Loss

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 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 monologue - gives, first, an account of the man, then addresses him directly. We learn of a conflicted childhood, of love lost to circumstance, of the press of death on the protagonist's waking thoughts. He is a man afflicted by personal loss, but also a man of his time, all too aware of the troubled world in which he lives. In this powerful sequence, Harsent's breathtaking formal skills are always in evidence. Intense, lyrical and passionate, Loss makes for enthralling reading.

Author: David Harsent
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 05/05/2020
Pages: 160
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.20h x 6.40w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9780571290550
ISBN10: 0571290558
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

About the Author
David Harsent has published twelve collections of poetry. Night (2011), a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the Costa, Forward and T. S. Eliot poetry prizes and won the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Fire Songs (2014) won the T. S. Eliot Prize. The most recent, Salt, was published in 2017.