We are absolutely thrilled to welcome David Harsent as our guest poet this month. David has published thirteen volumes of poetry. Legion won the Forward Prize for best collection. Night was triple short-listed in the UK and won the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Fire Songs won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A Broken Man in Flower, Harsent’s versions of poems written by Yannis Ritsos while in prison camps and under house arrest, was published by Bloodaxe in 2023. He has also made English versions of C.P. Cavafy and Goran Simic. A new collection. Skin, came from Faber in March 2024.
An architect of sound, Harsent has built a haunting body of work unlike that of any other poet of our time. Formally edgy and musically hypnotic, his poetry over five decades – often cast in intricate narrative sequences – unearths our most intimate desires for people and places, combining a photographic memory with the taste of dream and improvisation. Skin, his 13th collection, contains 10 memorable sequences about silence, our proximity to the dead, and the deep-seated struggle between light and darkness. Harsent’s restlessly inventive poetic forms bear “a fugitive geometry” that houses the enigma of the “seen-unseen, / self-unself, gone into a hare and gone to ground”. The book’s sheer metaphysical reach recalls Shakespeare’s dialectical sonnets, Wallace Stevens’s philosophical soliloquies, and Beckett’s ghostly investigations of love, pain, and silence. “The skylight empty of sky”, Harsent observes, “A line of song etched into the bone.”
David Harsent has collaborated with several composers, though most often with Harrison Birtwistle. Birtwistle/Harsent collaborations have been performed at major venues worldwide, including the Royal Opera House, the Salzburg Festival, the Concertgebouw and Carnegie Hall.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor Emeritus at the University of Roehampton.
As a special extra to the event, there will be a short reading at 7.15pm by Fire River Poet Phil Kirby from his newly published Mariscat Sampler