If some poets' work looks a lot like their other work, then so can some reviewers'. I flatter myself that a rehash of things I've said here before constitute a review. Halfway through Loss I wondered whether I could assay the same sort of bad pastiche that I've taken to doing when Paul Muldoon publishes new poems but whereas Muldoon seems unreviewable to me and imitation is some kind of flattery, perhaps I can at least say something about David Harsent before one day accepting that, like music, one can no more review proper poetry than direct people towards it.I steadfastly remain immune, even antagonistic, towards the idea of the 'poem sequence'. I don't know exactly why. It's perfectly harmless. Actually I do know why but I can't say. If the blurb here, and David, both say that Loss is a sequence then that's what it is but - stop me if you've heard it all before - such things are generally, if not always, either a long poem in sections or a collection of related poems, that is, The Waste Land or the Stratford man's Sonnets.
As my first piece of evidence, I cite the form of Loss, which is XX poems in the same elaborate but consistent form, viz,
14 lines that look like a prose poem but probably aren't;
a longer, often torrential, couple of pages of short-lined free verse - they vary in length but not by much;
four lines, rhymed abab;
and fractured lines in italics, with the protagonist, the sufferer, looking out of a window through the night.
There is so much unity to these 80 pages that it is as 'tight' a poem as something like The Sunlight on the Garden while still allowing David Harsent's facility to extend further and further into his dark theme. It's no wonder that the cover quotes John Burnside, who is the only one at least as good at doing such a thing. But, indeed, they could stand alone, as they have in magazines, because one is like the other except that one feels that the loss of the 'other', towards the end, transmutes into an awareness of the poet/persona/speaker's own mortality.
It appeared, for all the world, that David had lost his partner and that this was an account of his grief, not unlike those by Douglas Dunn, Christopher Reid or Julian Barnes, but more harrowing and nightmarish. But an internet check suggests that Julia Watson, who appeared in Casualty, is alive and hopefully well. I didn't really want to do that and now better appreciate the olde-worlde dogma we were taught at university 1978-81 that the text is all there is and biographical detail are not relevant.
So this is either some other loss or a work of the imagination and we shouldn't underestimate the powers of the imagination. What we might do is evaluate whether we prefer sincerity, or 'truth', over invention in literature. And the answer might be 'neither' because all you have to do is be any good.
Such concentration on the loss of someone else makes Larkin's fear for his own mortality seem very selfish but the difference is reduced as soon as the pity reverts to the one left behind rather than the one gone.
I didn't read David's Salt because it was reportedly made up of short poems. Yet another of my prejudices is against short poems, that include the briefer of Don Paterson's aphorisms and haiku in English. I could begin to feel like poetry's answer to Tommy Robinson, furious about harmless things, were it not for the rationale that in English one needs more than 17 syllables to get from one place to another. It rarely works.
So, while Fire Songs was a fine thing, I'm left alarmed that Night was 2011. Who knows where the time goes. Night ended with pages and pages, battering and battering us with its gin-drenched Elsewhere, and, apart from the fact it is now whisky and wine, Loss is from the same bloodline, blood being one of its leitmotifs, as well as Christianity, sleeplessness, fear, an abyss that is more terrifying for being white rather than black. There's bad going on out there as well as in here and don't we all know it.
One can admire it immensely but I won't ever be sure I 'like it'. I don't think one is supposed to 'like it' and it's not the sort of poem that would care if you did or not.
