Spoken Ink Poetry: Night

By: David Harsent

Narrated by: David Harsent

David Harsent's latest collection, here read by the author in its entirety, was received with wide critical acclaim when published in early 2011, and was Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring and short listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize. The collection won the Griffin Prize for Poetry in 2012, the largest and one of the most prestigious poetry prizes in the world. 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 sustained ‘Elsewhere’, a noirish, labyrinthine quest-poem in which the protagonist is drawn ever onward through a series of encounters and reflections like an after-hours Orpheus, hard-bitten and harried by memory. The print edition is published by Faber & Faber.

©2012 Spoken Ink (P)2012 Spoken Ink