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Poem of the Week: ‘Icefield’ by David Harsent

11 August 2025

Our Poem of the Week is ‘Icefield’ by David Harsent, from his collection Fire Songs.

The poems in David Harsent’s collection Fire Songs, whether single poems, dramatic sequences, or poems that ‘belong to one another’, share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone. Throughout the book – in the stark biography of ‘Songs from the Same Earth’, the troubling fractured narrative of ‘A Dream Book’, the harrowing lines of connection in four poems each titled ‘Fire’, or the cheek-by-jowl shudder of ‘Sang the Rat’ – Harsent writes, as always, with passion and a sureness of touch.

Icefield A place of ice over ice, of white over white and beauty in absences. There was a time when the only sound was the wind calling its ghosts, when the skyline was set clean as a scar on glass, when your heartbeat slowed with the cold, when your dreams brought in a white bird on a white sky and music that could only be heard from time to time on the other side of night. Now the horizon’s a smudge; now there’s a terrible weight in the air and a stain cut hard and deep in the permafrost. Breakage and slippage; the rumble of some vast machine cranking its pistons, of everything on the slide; and the water rising fast, and the music lost.

Copyright © David Harsent, 2015. Used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

Read all our poems of the week.

Buy the Book

Fire Songs
Fire Songs
David Harsent
£12.99

Winner of the 2014 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry: Fire Songs is a collection from award-winning poet David Harsent.

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