If poems are like other people’s photographs in which we recognise ourselves, David Harsent’s writing catches us at our most vulnerable, vicious and unnervingly visceral. Reading through his back catalogue gives you the measure of his oeuvre: A Violent Country, After Dark, Dreams of the Dead, Mr Punch, Night. Stalking through an often nightmarish territory of half-apprehended horror and bleakness, the narrators of his poems survey human fear and frailty against the backdrop of an elemental, unforgiving world. Like a scene from a Hitchcockian movie, the worst always seems to be held just out of shot, all the more present for its apparent absence. Redemption and absolution are rarely on offer. Harsent may have a beautiful technical facility for language, its measure, weight and texture, but the ends to which it is put are as black as a darkroom negative.
Salt is Harsent’s first collection since Fire Songs, winner of the 2014 TS Eliot prize. Its poems form a strange sequence of sorts, though their author is resistant to such definitions: “the poems belong to each other”, we are told in a prefatory note, “by way of certain images and words that form a ricochet of echoes”. Fragmentary, fleeting and impressionistic, the poems in Salt are rarely longer than five lines, issued from an anonymous speaker who gives next to nothing away, just as the poems so often explore the apparent next to nothing – a moment, seemingly insignificant, is mined for its sudden significance, as revelation, brief history or omen. Take the following piece, quoted here in full:
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