“There’s a smell of scorch in the air. And the time to be gone has gone.” So runs the last line of Night’s unnamed, prologue poem. The sense of menace in these two stripped-back and direct sentences goes only someway to preparing you for the shadowy and often threatening worlds David Harsent conjures in this collection. The loose tezra-rima style stanza forms which are used in many of the poems in the first-half nod towards Dante’s journey to the underworld, but in Night the damned remain on earth, propping up bars and wandering rainy streets, pursued by past lives. There is much that sounds like portent: “the sky on fire, cloud-wrack a bled bruise” but the prophecies remain undeciphered and unfulfilled. It is through this purgatorial half-light that Harsent brilliantly leads us, with ‘blood’ and ‘night’ echoing as talismanic signposts throughout.

The writing shows once again Harsent’s proficiency with form, intricate rhyme patterns are deployed providing incredible sonic-linkage in many of the poems. The poem ‘Moppet’, for example, crams 14 rhymes for ‘air’ into its ten lines, but with such subtly that the laconic voice which presides throughout this collection barely quickens its breath, while ‘Ballad’ shows there is still life left in that venerable metrical arrangement. This easy formalism works perfectly as the medium for the hard-boiled but lyrically adept narrator which closes the collection in the bravura 26-page closing poem, ‘Everywhere’. Even this poem, with its thrilling back-alley ambiance, begins with a sly nod to tradition: “First of the night and this ae night it’s gin” surely references the Lyke Wake Dirge, alerting readers to a possible after-life interpretation of Harsent’s poem.

Although there is a noir-like quality to some of the settings, on the whole the poems seem to take place in a kind of timeless stasis, reinforced by the deployment of archaic of obscure words: ‘hobbledehoy’, ‘spaewife’. However, even this is countered by the colloquial and the cliché, reinvigorated by Harsent’s use: “my intention / is to eat them out of house and home, to go hand over fist / at whatever they bring on.” Nor does he stint on sensuous description. The poem ‘Spatchcock’ takes in preparing a chicken, sunbathing, and sex, with each activity blending into the next; descriptions are shared and as one thing leads to another.

This is truly startling collection of poems, resembling at times the tenebrous style of a Caravaggio painting, at others the smoky atmosphere of a 1920s detective novel. David Harsent won the Forward prize for his previous book, Legion, and he must surely be in the running for the next year’s prize, and a slew of other prizes as well.

Hear an interview with David on Bookhugger

Bookmark to