A work in which the sureties of daylight become uncertain: dark, unsettling narratives about what wakes in us when we escape our day-lit selves to visit a place where the dream-like and the nightmarish are never far apart.

Yannis Ritsos (19091990) is one of Greece s finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. Louis Aragon called him the greatest poet of our age . He wrote in the face of ill health, personal tragedy and the systematic persecution by successive hard-line, right-wing regimes that led to many years in prison, or in island detention camps. Despite this, his lifetime s work amounted to 120 collections of poems, several novels, critical essays, and translations of Russian and Eastern European poetry.The 1960 setting, by Mikis Theodorakis, of Ritsos s epic poem...

The poems in David Harsent's new collection, whether single poems, dramatic sequences, or poems that 'belong to one another', share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone. Throughout the book - in the stark biography of 'Songs from the Same Earth', the troubling fractured narrative of 'A Dream Book', the harrowing lines of connection in four poems each titled 'Fire', or the cheek-by-jowl shudder of 'Sang the Rat' - Harsent writes, as always, with passion and a sureness of ltouch.