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.
Words of sadness and loss, comfort and consolation Summoning the words to express our feelings of loss for a loved one in the days following a death can feel almost impossible. And often the choice of readings available can seem daunting. Poems and Readings for Funerals is a carefully curated collection of the very wisest words about death by some of the world's greatest poets, thinkers, playwrights and novelists. Featuring beautifully and thoughtfully written poems, prose extracts and prayers, these readings have been chosen to move and console, sympathize and relieve - to bring everyone attending a funeral or memorial closer together.
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.
The best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured each year with the Griffin Poetry Prize. The 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology includes poems from the exceptional books shortlisted by judges George Bowering, James Lasdun, and Pura Lopez Colome. The poems in the 2008 anthology are selected and introduced by Bowering, the Canadian member of the jury. Royalties from the sales of the anthologies are donated to UNESCO's World Poetry Day.
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.
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.
Odysseus Elytis (1911-96) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1979. With Seferis and the 'Generation of the Thirties', he introduced French Surrealism into Greek poetry. Kimon Friar's classic translation The Sovereign Sun begins with his brilliantly sensuous early poems. It has large selections from his master work, Axion Esti (1959), and includes the whole of his Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign (1945). His Nobel Prize citation stated: 'Against the background of Greek tradition, his poetry depicts with sensuous strength and clearsightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness.'
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.
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.
