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Harsent's
tenth collection of poetry, Fire Songs, is a beautifully arranged descent into
a world in which 'the clocks are set / one at the right time, one to fool the
devil.' Composed of single poems, those that 'belong together' and set
sequences, the collection is sprinkled with recurring leitmotifs on which the
poems coalesce to assume a sense of unity and shared purpose. 'There's the
butt-end of prophecy to be sure', Harsent conjures intense and visceral
images of rats, tinnitus, war and environmental damage. These recur
throughout the work and invoke the prophetic spirit of a mystic or prescient
'in constant song' and on 'the edge of sleep, that fine and full suspension
of the will.'
They are drinking the
last of the wine having drunk
the last of the water...
through veils of smoke and smut the blank
stare of angels as they
tread the air, as they ransack the sublime.
This is the poetry of warning and sacrifice and it is masterful in its
realisation.
Harsent establishes his gambit in 'Fire: A song for Miss Askew', the collection's
opening poem, here the speaker observes a bonfire and becomes entangled with
the execution of the sixteenth century poet Anne Askew whose judges 'brede
cockatrice egges and weve the spyders webbe.' What follows is an
intense and sustained vision of the poet's death:
And when I wake in
sunlight, that flare is the flare
in her eye, that rising
note in my ear the singing deep in green
branches, that low rumble
her blood at a rolling boil;
and what screams from the
centre, now, as her hair
goes up in a rush, as her
fingers char,
as the spit on her tongue
bubbles and froths, as she browns from heel
to head, as she cracks
and splits, as she renders to spoil:
the only thing she can
get to me through the furnace, as I lean
in to her, is yes, it
will be fire it will be fire it will be fire ...
that
leaves the reader in no doubt of the role to be played by fire within the
collection: simultaneously an unpredictable harbinger of death and
redemption, as likely to 'stoop(s) to take up your soul' as it is to
'shrivel-hiss/of burning hair'.
Rather than relying, as a lesser poet might, on an archaic mode or language,
Harsent regularly surprises with his unusual choice of syntax and utilises
full and half rhymes to great effect Ð most noticeably in 'Effaced in which
the reader hears the hidden 'rooms', 'reams' and 'rhymes' and senses Dorothy
Wordsworth's 'life beyond the life and known to no one.' Fire Songs is musical and richly
detailed, capturing a confessional dreamscape that often infuses the
collection as a whole with a sense of creeping unease. This perceived
darkness gathers above the lyric as a great dark storm cloud, breaking on
such frantic movements as the scrawling and anarchic staccato syntax of 'Sang
the Rat' and the agonising delight of 'A Dream Book' in which one lover
remarks to another 'You think you are safe? You are not.'
It's a shame that, owing to the might of the longer pieces and sequential
poems often the short form fragmentary pieces are left by the wayside. I
refer here to the likes of 'The Fool at Court' and 'Rat Again' which despite
their nuanced turns (especially with regard to the latter) feel like little
more than quaint poetic sorbets to cleanse the reader's palate and allow
Harsent to flutter between his themes and better navigate the dense
interconnected references. There will be those who attempt Fire Songs and find themselves
unmoved or even put off by the level of personal work Harsent expects of his
readers, but those who come to the collection open to doing a bit of further
research will likely pay its dividends and will reward both poet and reader
with a shared respect. As the speaker of 'Fire: love songs and descants' attests '...It's not only in
dreams that I can go through fire...'
© Phillip Clement 2014
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