David Harsent's Night was a masterpiece of dislocation, corruption and, mainly, gin. This next collection, if anything, has got darker.
Fire; a song for Mistress Askew opens the set maghnificently, but horribly. It is an unremitting account of the burning of, we assume, one accused of witchcraft,
Some stood....
close enough to hear the shrivel-hiss
of burning hair, to see her sag and slump, to witness
the pucker and slide of her skin, the blister-rash on her eyeballs.
One could begin to wonder whether it doesn't become a bit gratuitous were it not so well done. The only solace seems to be that 'in the fire lies your salvation, Anne'.
If students are still encouraged to identify semantic fields then they will not struggle to list such fire-related waste words as 'scorched', 'ash', 'charred' and the cumulative effect they have of this world as blackened debris. There is a lot of burning in these extended poems, many acknowledged as commissions, but there are other aspects of deadening, dead senses, places beyond human existence or extinction. Another semantic field might be identified around 'ghosts' and 'dreams' which recur often, and 'sleep', 'blindness' and 'silence'.
The poems other than the fiery ones are perhaps the most successful.
Bowland Beth laments the killing of a hen harrier which, in the note, it says, 'is on the verge of extinction in England thanks to systematic, gleeful, illegal persecution' so we can be reassured of where Harsent stands on the issue. She is celebrated,
That her only dream was flight forgotten
moment by moment as she dreamed it
before the economical but harrowing lines on her being shot.
Icefield is the massive, slow movement of Antarctic 'ice over ice, of white over white / and beauty in absences', a colossal abnegation in nature, whereas Trickster Christ with 'the stench of the grave still on him' is a dubious miracle worker returned from the dead, not really of this world but still feeling a 'jolt' and his hand in the dip of Mary's back is 'surely the start' of something really quite earthly.
The Rat poems can't help but bring to mind Crow with their disgust and will to survive but it is in Effaced that there might be a bit more to it all than a further virtuoso run through the macabre dungeon of the imagination. It concerns Dorothy Wordsworth and the 'heavily deleted' account in her journal of how she wore the ring her brother's wife was going to wear on the day before their wedding,
widowed without being wed, feeding the fire, if you want to, with
reams
of work half-done and left to grow in silence, that precious stack
curling and catching- last love, last light- as you burn whatever
rhymes.
And so perhaps really the poems are about the removal or denial of identity, sometimes entering into worlds that are not this one, on the edge between them, or simply oblivion. It takes the poems in Night that stage beyond the rather more benign ghosts we met there. It is a dark vision but one that persuades us of its likelihood.
