Legion
A collection that traces memory, loss, and the shadow of violence, using mythic and religious echoes to build a dark, taut lyric landscape.
Work Information
A book that compresses submerged feeling into sharp, exact language.
David Harsent’s 2005 poetry collection was published by Faber and Faber in an 82-page paperback. Its dark lyric intensity and tightly packed imagery anticipate the work that later made him one of Britain’s most admired poets.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Faber & Faber
- Published
- 2005-08-18
- Pages
- 96 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13 x 0.9 x 19.8 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780571228096
- ISBN-10
- 0571228097
- Price
- 3019 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/History & Criticism/Criticism & Theory
The title-sequence of David Harsent's new collection of poems, Legion , offers a report from an unnamed war, in which various images of conflict accrue without cohering, as if the reader is locked inside the crisis together with the protagonists. In a series of momentary and abruptly discontinuous images, laconic despatches from a war-zone, a fictional testimony begins to take shape - an array of different voices giving witness to war and the consequences of war. In its formal mastery of the poetic sequence, Legion is a distinguished successor to David Harsent's previous collection, Marriage .
David Harsent has published thirteen collections of poetry. Legion won the 2005 Forward Prize for Poetry. Night (2011), a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the Costa, Forward and T. S. Eliot poetry prizes and won the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Fire Songs (2014) won the T. S. Eliot Prize. His most recent collection, Skin, was published in 2024.
Reviews
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Five Stars
Glad I got this.
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Worth reading
The first sequence - i.e. the title poem - is made up of vignettes of an imagined conflict in a geographically ambiguous place. In doing so, it comments on the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and - it seems to me - Northern Ireland. It's an interesting approach because it allows Harsent to address the brutality of war without speaking for anyone in particular. I can't remember the rest of the collection but I seem to remember it was fine.
Related Literary Awards
- Forward Prizes for Poetry Edition 14 (2005) ・Excellence Award