Salt

Salt is a 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 brief utterances. One extends 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, 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 – 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.