Tag Archives: David Harsent

The Tanglewood Sonnets by David Harsent (Vanguard Editions)

Posted on October 9, 2024 by tearsinthefence
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 9th October 2024

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Of Certain Angels by David Harsent (Dare-Gale Press), Annunciation Sonnets by Linda Kemp (Broken Sleep Books), The Book of Yona by Sarah Cave (Shearsman Books), Apostasy by John Burnside (Dare-Gale Press)

Posted on April 13, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Of Certain Angels by David Harsent (Dare-Gale Press), Annunciation Sonnets by Linda Kemp (Broken Sleep Books), The Book of Yona by Sarah Cave (Shearsman Books), Apostasy by John Burnside (Dare-Gale Press)

There is magic all around us. I do not mean the stuff of fairy stories and fantasy novels, nor do I mean the occult activities of lodges, covens, ritual groups or obsessive individuals. I mean the magic of language and its ability to create ideas, images and new worlds when arranged upon the page. 

David Harsent writes about ‘certain angels’, beings who are not spiritual or religious at all, rather sensual, seductive, passionate creatures engaging with humankind through music, sex, memory and invention. These angels write ‘delinquent’ poetry that is ‘ruinous’, guides the dark dreams of the sleeping, seduce with traces of their absence: ‘dark angles and deep scents’, ‘illusions of aphrodisia’, ‘patterns of light refracting to a hall of mirrors’. We are, it seems, mirages ‘in the corner of her eye’, beings who can never know ‘what prayers and hallelujahs light the commonplace’.

Linda Kemp’s Annunciation Sonnets also discusses ‘the insistence of extraordinary’ but there are only implied angels here in these deconstructive poems which take apart the very concept of the annunciation story, sometimes referring to specific images and artists, sometimes not, all ‘transmitting the moment’ and questioning the ‘influential metaphors’ of the Bible story where an angel tells a mother she is pregnant and prophesies what the future holds for her son. Kemp has little truck with the spiritual however: ‘the gesture of a martyr is no place marker’, she states in the book’s opening poem. Her texts consider the ‘documentation of salutation’ which continues to this day, how light and colour and shape convey the moment, the ‘bewildering piety’ of Mary, ‘the beginning of intimate / knowing’. There are no question marks in these poems, but there are implied questions and commentary in these playful, splintered poems riffing on the ‘various discrepancies’ of iconography and belief.

A quick online search shows much bickering between religious commentators, sects and denominations about whether Jesus had any siblings, Mary stayed a virgin, or the earth is flat (I made that last one up). It’s strange because there are clear Biblical references to four named brothers and to two unnamed sisters. Sarah Cave doesn’t care however, in The Book of Yona she names one sister Yona and has her cursed by the Apostles to live forever, or at least until her brother returns to Earth. So, she endures the centuries, on the way becoming a ‘cunning woman’, falling in love with ‘the beguine mystic Hadewijch of Brabant’ who lived in the 13th Century, and seemingly becoming a saint, remembered for a while through her relics, which by now are only folklore.

The book starts with a queer rewriting of The Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon as it is called here), a celebration of celibate longing and love, written – and still apparently being rewritten – for Hadewijch. It is desirous, lustful even, romantic and sensual, speaking of a ‘Love no flood can / quench’ as it hymns the author’s Beloved. Further sections of the book are more playful, as Yona becomes a bird, a cat, her own familiar, and her brother Jesus becomes yesyou. She is a shapeshifter, a timeless presence, a nature- and animal-lover like St Francis, a necromancer and is then forgotten. Even as St Yon.

All that is left are lost and missing relics, some of which have been recreated in wool by the St Didymus’s Mother’s Union and photographed here. Others only exist as ‘anecdotal information’ or are reputedly ‘held in another collection’, whilst ‘the existence of Yon’s Jewish heritage has been redacted’. After this, the collection draws to a close. There is a brief psalter, where Yona has become an anchoress whose relationship with the world is reduced to

                   gaps of beauty, nothing

     …

                                     gaps of beauty, sound between trees, nothing

and visions of the Crucifixion. A final section offers us a ‘Triptych’ of ‘sky, stardust, nebulae’, ‘gathered nightfall’, ‘occult blossoms’, a baby singing and breath turning Yona’s breastbone into ‘a fragile harp’, and then Yona is gone, as transient as ‘ants flying flying ants flying’, ‘like the mayfly, like the seed, / like the baby’s breath’. Cave’s new volume is a subtle, elusive text that only reveals its intricacies and playful subtext slowly, with rereading and attention, but it is also a book to enjoy as a reader.

John Burnside is having no truck with established religion, even fictional or poetic ones. Instead, in this fourteen poem sequence he prefers ‘Blossom in the ruins’ of belief, preferring ‘The Gospel of Narcissus’ where ‘every man [is] alone beneath the stars’. In ‘XII   Litha’ he reflects that

     In summer, it was harder to be churched;
     the pagan gods were out, their sentries
     drifting through the sunlit

     chapel, pollen
     scattered on the flagstones like some timeless
     scripture from a world before the Word.

Although he says ‘At one time, / […] there might have been a God’, it is to nature he returns, as ‘a pilgrim again, beyond all destination’, with ‘nothing to repent, / and nothing to forgive’. Embracing ‘The Heresy of the Free Spirit’ he ends – perhaps somewhat over-defiantly, considering the previous thirteen poems – ‘haunted by nothing at all.’

Rupert Loydell 13th April 2024

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Nine by David Harsent (Guillemot Press)

Posted on October 10, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Nine by David Harsent (Guillemot Press)

There is a long history of incomplete texts in poetry. From the fragments of Sappho to Ken Smith’s Burned Books, via Tom Phillip’s A Humument and Antonin Artaud’s demented scribbles and spells, authors have created works with missing, deleted, amended or changed parts. Nine claims to be ‘a reconstruction of certain passages from a notebook found among the writer’s effects’, although we are never told who that writer is, only that ‘[s]ome pages had been damaged, removed, or scored out.’ It also notes that the gaps in the text are as per the original. 

I mostly know David Harsent’s work through a couple of his early books of poems, his sequence about Mr. Punch (which seems to be out of print) and his recent versions of Yannis Ritsos poems. This book feels very different: stream(s) of consciousness, sexual and religious undertones and witchery, along with several mentions of specific, named works of art. It is incantatory, dense but lyrical, allusionistic and at times obscure and full of signs, symbols and digressions.

The poem starts with the notebook’s narrator remembering ‘the riddle of how she came to me at the tideline’, her ‘sudden arrival’, but quickly moves to one of many sections about and mentions of ‘The Fool’, here a ‘riddler     jester’ cackling at ‘nine white gulls on a flawless sky’. Then there is a passage about a witch’s stone, worn smooth, followed by the first of many notes regarding damaged and missing pages, then a brief consideration – reported as spoken by the unnamed ‘her’ – regarding the ‘women at the foot of the cross’. 

The obsession with representations of women continues throughout this long work. The abstract consideration of

     – the female form     (a charcoal sketch)    is a pattern of
     flow      is rhythmic     (first from life later from memory)
     the way self shadows self               the way line develops
     harmonies    the way light returns shape to shape    (up

changes into specific memories and misrememberings before becoming an image ‘set behind glass’, which links to mentions of paintings by Klimt, Sickert featuring women, but also to visual memories of landscapes and the sea, Dürer’s Melancholia and Holbein’s Dead Christ (both titles’ lack of italicisation appears to have escaped the proofreader’s notice) and possibly Malevich’s minimalist black square painting. Literature is in the mix too: Kristeva and Dostoevsky are mentioned in one section.

Death is a character, The Fool is a constant, as is the questioning of the representation of women: sex object, fetishised other, witch, object of devotion and desire and the dangerously clichéd whore/goddess duality. Fragments of narrative appear and fade away, moments of anger, silence, dreams and love; expressions of loss and mourning; children’s voices and the sounds of nature. Although we are told ‘the story of herself is simply told’ it is not, not here anyway; it resists the suggestion that it ‘goes into hiding in plain view’. This is a story of fogs and mists, misunderstandings and slippages between worlds. Of inclinations, assumptions and suggestions; rituals and self-sacrifice, emotional unrest and ‘passion’s overload’; questions and few answers. It all, suggests the text, leads to ‘fire-in-flood     and carnage    cities falling’, a world where ‘every doorway gives onto a boneyard’. And the final line is even darker, shockingly so, but I will let you read that for yourself.

I did wonder if the whole book is inspired by art, but I don’t think so. Nine is a ‘magical’ number in mathematics, there were nine muses, cats have nine lives, and in Norse mythology the tree of Yggdrasil not only supported nine worlds, but Odin was also hung on it for nine days. There are nine hares – often associated with witches – drawn on the cover of this book and in one of the illustrations; and I’m sure there are more connections and suggestions. But poems don’t need decoding in this way, it is enough to be challenged and entertained, seduced by the language and made to think. 

Nine is another beautifully designed hardback book from Guillemot, although it’s a shame that the 8 pages of illustrations (visual suggestions of the found notebook) are clustered together and printed on different paper rather than spread out throughout the text. I also found the text’s justification strange, as a handwritten notebook would not work in this way; I’d rather have had a ragged right-hand edge of text. But these are minor quibbles, Harsent has produced a distinctive and otherworldly long poem that reads as not only out-of-time but also contemporary, rooted in a mythical pagan past.

Rupert Loydell 10th October 2023


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Monochords by Yannis Ritsos with Chiara Ambrosio Translated by Paul Merchant (Prototype)

Posted on June 7, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Monochords by Yannis Ritsos with Chiara Ambrosio Translated by Paul Merchant (Prototype)

Yannis Ritsos was a prolific poet, who spent many years in prison or under house arrest because of his communist beliefs and opposition to Greece’s right-wing regimes. Monochords is a strange book amongst his work: 336 one-line poems written in a single month in 1979. I have a copy of the text already, but when several poems are presented on the page it’s difficult to allow them the mental space and room for understanding. 

This beautiful new edition corrects that: each page consists of a single poem accompanied by a small linocut from artist Chiara Ambrosio. She already knew the poems, indeed they had been a companion to her ‘for over a decade’, but when the pandemic and lockdown shut down, she set herself the task (‘I felt compelled,’ she says) to make an image for each monochord, one a day, reading and responding to the text, seeking ‘out resonances and emergences’.

They are more, much more, than illustrations though. They have become part of the poems, opening up what Ambrosio calls ‘text and image entwined in mysterious ways, creating often incendiary pairings, unlocking new, contemporary resonances within the text’. The artist describes her daily process as ‘akin to the tending of a garden’, but also ‘a dialogue with Ritsos’, her own ‘personal diary, and ‘a book of days’. It is this complex relationship, the entwining of poetic and visual lines which makes this volume so exciting. The past and present are mixed on the page: 1970s Greece, English translations from the Greek originals, lockdown London, the reader’s now, the timelessness of poetry and the imagination, and the way text can facilitate a kind of time travel:

     How gently time collapses into poetry.   (286)
                                                                                                                                                      
Sometimes Ritsos’ writing can be surreal, indeed the first book of his I came across – in a seaside shop in Greece, 1980 – seemed to present him as a juxtaposer of unconnected images and actions. In hindsight, having found other collections, most of this was due to the translations, not the original text, but there is no escaping the strangeness of some of Ritsos’ minimal poems:

     A naked man with an umbrella. Summer noon.   (72)


     At night, the sea with its ships enters my room.   (244)
         

Elsewhere, there are more straightforward moments: a ship departing the harbour whilst the poet remains on land, memories of ‘lost years’ triggered by ‘distant voices of children’, a red pebble hidden under a white one, rubbish on the stairs, all considered and given recognition or attention in retrospect:

     Much later you see what you saw.   (164)


Ritsos can be philosophical, too, about both the world and words themselves:

     I saw you and remembered poems.    (16)

     A word made fresh by repetition.     (17)
         

He also suggests poetry as a kind of ritual cleansing, a personal shedding and dismissal of, and moving on from, the past:

     I create lines to exorcise the evil that oppressed my country.  (203)
 
In addition to the images and texts of the poems themselves, the book contains several useful and informative texts. David Harsent, himself a translator and author of ‘versions’ of Ritsos introduces the writer himself, discusses the Greek derivation of ‘monochorda’, and then contextualises and discusses both Ritsos’ poems and Ambrosio’s images. The artist herself then describes the project, her working methods and relationship with the poems, which then follow. Gareth Evans’ ‘afterword’ is a wide-ranging essay which discusses re/presentation, materiality, the abuse of authority (and resistance to it), and contextualises the work in relation to film makers Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Tarkovsky, the author John Berger and several other writers, as well as myth and history.

The musician and author Thurston Moore, in his blurb, suggests that these monochords are ‘the essence of a thought, a sign, a glimmer’, the product of ‘singular moments and observations’, which Chiara Ambrosia has responded to in ‘a dance of suggestion’. This beautifully conceived, designed and produced book is the best form of collaboration, one where something new is produced whilst also retaining both the essence and specificity of the original. It is text and metatext, reinforcement, recognition and reconsideration of ideas, poetic gloss and development, commentary and continuation. As monochord 121 says:

     The distance between things keeps growing till they meet.


Rupert Loydell 7th June 2023

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