Chloe Stopa-Hunt reviews David Harsent's Night
Night is David Harsent's tenth collection of poems; his first since Legion, which won the Forward Prize in 2005 for its anguished, ambiguous war poetry. The new book begins before it's expected to, a short, untitled lyric preceding the acknowledgements and table of contents. These twelve lines stand as an epigraph to the main body of poems, sketching Night's motley cast of ghosts: the gambolling inhabitants of that “Happy Hour which lasts from dusk to dawn”. This collection explores, more intimately than any of Harsent's previous work, the premise that “darkness unquenched is our true endowment” (“Elsewhere”), so the transfiguration of night into an extended Happy Hour may seem disingenuous. Yet the essence of Harsent's dream-time, that slippery space in which many of the book's finest poems are sited, is its mutability of tone, its see-sawing from tenderness to horror.

As early as 1998, in A Bird's Idea of Flight, Harsent perceived that “the kind of hocus-pocus dreams deliver” (“Good Weather on the Lizard”) could offer fascinating if refractory material, and much of Night is concerned with presenting the irrational and hyper-emotive territory of dreamscapes. One sequence of poems, “The Queen Bee Canticles”, tells the reader that “this was dream-time, remember / when things come fast and smudged” (“The Apiarist Dreams of the Queen”), and many poems are rich in what Harsent calls “the sort of dream-fluke / that changes everything” (“Elsewhere”). Dreaming, we rescind control, and Night is a take-no-prisoners collection, a book that holds the reader's attention forcibly. By the time we reach the end of that introductory poem, its narrator is announcing that “the time to be gone has gone”; like a victim of Coleridge's Mariner, the reader of Night “cannot chuse but hear” all that is to follow.

Harsent invokes the same motif in the collection's last poem, “Elsewhere”, as its protagonist – dreamer and drinker, lover and guilty leaver – is drawn by memory's unrelenting tug through nearly thirty pages of fluid, devastating septets. Reaching the sea, he meets a “sad old sack” of a man:

     I start to get to my feet, but he takes me hard by the arm.
     'You of all people...' His hand drops, but the wet
     of his eye, reflecting a lick of flame,
     red in the iris and deep there, holds me.

The tales he's compelled to relate are at first archetypal: “the maiden and the loathly worm / [...]the gallant roped to the mast”. But they are superseded by the less familiar story of a “man who spoke his mind, / fastened his eyes on darkness, and hunkered down in a cage / of secrets”. The narrator of the poem is being offered his own tale: his are the eyes fixed on darkness, the darkening skies and the dark cinema-screen of reminiscence. Harsent's poems collapse the boundaries separating creators and consumers of narrative. In “Live Theatre”, there is ultimately no meaningful distinction between actor and audience member: “The leading man's / in the seat next to yours, worn out, his head in his hands”. The death-bed dragged onto the stage is also the death-bed in “Black”, the scene of thoughts turned inside out (“It's been a lifetime coming but now you understand, / or think you do, why what you wanted wasn't what you planned”), and consummate intimacy achieved; the dying speaker feeding from Death's own hand.

Harsent's narrators even seem eager to borrow their author's organising forms. In the eponymous “Night”, the sleepless vigil-keeper is charged with an unusual work of accountancy:

                                                                   his duty then to check

     statistics, to itemise the download, to keep track
     of the trade in flesh, of the how and where and when of the recent dead

Harsent is a great list-maker. He favours the extended sentence, many clauses long, and the poetic catalogue; both allow him to construct breath-taking chains of images which spill across the restrained stanzaic forms (usually couplets or tercets) he typically prefers. This amplification swoops inventively between registers, absorbing everything in its path. In “Rota Fortunae”, the progress of the inexorable wheel is “simply the way of death”:

                                                                 is death
     as shiftless shadow, death as that hint in the air, as the first

     waking thought, death as a face in the street,
     a face in a photo-album long since lost,
     is death the dreamer, death the locksmith, death now cast

     as a friend in need, death as the thin
     end of the wedge, is the fuddle of death, the way death sidles in
     with a nod and a cough, is death self-styled,

     is the niff, the nub, the rub of death[...]

This rapid-fire juggling of death is tinged with a seventeenth-century sensibility: Harsent, like Donne, might be caught exclaiming, “How witty's ruin!”, half-admiring and half-afraid. “Rota Fortunae” articulates Night's need to fuse merciless determinacy – “a deal // struck at the hour of your birth” – with randomness, or “giving yourself over to chance”. In “Elsewhere”, the universe telegraphs its annihilation of this fragile balance: watching the sun sink “like a broken wheel”, it becomes clear to both dreamer and reader that deciding to surrender to chance was always an illusion. As in Ascending and Descending (1960), Escher's lithograph of an endless staircase, the dreamer re-treads an inescapable pattern: his life.

In “Contre-jour”, one narrator seems to sum up the book's katabatic progresses with his assertion that “My descent was a kind of dance”. Night is infused with the capacity for such reversals, always threatening or promising a change of key: even joy is “hazardous” (“Live Theatre”) and “a slippery slope” (“Elsewhere”). Harsent recognises that ending the sort of journeys he traces will always more-or-less mean pulling the wool over his reader's eyes; the promise of metamorphosis, then, is his best resistance to the pressure of telos. Old doubts about journeys, dating back to his first collection (A Violent Country, 1969), have shaped Night profoundly. “The Hut in Question” illustrates a quest – the narrator visiting Edward Thomas's writing hut – yet attacks questing's egotism: “its self-regard[...] its need to know / the worst and wear its sorrows like a badge”. These quests have ceased to satisfy, or perhaps to occur at all: “Elsewhere” affirms that “despite everything your journey was no true test / since the road that took you away is the self-same road / that has brought you round again”. Here, Harsent uses the idiom of “big poems” in no spirit of mere imitation. On the contrary, he re-fashions the idealised circularity of Eliot's Little Gidding – “the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” – into something restless, dissatisfied, and infinitely contemporary. Night is anchored by expertly-observed material detail, yet its prevailing tone is one of evasive and grief-stricken mysticism. Harsent has written a bookful of Dream Songs for our time, a collection revealing again and again that its author is at the height of his powers.

David Harsent, Night, Faber and Faber, 2011. £9.99. 978-0-57125-563-4
© Chloe Stopa-Hunt, 2011
The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.