The Tanglewood Sonnets by David Harsent (Vanguard Editions)

Following his last, visionary, Faber collection Skin, published earlier this year, David Harsent’s latest publication is a simple but beautifully produced 20 page limited edition, The Tanglewood Sonnets, from Richard Skinner’s Vanguard Editions. 

It contains fourteen sonnets.  Each is composed of an opening couplet, followed by a tercet, then two stanzas of four, then five lines. The final line, often a complete sentence, can wrong-foot the reader, countering or contradicting, at times enriching what’s come before. Each has a title which picks up a word from the text.  As in this poet’s previous works, the structure as a whole works through rhythm and repetition.   

There are two unnamed characters, a ‘he’ and a ‘she’. In the first sonnet ‘Their voices sometimes match and marry’ but more often they are distanced, with the man on the outside watching the woman from afar, who is struggling through her own journey, maybe in search of a place of safety. A dreamlike narrative is developed, filmic, with shifting scenes.  A sense of unstable realities and perceptions is emphasised by phrases such as ‘it seemed she might/her understanding of it/what appears/what presents as/what’s said to…’.  Everything is suggested, yet an emotional urgency carries the narrative through the poems and the effect is cumulative, like the form itself.  

Dark images of violence, loss, anguish and despair, reappear at two levels, the intimate, within the relationship, and the wider social and political through the loss of home, migration, an apocalyptic destruction through fire.  In the first sonnet we learn ‘They were members of a cargo-cult’ and images related to such a cult recur: a spiritual search, prophecy, burning, ecstatic dance, a departure from an island, the ghosts of dead ancestors, pariah dogs. Esoteric references, with scenes of fairground (a sonnet titled ‘Freak-show’) and a maze, familiar from some of Harsent’s earlier work, also return in two of the sonnets.  In fact many of the themes, images and references echo Harsent’s earlier volumes of poetry as if they were all part of one pulsing work.

The necessity and limitations of writing as a way of comprehending reality and retaining memory, are touched on in two sonnets. The woman is at times blind and speechless but she’s making notes in a dreambook.   Sonnet IX ‘Words’ expresses some of its contradictions. In the second stanza: ‘Who owns the book must surely treasure it’, is followed in the third by:  

‘Question-marks, under-scoring, marginalia, lines

struck out…It was a long night. There are words

she no longer trusts; they have shed

their music; they say just what they mean’. 

For a poet, words that say what they mean but are without ‘music’ can be at some level untrustworthy, untruthful and, despite the ‘surely’ in the second stanza, the book is not treasured. In the final stanza there’s a house torn down, an oil-drum-fire burning what’s left, and in the last line: ‘She crosses the road and pitches the book into that’. 

Sonnet X ‘The Exchange’ is built up of a vocabulary of sounds: the woman makes a noise that ‘matches’ the dog barking (as she ‘matches’ the man in the first sonnet). There’s ‘a timbral footfall’. ‘The bird is glissando’ and ‘delirious counterpoint’. A sonnet of sounds. Yet again the last line appears to under-cut what’s gone before: ‘From a nearby room he listens to the silence’, prompting the reader to wonder, is that the silence, or his silence?

The work is strongly visual, filmic, choreographic, and as always, musical. Harsent has written libretti for Harry Birtwhistle and has spoken in interviews of how essential music is for him. In a commendation on the back cover of this pamphlet, Sean O’Brien refers to the word-choice, sentence construction and to ‘the musical undertow of the poem’. He states ‘Harsent is the poet as composer’.    

It’s hard to define the powerful effect of Harsent’s writing. It doesn’t lie in the immediate grasp of what the poem is ‘about’.  Part of the satisfaction is in re-reading the poems, to draw out their meanings, but even more it is to experience the cumulative effect of the poetry (images, sounds, intensity of emotion), all that remains with you after you’ve set the book down, and ‘the musical undertow’. 

Caroline Maldonado 9^th October 2024