‘The Tanglewood Sonnets’ (Vanguard Editions, 2024)
Image © Jules Atkinson
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Following his latest masterpiece, Skin, David Harsent presents a suite of 14 sonnets. Written in a new incremental shape, these poems delve into the ‘human drama’ with soul-deep fierceness. Each piece is passionate, rigorous and quite unlike anything else in contemporary poetry, although they might be likened to György Ligeti’s Études pour piano for their intensity and impact. The Tanglewood Sonnets is testimony to Harsent’s skill in recording the fragility and resilience of human experience. He is a prophet of ghosts.
‘Word-choice, musicality, the relation between sentence construction and line: few poets nowadays work with equal assurance in all these areas. David Harsent is one. His world of loss, sex, death and punitive memory seems unique to him. The musical undertow of the poems ushers the reader into a landscape and a climate where time and place are almost but not quite within reach, and at the same time inescapable. Harsent is the poet as composer.’ — Sean O’Brien ‘Harsent’s work is so astonishingly musical as well as visionary, and yet the voice is uncompromising. The craft is always immaculate, and the imagination boundless, but I still don’t know how he does it.’ — Ruth Padel ‘The Tanglewood Sonnets is a beautiful little pamphlet and I am relishing it, the challenge and the movement, the matter-of-fact telling of mysteries, the slicing down with the gentlest of blades into moving depths of experience and longing. "Her nightwalk ends at a fairground. Energy / locked-off. It stills her blood. The broken music." So much, so tender and so powerful.’ — John F Deane ‘It’s hard to define the powerful effect of Harsent’s writing. It doesn’t lie in the immediate grasp of what the poem is ‘about’. Part of the satisfaction is in re-reading the poems, to draw out their meanings, but even more it is to experience the cumulative effect of the poetry (images, sounds, intensity of emotion), all that remains with you after you’ve set the book down, and ‘the musical undertow’.’ — Caroline Maldonado (full review here) You can read an interview I conducted with David here: pp.20 / £10 incl. UK p&p (please add £5 for Europe / £6.50 for the rest of the world) You can purchase a copy of The Tanglewood Sonnets via PayPal using: [email protected] Alternatively, you can make a bank transfer to VANGUARD READINGS, Account Number: 21788057, Sort Code: 50-10-29. Please let me know your postal address via the Contact Page. |
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