David Harsent Book order

Skin is David Harsent's visionary new collection, consisting of ten dramatic sequences of poems, which, like a planetary system, operate on one another in a dynamic assemblage of propulsion and pull.

Versions by one of Britain's best-known poets of Yannis Ritsos (1909-90) - along with Cavafy, Seferis and Elytis - one of the most significant Greek poets of the 20th century. Harsent's selection is of poems written while Ritsos was in prison or under house arrest.

It is 00:00 and the full of the night yet to come. A man sits at a window through the dead hours of night, his sleep broken by troubling dreams of a figure in a white landscape. He is a man afflicted by personal loss, but also a man of his time, all too aware of the troubled world in which he lives.

A Bird's Idea of Flight describes a circular journey in a sequence of 25 poems. Twelve poems chart the outward journey, the thirteenth is pivotal, and twelve poems bring the traveler back.

'They belong to each other in mood, in tone and by way of certain images and words that form a ricochet of echoes - not least the word salt.' Mineral, eerie, sensory, 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.

Featuring a collection of poems, this book includes dramatic sequences that belong to one another, share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone.

Among the poems that open Night, David Harsent's follow-up to his Forward Prize-winning collection Legion, is a startling sequence about a garden - but a garden unlike any other.

In an illustrious career, David Harsent has published eight collections of poetry, from A Violent County in 1969, to Legion, winner of the Forward Prize in 2005.

The second sequence, 'Lepus', extends an interest in the hare as trickster, traceable elsewhere in David Harsent's work, and most recently in 'The Woman and the Hare', a piece commissioned by the Nashe Ensemble, set to music by Harrison Birtwistle, and first performed at the South Bank Centre in 1999.