Available Formats
Salt
By (Author) David Harsent
Faber & Faber
Faber & Faber
4th March 2019
7th February 2019
Main
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Modern and contemporary poetry (c 1900 onwards)
821.914
Paperback
192
Width 160mm, Height 205mm, Spine 15mm
275g
Salt is a distinctive assembly of poems by the multi-award winning David Harsent. Resting somewhere between fragment and exposition, these intense and primal pieces stretch out across the measure of the page in the form of brief utterances. One extends to sonnet-length, one consists of a single line; but each piece uniquely completes its own world, and at the same time shades on to the next as a succession of frames and stills and imaginings that lends light and colour in the round. 'The poems in this book are a series, not a sequence,' the author explains. 'They belong to each other in mood, in tone and by way of certain images and words that form a ricochet of echoes - not least the word "salt".'
Mineral, eerie, sensory, the poems in the collection are experienced as encounters - some with the surety of daylight, others in dream-life - that refresh with the turning of each page. Like a set of shared notes or little fictions passed through space from hand to hand, the writings build powerfully to make Salt an unforgettable volume from this most visionary of writers.
David Harsent has published eleven 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. The most recent, Fire Songs, was published in 2014 and won the T. S. Eliot Prize.