Father and son combine poetry with photography to elegant effect, locating our inner turbulence in nocturnal seas
This book belongs in a category of its own. It is an unusual collaboration between the poet David Harsent and his photographer son, Simon– not a poetry collection in an ordinary sense, but a startling and beautiful double act about the moon on the sea at night. Through a glass darkly, we see the sea – never the shore – in a sequence of black-and-white photographs. The stills are never still. The moon keeps changing and the water’s texture changes too: feathers, fur, oil paint. Stippled and amniotic, it is suggestive of an ultrasound scan and tempts one into fancifully seeing this book as a birth of sorts – of an exceptional and elegant hardback.
What briefly promises to be a bird’s eye view becomes the dizzying consciousness of a sightless bird – a blind vision
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