Results by "David Harsent" in All categories

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.

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.