Reviews

• These a re powerful and upsetting poems: Harsent is a consummate craftsman, and he is on top form in 'Fire Songs', His poems are not just finely crafted, they are are loaded with content that is highly charged, honest (sometimes brutally so,) and wide ranging. I have this collection on my Kindle so that I can enjoy them almost anywhere. For me, he a poet's poet, but also one who also appeals to the humanity in all of us. Harsent's genius is everywhere evident in these thought-provoking poems.

• I recently read "I Knew the Bride" by Hugo Williams, shortlisted but not the winner of the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize of the Poetry Book Society, founded in 1953 by T.S. Eliot and friends. I was so taken with Williams’ poems that I wondered just how good the winner was. So I read it: "Fire Songs: by David Harsent. It begins with what is undoubtedly a fire song – “Fire: a song for Mistress Askew” – a rather graphic account of a woman being burned at the stake, with enough Old English lines worked in to add an air of historic reality. (As it turns out, Mistress Anne Askew, a Protestant poet, was arrested several times, found guilty of heresy and, after torture in the Tower of London, burned at the stake in 1546. She was 26. You read Harsent’s poem, and you suffer alongside Mistress Askew. And it is a long poem. The poetry in this collection, his eleventh, is vivid, startling, and engaging. At some points he seems to be speaking a new kind of language, one filled with such sharp images that it almost leaves you breathless. This is poetry about England and its history, and poetry about England and its contemporary state – especially its state of the environment. “Bowland Beth” is a poem about a bird, a hen harrier, and was commissioned for The Sparrowhawk’s Lament: How British Breeding Birds of Prey Are Faring by David Cobham. The hen harrier is the focus of a bird breeding project in the Bowland Forest in Lancashire in northwestern England. Read it for the beauty of Harsent’s words, and the harsh reality of what he’s describing. Bowland Beth That she made shapes in air That she saw the world as patterns and light moorland to bare mountain drawn by instinct That she’d arrive at the corner of your eye the ghost of herself going silent into the wind That the music of her slipstream was a whisper drone tagged to wingtips That weather was a kind of rapture That her only dream was of flight forgiven moment by moment as she dreamed it That her low drift over heather quartering home ground might bring anyone to tears That she would open her prey in all innocence there being nothing of anger or sorrow in it That her beauty was prefigured That her skydance went for nothing hanging fire on plain air That her name is meaningless your mouth empty of it mind empty of it That the gunshot was another sound amid birdcall a judder if you had seen it her line of flight broken That she went miles before she bled out In his acknowledgements, Harsten says “the hen harrier is on the verge of extinction in England thanks to systematic, gleeful, illegal persecution: hen harriers take grouse. Bowland Beth was killed before she could breed.” Every poem in the collection is just as arresting, whether it’s about describing the travels of a rat as a kind of social commentary (“Sang the Rat”), poems that use tinnitus (that “white noise” sound you hear in your ear as you age) as a metaphor, or the poem entitled “Icefield” that uses words like cold knives. In short, "Fire Songs" is simply stunning.

• This is excellent, it is naked Poetry opening its mouth at the streaming stars. It has pace, which seems unbounded. It has a clarity which is quite panoramic in its scope but which also has a zoom button for details and a subtle ear to the patterns and streams of discourse and dialogues, History as Poetry, and Poetry as History.

• truthful poetry

• A classic Faber poetry edition as befits a masterful poet. The poems are dark, but beautiful, very close to songs in form with long lines and repetition of phrases. Anybody who appreciates poetry should have this on their shelf.

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