair, and an apprehension of death, but also of the savagely troubled world in which we live (mention of the Holocaust, of Bataclan, of Aleppo, of ISIS, of failed religion, of rough sleepers). Harsent tests and teases the balance between 'control' and 'wildness', demonstrating his breathtaking formal skill, an arresting use of white space, and conveying psychological turmoil all the more powerfully in this masterful fragmentary epic.
Skin
Skin, David Harsent's new collection, consists of ten dramatic sequences of poems, which, like a planetary system, operate on one another in a dynamic assemblage of propulsion and pull. The stage is charged and minimal. Harsent works from an image-bank of 'touchstones' accrued over the course of a long poetic career and rich with symbolic import: doorways and windows, a bed, a mirror, the sea, the moon. To which, the players arrive in various configurations: a man, a woman, a chorus of feral angels, a caged bird, the breath of animals. Conveyed in language that is profoundly musical, preoccupied with signs and portents, numbers and repetitions, driven by the mutable nature of desire, the ensuing drama is intense, domestic-mythic and visionary.
Legion
The title-sequence of David Harsent's new collection of poems, Legion, offers a report from an unnamed war, in which various images of conflict accrue without cohering, as if the reader is locked inside the crisis together with the protagonists. In a series of momentary and abruptly discontinuous images, laconic despatches from a war-zone, a fictional testimony begins to take shape - an array of different voices giving witness to war and the consequences of war. In its formal mastery of the poetic sequence, Legion is a distinguished successor to David Harsent's previous collection, Marriage.
After Dark
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Working Model of the Fall from Grace, A:
For over half a century David Harsent has been one of the world's leading poets. His libretti, essays, drama and fiction accompany a unique and fiercely original central body of poetry, from his earliest collection, A Violent Country (1969), to the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning Fire Songs (2016). Here, critics, poets, editors, collaborators and friends of the writer have come together to celebrate his work. Through poetry, prose and criticism, this volume, edited by his biographer, and with a foreword by his editor at Faber & Faber, explores Harsent's fifty years of writing life, opening unique insights into his skill and art. From childhood friends and recent mentees, booksellers and broadsheet reviewers, in affectionate portrait and close-reading analysis, the viewpoints gathered here offer a wide-ranging and diverse response to Harsent's work. This is a timely, considered and heartfelt appreciation of one of our finest poets.
Marriage
Marriage consists of two sequences of poems. The first is loosely based on the relationship between Pierre Bonnard and his muse and model, who became eventually his wife. It is a rich pattern for the study of the mysteries of domesticity, the unspoken privacies and intimacies that can exist between two people. For the painter, problems of seeing become, for the husband, problems of knowing. 'Marriage' is an inspired portrait of conjugality, exact, watchful and understated. The second sequence, 'Lepus', extends an interest in the hare as trickster, traceable elsewhere in David Harsent's work, and most recently in 'The Woman and the Hare', a piece commissioned by the Nashe Ensemble, set to music by Harrison Birtwistle, and first performed at the South Bank Centre in 1999.
