
Salt
Faber & Faber, 2017
Salt is a distinctive new assembly of poems by the multi-award winning David Harsent. Resting somewhere between fragment and exposition, these intense and primal pieces stretch out across the measure of the page in brief utterances. One extends sonnet-length, one consists of a single line; but each piece uniquely completes its own world, and at the same time shades on to the next as a succession of frames and stills and imaginings that lends light and colour in the round.
Mineral, eerie, sensory, spine-tingling, the poems in the collection are experienced as encounters - some with the surety of daylight, others in dream-life - that refresh with the turning of each page. Like a set of shared notes or little fictions passed through space from hand to hand, the writings build powerfully to make Salt an unforgettable volume from this most visionary of writers.
Reviews of Salt:

Fire Songs
Faber & Faber, 2014
The poems in David Harsent’s new collection, whether single poems, dramatic sequences, or poems that ‘belong to one another’, share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone. Throught the book – in the stark biography of ‘Songs from the Same Earth’, the troubling disconnects of ‘A Dream Book’, the harrowing lines of connection in four poems each titled ‘Fire’, or the cheek-by-jowl shudder of ‘Sang the Rat’ – Harsent writes, as always, with passion and a sureness of touch.
- Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2014
Reviews of Fire Songs:

Songs from the Same Earth
Rack Press pamphlet, June 2013

Night
Faber & Faber, 2011
Among the poems that open Night, David Harsent’s follow-up to his Forward Prize-winning collection Legion, is a startling sequence about a garden — but a garden unlike any other. It sets the tone for a book in which the sureties of daylight become uncertain: dark, unsettling narratives about what wakes in us when we escape our day-lit selves to visit a place where the dream-like and the nightmarish are never far apart.
The book culminates in the seductive and brilliantly sustained ‘Elsewhere’, a noirish, labyrinthine quest-poem in which the protagonist is drawn ever onward through a series of encounters and reflections like an after-hours Orpheus, hard-bitten and harried by memory.
- Winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize
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Reviews of Night:
Reviews of Night:
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Selected Poems 1969-2005
Faber & Faber, 2007
In an illustrious career, David Harsent has published eight collections of poetry, from A Violent County in 1969 to Legion, winner of the Forward Prize in 2005. This selection, made by the author himself, draws upon the full arc of his career and offers an outstanding concentration of, and introduction to, the full range and powers of this distinguished poet
- Shortlisted for the Griffin Prize (Canada)
Reviews of Selected Poems 1969-2005:
Reviews of Selected Poems 1969-2005:

Legion
Faber & Faber, 2005
The title sequence of this collection offers reports from a series of unnamed war zones. Throughout, various accounts of conflict accrue: a series of discrete images, voices, events, and intermittent despatches — immediate and vivid — that cohere to give witness to war and the consequences of war.
- Forward Prize winner 2005
- Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award 2005
Reviews of Legion:
Reviews of Legion:
Reviews of Legion:
Reviews of Legion:
Reviews of Legion:
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I often recommend, to friends, students and outsiders fresh to English poetry, the haunting, beautiful and deeply unsettling “Ghost Archaeology” as an example of the best of what is happening in contemporary writing. As close as any finished thing comes to perfection, this is work of subtle, yet gently insistent musicality, compassionate in the true sense of the word and, as it reaches its eerie closing lines, deeply humane in its vision. This is poetry of utter integrity that, for the attentive reader, can make the world, if not a better, then at least a truer place.

Marriage
Faber & Faber, 2002
Marriage consists of two sequences of poems. The first is loosely based on the relationship between Pierre Bonnard and his muse and model, who became eventually his wife. It is a rich pattern for the study of the mysteries of domesticity, the unspoken privacies and intimacies that can exist between two people. For the painter, problems of seeing become, for the husband, problems of knowing. Marriage is an inspired portrait of conjugality, exact, watchful and understated. The second sequence, Lepus, extends an interest in the hare as trickster, traceable elsewhere in David Harsent’s work, and most recently in The Woman and the Hare, a piece commissioned by the Nashe Ensemble, set to music by Harrison Birtwistle, and first performed at the South Bank Centre in 1999.
- Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Poetry Prizes 2002
Reviews of Marriage:
Reviews of Marriage:
Reviews of Marriage:

A Bird’s Idea of Flight
Faber & Faber, 1998
A sequence of 25 poems which charts a circular journey: 12 of them trace the outward journey, the 13th is pivotal, and the remainder bring the traveller home. The subject of the quest is thanatology, and in particular the author is deeply curious about the business of his own death.
- Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Poetry Prizes 1998
Reviews of A Bird’s Idea of Flight:
Reviews of A Bird’s Idea of Flight:
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Reviews of A Bird’s Idea of Flight:

The Potted Priest
Limited edition: Four Seasons Press/Snickersnee, 1997

News from the Front
Oxford University Press, 1993
News From the Front, David Harsent’s fifth collection of poems, is a sequence that explores a powerful drama of separation. It uses the voices of several characters: a man is separated by war from his common-law wife, and while he is away she gives birth to his child, a boy. The man writes letters home and also keeps a journal, which consists partly of a Bestiary, which he hopes to be able to show his son. The woman lives on the edge of Dartmoor, and her fantasies and inner life are so strong as to bring the man almost within reach; the boy falls in with this, and sees his absent father as a hero.
Reviews of News from the Front:
Reviews of News from the Front:

Storybook Hero
Limited Edition: Sycamore Press, 1992

Gawain: A Libretto
Universal Edition, 1991

Selected Poems
Oxford University Press, 1989
This selection, made by the author, brings together work from his four individual collections, A Violent Country (69), After Dark (73), Dreams of the Dead (77), and Mister Punch (84), together with a number of new poems.
Reviews of Selected Poems:
Reviews of Selected Poems:

Mister Punch
Oxford University Press, 1984
Mr Punch is generally identified as the manic anti-hero of the traditional puppet show, whose origins lie in the commedia dell’arte. Punch’s history goes further back than that, however — to court fool, holy fool, trickster, and even, perhaps, shaman. He is the grotesque, our shadow-side, who must act out a role that takes him from aggressor to victim, and thence to the possibility of spiritual resolution.
David Harsent’s brilliant adaptation of the tradition brings Punch squarely into our painful and complex times.
Reviews of Mister Punch:
Reviews of Mister Punch:

Dreams of the Dead
Oxford University Press, 1977
With this new collection, David Harsent enhances the considerable reputation established by his earlier volumes. The poems in Dreams of the Dead represent, in some ways, a departure from his previous work; he writes here at greater length, often using poem-sequences which provide a traceable narrative line while retaining a distinctive and powerful lyrical vocabulary.
- Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize winner 1977
- Awarded Arts Council Bursary
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Reviews of Dreams of the Dead:
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After Dark
Oxford University Press, 1973
The poems in David Harsent’s first collection, A Violent Country, were set mainly in the terrain of obsession and extremity. With no dilution of intensity this new collection is in a deeper and stiller vein. The poet is concerned to explore those mysteries of experience beneath the surface of incident, informing and informed by recollection. In a number of poems early in the book (Homecoming, Old Photographs, After Dark), by reinventing the past he looks, taking examples, at the strength of the ‘myth’ of one’s childhood — something which is forgotten, literally, but which remains clandestinely powerful under one’s adult life. Other poems demonstrate a continuing concern with solitude and with the influence of landscape; and there are too a number of finely balanced love poems. This new collection will confirm Harsent’s reputation as one of the best poets of his generation.
Reviews of After Dark:
Reviews of After Dark:
Reviews of After Dark:

Truce
Limited Edition: Sycamore Press, 1973

A Violent Country
Oxford University Press, 1969
Poem after poem in this, David Harsent’s first collection, demonstrates his mastery of the terrain of obsession and extremity in which his work is set. A brilliant series on madness — Nijinsky’s, St Simeon Stylites’, a friend’s in hospital — is balanced by love poems whose grave music never scants the terror that underlies them; and a group of compassionate but unsparing poems on a suicide is set against a sequence in which a woman moves with dreamlike precision through her house and garden, solitary, observant, anguished, withdrawn. In each, and running under all, is an extraordinary visionary power and authority.
- Awarded Arts Council Bursary
Reviews of A Violent Country:
Reviews of A Violent Country:

Tonight’s Lover
The Review, 1968

In Secret: Versions of Yannis Ritsos
Enitharmon Press, 2012
Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) is one of Greece’s finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. Louis Aragon called him “the greatest poet of our age”. He wrote in the face of ill health, personal tragedy and systematic persecution by successive hard-line right-wing regimes that led to many years in prison, or in island detention camps. In Secret gives versions of Ritsos’s short lyric poems: compressed narratives that are are so pared-down, so distilled, that the story-fragments we are given – the scene-settings, the tiny psychodramas – have an irresistible potency.
- A Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation

Sprinting from the Graveyard
Oxford University Press, 1997
Goran Simic was born in Bosnia in 1952. This collection contains David Harsent’s English versions of poems written by Simic during the time he and his family were trapped in Sarajevo during the siege. The poems speak with a unique and terrible directness of the experience of war, and, in particular, the besieging of a civilian population.
- A Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Reviews of Sprinting from the Graveyard:
Reviews of Sprinting from the Graveyard:

The Sorrow of Sarajevo
Limited Edition: Cargo Press, 1996
Versions of Poems by Goran Simic

From an Inland Sea
Viking/Penguin, 1985
From an Inland Sea charts the progress of an obsession. We first encounter the novel’s protagonists during one of their frequent trips abroad, and at once they become strikingly present to the reader: he clever, heated, questioning; she cool, successful, wary. Freed, briefly, from ordinary domesticity, they are still unable to liberate themselves from the accumulated expectations and anxieties of their relationship.
An outrageously funny dinner party, a separation, a shooting weekend, a brutal moment glimpsed through a window, a brawl in a London flat, a manic photographic session, a crazed drive through southern France... scene by scene, David Harsent builds a story that is comic and passionate, menacing and desolate. Throughout, he uses a beautifully controlled and suggestive prose that brings characters and events vividly to life.
Reviews of From an Inland Sea:
The Wormhole
Work in progress...

Raising the Iron
Cargo Press, 2004
Foreword: “The last time the iron came down at the Palace Theatre Watford was in July 2002 when the theatre closed for major refurbishment. The theatre’s Artistic Director, Lawrence Till, asked me to commission a number of poems to celebrate its reopening, but also to celebrate theatre in general.
“It seems to me that theatre is, quite simply, indispensable to community life, and to the spiritual life of the nation, whether the nation knows it or not. The re-emergence of the Palace Theatre from the rubble of demolition is an exciting event, and a crucial one.”
–David Harsent

Another Round at the Pillars
Cargo Press, 1999
For his sixtieth birthday friends of the distinguished poet, critic and biographer Ian Hamilton, have gathered to offer an international festschrift to honour his writings and the remarkable influence he has exerted on his generation.
The result is an unparalleled portrait of literary London for the last thirty years, a Who’s Who of Britain's best poets, novelists, and playwrights resulting in a unique document filled with wit and humour... a must.

Savremena Britanska Poezija
Sarajevo Writers’ Union, 1988
with Mario Susko, 1988
In the Locked Room
Forthcoming in 2012
Opening at the Edinburgh International Festival 2012. Further performances at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, and the Linbury Theatre at the Royal Opera House, then on tour.
Opera; music by Huw Watkins.
The Yellow Wallpaper
Forthcoming in 2012
Opening at St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, on April 20th 2012.
Concert piece; music by Simon Holt.
The Corridor
2010
The Corridor opened at Aldeburgh on June 12th 2010, with subsequent performances on the 15th, 17th and 18th.
Further performances were given at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Monday July 6th and Tuesday July 7th, and at the Bregenz Festival in Austria.
Music by Harrison Birtwistle.
Crime Fiction
2010
Crime Fiction opened in 2010 at Weston Studio, Wales Millenium Centre, Cardiff on Saturday March 28th, with a subsequent performance at Galeri Caenarfon in April.
Music by Huw Watkins.
The Minotaur
2008
Commissioned by the Royal Opera House, opened in April 2008.
Music by Harrison Birtwistle.
The Hoop of the World
Music by Alan Lawrence; in preparation
When She Died
2007
Commissioned by Channel 4 UK. Also aired on the Trio cable channel in the USA.
Staged production: Kammeroper, Vienna, 2007.
Music by Jonathan Dove.
The Ring Dance of the Nazarene
2004
Commissioned by BBC Radio and VARA (Holland).
First performance was given at a Concertgebouw Promenade concert in Amserdam, 2004.
Music by Harrison Birtwistle.
The Woman and the Hare
1999
Commissioned by the Nash Ensemble.
Performed March 1999 at the Purcell Rooms, South Bank Centre, and again in 2000. Also performed at the Megaron in Athens, 2002. The USA premiere was given at Carnegie Hall in 2005.
Music by Harrison Birtwistle.
Gawain
1991
Commissioned by the Royal Opera House.
First performance given May 1991, revivals in 1994 and 2000.
Music by Harrison Birtwistle.
Serenade the Silkie
1994
Commission for the Prussia Cove Festival 1994.
Music by Julian Grant.