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David HarsentDavid Harsent
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BiographyDavid Harsent was born in 1942 in Devonshire.
He has published nine collections of poetry, including A Bird's Idea of Flight (1998), and Marriage (2002), both shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S. Eliot Prize. Legion (2005), won the 2005 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and was shortlisted for the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2005 Whitbread Poetry Award.
His poetry includes versions of the work of Bosnian poet Goran Simic, notably Sprinting from the Graveyard (1997), poems written during the siege of Sarajevo. He was co-editor, with Mario Susko, of Savremena Britanska Poezija (1988).
His work in music theatre has involved collaborations with a number of composers, but most often with Harrison Birtwistle, and has been performed at the Royal Opera House, Carnegie Hall, the South Bank Centre, the Proms, the Megaron (Athens), and on BBC2 and Channel 4 TV. His libretti include Serenade the Sikie for the Prussia Cove Festival in 1994 and When She Died for Tiger Aspect and Channel 4 television in 2002. His collaborations with Harrison Birtwistle are Gawain (1991), The Woman and the Hare, The Ring Dance of the Nazarene, and, currently in preparation, The Minotaur.
He has published a novel, From An Inland Sea (1985), and has another, The Wormhole, in preparation. He writes crime fiction under a pseudonym and has written a number of screenplays and television dramas.
David Harsent was appointed Distinguished Writing Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University in 2005, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His Selected Poems, 1969-2005, was published in 2007. In 2008, he received a Cholmondeley Award.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Fiction, Libretto, Poetry
BibliographyA Violent Country Oxford University Press, 1969 After Dark Oxford University Press, 1973 Truce Sycamore Press, 1973 Dreams of the Dead Oxford University Press, 1977 Mister Punch Oxford University Press, 1984 From an Inland Sea Viking, 1985 Savramena Britanska Poezija (editor with Mario Susko) Writers' Union (Sarajevo), 1988 Selected Poems Oxford University Press, 1989 Gawain: a libretto Universal Editions, 1991 Storybook Hero Syacamore Press, 1992 News from the Front Oxford University Press, 1993 The Sorrow of Sarajevo (English versions of poems by Goran Simic, illustrated by Robert McNab) Cargo Press, 1996 Sprinting from the Graveyard (English versions of poems by Goran Simic) Oxford University Press, 1997 A Bird's Idea of Flight Faber and Faber, 1998 Another Round at the Pillars: A Festschrift for Ian Hamilton (editor) Cargo Press, 1999 Marriage Faber and Faber, 2002 Raising the Iron (editor) Cargo Press, 2004 Legion Faber and Faber, 2005 Selected Poems, 1969-2005 Faber and Faber, 2007
Prizes and awards1967 Eric Gregory Award 1970 Arts Council Writers' Award 1977 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize Dreams of the Dead 1978 Arts Council Writers' Award 1988 Society of Authors Travel Award 1998 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) (shortlist) A Bird's Idea of Flight 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) A Bird's Idea of Flight 2002 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) (shortlist) Marriage 2002 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) Marriage 2005 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) Legion 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) Legion 2005 Whitbread Poetry Award (shortlist) Legion 2007 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem) (shortlist - 'The Hut in Question') 2008 Cholmondeley Award
Critical PerspectiveDavid Harsent has described himself as ‘not a public poet’, and his career as a poet has involved a slow rise to prominence over the course of several decades. Yet his Forward Poetry Prize-winning collection Legion (2005) is an imaginatively free treatment of that most public of themes, war. Its voices from war zones are various: soldiers, a sniper holed up in a church tower, victims and observers, which seem to date back to Roman times and go forward to the present day. Indeed, writing about the book in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Harsent remarked that he began to write the sequence around the start of recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but ‘the voices and incidents might relate to any conflict’. He stressed that the poems ‘didn’t emerge from any political imperative or sense of moral outrage: they carry no agenda’. The latter statement can also apply to the whole range of his works, whether dramatic poetic sequences, opera libretti (for the composer Harrison Birtwistle) and his more recent career as a successful crime novelist under the name ‘David Lawrence’.
What strikes the reader most forcefully about Harsent’s poetry is the truly macabre imagination: just the title of his 1977 collection Dreams of the Dead indicates his longstanding preoccupations with dreams, death and human frailty. There is perhaps a touch of the Jacobean dramatist John Webster about him, as a writer who ‘sees the skull beneath the skin’, and amongst other influences Harsent has mentioned are decadent French bards Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine. Harsent allies this sensibility to a modernist method, in writing episodic narratives with structures that belong, as he remarked in 1989, ‘to a poetic progression of clues, sense-impressions, key images, rhythms and … subjects’. His is a mentally shifting poetry of acute fragments, strangely compelling in what has been called its ‘psychological shrapnel’.
Selected Poems, 1969-2005 (2007) was chosen by the author ‘to give readers a representative account’, though most of its contents are taken from his mature works. Dreams of the Dead first deploys the characteristic fluid dream sequence, taking the form of a fragmentary diary in which characters, images and landscapes fleetingly appear. An unnamed man is trapped in a kind of limbo for ‘most of one night, sleeping and awake, / rehearsing someone else’s tragedy’. His dreams, memories and waking life seem to merge, in scenes involving skiing, the sun, and death by drowning; ‘the body washed in, / a froth of limbs and spume across the rocks’. Finally if enigmatically, ‘He stepped into the vast, unshuttered glare / like a swimmer loosing his foothold, / moving through silence, his own element’. Mister Punch (1984), by contrast, is much more specifically menacing and was his breakthrough book. The archetypal English seaside puppet takes on a violent interior life, in which he may – or may not be – a rapist and serial killer. ‘These women are all alike to Mr Punch. // He’d like to own them, he’d like to eat them whole, / he’d like their murders / feeding his night-time conscience’. In a series of edgy scenarios, Punch is tortured by his own actions and nightmares: ‘I’ve become / my story’s heroine / saturated by disease, the last/ of the beautiful tuberculars’.
News from the Front (1993) concerns a drama of separation between a soldier away at a war and the wife and son he leaves behind on Dartmoor. Their lives seem to interact at various points as scenes shift around: ‘She would sleepwalk / with the night-patrols and litter / the map with tank-traps’. In the title poem, torture victims are found, ‘shreds of themselves; // on both ankles, dark like hung meat’. Harsent’s preoccupation with death is given its most bravura expression in A Bird’s Idea of Flight (1998). This sequence of psychologically disturbing journeys moves through London and through time, visits ‘The Black Museum’ and goes underground. Death (‘the Good Companion’) takes on various guises; as an archivist ‘walled-up / by tree-calf and buckram’; as a curator, and as a pathologist doing a post-mortem. The narrator is, as ever, haunted by those he meets, with their accompanying discourse about sex and death. And, most poignantly, by ‘those faces, some I’d loved, loved even now, / and one who promised to lead me a merry dance’.
His ‘David Lawrence’ crime novels began with The Dead Sit Round in a Ring (2002), featuring his long-suffering protagonist detective Stella Mooney, and are packed with fast-moving contemporary phenomena: amoral London gangsters, sleazy informants, prostitutes from Eastern Europe and a regular regime of brutal killings. They are of the familiar ‘police procedural’ type, but made distinctive by the sheer extent of their gruesome detailing of the processes of death and its effects on the human body. There are some elaborate descriptions, for example, of rooms full of flies and rodent activity (‘some little feaster at death’s table’). The first novel opens with minor drug dealer Jimmy Stone and three other corpses being found in a London flat, and the storyline follows the investigation into how and why it happened. Stella’s personal life, her affairs and psychological traumas from the past, form the counter-point to the plot. And, in a particularly nice piece of self-referencing, a man about to jump to his death is described as looking ‘like Mr Punch asking the children where the baby had gone’. Nothing like the Night (2003) again opens with the discovery of corpses. ‘Once she had been beautiful; now she was eight days dead’, and ‘maggot masses were feeding on her … growing and getting ready to break out’.
By his own account, Legion was inspired by Harsent’s versions of poems written by Bosnian Serb Goran Simic during the siege of Sarajevo. This is most clear in ‘Sniper’, whose speaker is ‘tucked up here out of sight. I am tucked up here / in the bell tower of Our Lady of Retribution’. He observes the inhabitants of the city, his former neighbours: ‘They go in fear / of me. And where they go they go by my good grace’. Despite the strong Balkan echoes, the voices actually move back and forward in time. ‘Harp Strings’, for example, is in the voice of a Roman legionary contemplating a battle with daubed naked Britons, in ‘bone- / ash mixed with clay slapped to their cheeks and necks is how / they came among us’. ‘At the Riverside’ returns to the present, as an old woman, ‘the whole of herself bitten back to the bone’, one of the eternal victims of war, speaks: ‘’and why such fuss, / … about who we are or what we might have been / if it comes to this: cracked laughter, the world as shadow, nil by mouth?’ What Ruth Padel has aptly called Harsent’s ‘unique mix of the nervily cerebral and the visionary, the deeply lyrical and the sourly vernacular’ (in The Independent on Sunday) gives us some salutary visions.
Dr Jules Smith, 2008
Author statementIndividual vision comes from a long way back, a long way down ... my poems are written out of a compulsion that I recognise but don't fully (and don't care to) understand. Poetry is a way of life; everything adapts to it.
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