Reviews

Selected Reviews

Selected Poems 1969-2005 (2007)

Harsent's early gift was for the icy observation and resonant image. [Later] Harsent's verse opened up to longer lines and the poem sequences Mister Punch (1984), News From the Front (1993) and Marriage (2003), which drew on Bonnard's relationship with his model. By the time of the Legion war poems - "Then we had iron rain, nine days without break or let" - the terse exactitude still projects a stunning clarity of vision, but has expanded into a wider and deeper wisdom, and this exemplary distillation of a career exerts a formidable potency.

Nicholas Wroe, The Guardian

David Harsent has become a poet of immense power, nuance and resource, enriching his textures with ‘high’ culture and with folk and ballad features, pursuing uncompromising insights and rigorous narratives, laying down rhythms as deft as any in Robert Gray or Paul Muldoon... Only with Ted Hughes gone could our principal anthropologist come into his own: Harsent is our master of the human red in tooth and claw.

Michael Hulse, Poetry Review

Legion (2005)

David Harsent...makes form serve the needs of his poetry. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that there is no poet writing today that I know who uses near-rhyme, assonance and the peripheries of formal verse anything like as effectively.

Raymond Humphries, Stride Magazine

David Harsent’s Legion has knocked me sideways with its vivid and sepulchral power.

Antonia Fraser, Sunday Telegraph ‘Books of the Year’

An exceptional collection that looks without prurience at the countless horrors of war we choose to forget...technically one of the most accomplished poetry books of recent years.

Tim Dee, Chairman of Forward Prize judges

David Harsent’s carefully harrowing collection, Legion, is both a disturbing distillation of, and profound meditation on, the vicious wars we have witnessed recently. Poems that move you and make you think.

William Boyd, Guardian ‘Books of the Year’

A compelling, immediate evocation of war as an inescapable condition... the technical accomplishment of Legion is assured and sustained to the end.

Times Literary Supplement

David Harsent’s Legion describes war, its contexts and ramifications, from a number of angles, coldly accounting for the incalculable human costs with a rightly discomfiting fluency of execution.

Robert Potts, Guardian, ‘Poetry Books of the Year’

I read David Harsent’s Legion with the same interest and admiration I have felt about his work for many years. His technical skill and power increase with every book. The sequence The Woman & the Hare, rich with sexual and natural imagery, is the text for a wonderful piece of Harrison Birtwistle’s music... But the title sequence, which might be dispatches from an all-too-familiar though unspecified situation of war, reveals a new tone, a deepening and darkening of his viewpoint and voice which, unfortunately, seems totally justifiable at this historic moment.

Ruth Fainlight, Independent ‘Books of the Year’

Marriage (2002)

Brilliantly cadenced, caustic, tender, these poems chart domestic observations like a heart-graph. (Harsent) is a unique mix of the nervily cerebral and the visionary, the deeply lyrical and the sourly vernacular, with a nice top-spin of craziness in imagery and a fantastic ear.

Ruth Padel, Financial Times.

Surely one of the most exciting poetry collections to appear for some time.

Ruth Fainlight, Independent on Sunday

Tremendously achieved. This is memorable stuff.

Alan Marshall, Daily Telegraph

A Bird's Idea of Flight (1998)

A Bird’s Idea of Flight is inventive, fertile, littered with banana skins, seething with ideas, and brilliantly written. Quite unlike any new book of poetry I’ve read for years.

Michael Bradshaw, Richmond Review

Harsent’s tense, vivid language and richness of reference make this impressive work as compelling as an adventure story.

Ruth Fainlight, Financial Times

A very ambitious piece of work, bold in language, rich in reference and caustic wit.

Helen Dunmore, Observer

The sequence follows Harsent on a near-fatal descent into obsession, guilt and illness until the thirteenth poem marks a kind of self-discovery, whereupon his journey turns back on itself, giving the overall sequence a wonderfully reflective butterfly structure. A remarkably eerie piece of poetic engineering.

Ra Page, Literary Review

There is wit and tenderness as well as fear in these poems; erudition also. This is without question an important development in the work of a poet who has never rested content with his achievements.

Alan Brownjohn, Sunday Times

David Harsent’s latest book takes the form of a dream journey... The book is undeniably difficult but immensely pleasurable for all that.... Harsent writes beautifully and readers will gain more from this unusual and ambitious exploration every time they read it.

Robert Potts, Times Literary Supplement

A Bird’s Idea of Flight is a dream-like, or rather nightmare-like, sequence of poems in which images of modern urban corruption — strip joints, whores, seedy nightclubs, instruments of pain and death — are presented as continuities of more ancient terrors, the one connecting thread being the poet’s fear of an fascination with the dreadful certainty of human mortality...(there is) passion, terror and wild, appalled laughter.

Vernon Scannell, Sunday Telegraph

It’s a dream journey flickered through by the trickster presence of the hare and a “bundle of bones” straight out of a fourteenth-century fresco... The imagery is darting rather than confusing, fired by a snappy yet sensual language, the lines bobbing hypnagogically just where poetry brews itself most potently.

Adam Thorpe, Poetry Review

News From the Front (1993)

Harsent’s poems are characteristically lithe and swift and punctuated with deft visualisations...(his) verbal and imaginative range has never been more extensively on display than it is in this volume.

Nicholas Murray, Times Literary Supplement

News from the Front is a decisive advance on previous work, and it is this which might make Harsent a major poet rather than an unbeaten knife-fighter. The advance is of scale and compassion. He is trying to equip love to deal with the sheer physicality of rage.

Andrew Duncan, Angel Exhaust

Selected Poems (1989)

Harsent’s commitment to lyricism has caused him to fight hard over difficult territory, since he is not content to isolate shining moments, but is driven to tackle complex subjects. His solution is the dramatic sequence... There is an acute sexual edge and much brilliant imagery.

Peter Porter, Observer.

Experiences that bruise the psyche haunt Harsent’s poetry. Astringent, wild imagery threads through his writing and gives a sensuous, unkind, but sometimes beautiful and unnerving lyrical landscape to a poetry that is uncompromising in its imaginative treatment of the unpacified and sore areas of experience.

Douglas Dunn, Evening Standard

Dreams of the Dead (1984)

Dreams of the Dead is the most important long poem to have appeared in English since Basil Bunting’s Briggflats.

Times Literary Supplement

(Here) he breaks out into a new poetic eloquence...a loose narrative holds together round a framework of event and emotion, often lyrical and sinister, with a macabre beauty to it. One hopes that it is in this vein that Harsent will follow, for it is rare in British verse and much needed.

Martin Booth, Tribune

Realising the weakness of imagism, its stationariness and brevity, Harsent is linking poems into not only larger but more complex wholes, where images interact with a sometimes hallucinatory beauty.

Herbert Lomas, London Magazine

(These poems) compress the stuff of novels — Firbank or Fitzgerald novels, perhaps — into a few score lines...his language has purity, power and precision... The dynamics of each poem-story are so exact and balanced that elaboration would only spoil them.

George Mackay Brown, the Scotsman

A strong third collection... Harsent has an unusual claim to notice: you begin every poem with the certain prospect of pleasure and surprise.

Martin Amis, Observer ‘Books of the Year’

Mister Punch (1977)

He stakes a real claim to attention... His strongest creation is the sexual extremist, Mr Punch, an insatiable aggressor and victim... These poems have the compulsion and estrangement of a vision.

Sean O’Brien, Bananas

Harsent has become master of more voices than the first person. Mister Punch is a considerable lyrical achievement: few poets writing today can command such tension or such fluency of line.

Times Literary Supplement

After Dark (1973)

David Harsent’s new collection leaves most of his contemporaries at the starting gate. These are dark and magnificent poems in which memory and landscape are deftly balanced... There is an exactness about Harsent’s judgment which allows the reader not only to view his world, but participate in it.

Lyman Andrews, Sunday Times

The characteristic atmosphere of his poems derives from the contrast between their musical exactness of measure and the uncharted, menacing territory it is their business to explore. He is a writer of extreme assurance and precision, poem after poem sounds irresistibly right, its rhythmic and sensuous components perfectly interlocking.

Times Literary Supplement

After Dark is his second book, and a marvellous advance on his first. An important lyrical talent...

Douglas Dunn, London Magazine

A Violent Country (1969)

David Harsent’s language is taut almost to breaking point... The poems are born of necessity, and this sense of extremity pervades the whole collection... There is little one can say about a book so exciting, except that it is supremely disturbing.

Peter Jones, Carcanet

Individual images are incisive to the point of cruelty: the poems as a whole are deeply compassionate and sane... A sensibility of quite arctic rigour.

Roger Garfitt: London Magazine