Skin, David Harsent's new collection, consists of ten dramatic sequences of poems, which, like a planetary system, operate on one another in a dynamic assemblage of propulsion and pull. The stage is charged and minimal. Harsent works from an image-bank of 'touchstones' accrued over the course of a long poetic career and rich with symbolic import: doorways and windows, a bed, a mirror, the sea, the moon. To which, the players arrive in various configurations: a man, a woman, a chor...

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. Throughout 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 su...

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. 'The poe...

The city never sleeps. Silence would weaken it. When all else fails it talks to itself: seamless thrum of machinery: dark undertone.It is 00:00 and the full of the night yet to come.A haunting twenty-part sequence that captures the rich psychological depth of a mind at night, filmic in quality. Each poem should be read in numerical order and consists of an unrhymed sonnet, followed by a 60-line column, sealed with a rhymed quatrain. Between the sections, a...

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...

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.

The city never sleeps. Silence would weaken it.When all else fails it talks to itself seamless thrum ofmachinery dark undertone.It is 00:00 and the full of the night yet to come.A man sits at a window through the dead hours of night, his sleep broken by troubling dreams of a figure in a white landscape. This fragmentary vigil anchors a series of narrative sections in which a dramatic voice - which might well be an interior mon...

The Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for the Winter Quarter, 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 the systematic persecution by successive hard-line, right-wing regimes that led to many years in prison, or in island detention camps. Despite this, his lifetime's work ...

A Broken Man in Flower presents new versions of work by one of the most significant Greek poets of the last century, translated by one of the UK's most renowned contemporary poets.The life of Yannis Ritsos was, to say the least, troubled. From an early age, he was dogged by the tuberculosis that killed his mother and brother. His father and sister suffered breakdowns and spent time in institutions. His poem Epitaphios (1936), a la...