Salt

(Hardback, Main)

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Salt is the distinctive new 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 utterances of two and three and four and five lines, like a series of fingers opening from a hand. Some extend beyond, to the length of a sonnet, others are 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, by way of certain images and words that form a ricochet of echoes - not least the word "salt".' Mineral, eerie, sensory, spine-tingling, the poems in the collection are experienced as encounters - some with the surety of daylight, others in dream-life - 'happenings' 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 discovery by this most visionary of writers.

Reviews

'Probably the richest, most seductive and, at the same time, most rigorous imagination working in English poetry today.' John Burnside, Guardian

Author Bio

David Harsent has published eleven collections of poetry. Night (2011) was 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.