In an illustrious career, the author has published eight collections of poetry, from "A Violent County" in 1969 to "Legion", winner of the Forward Prize in 2005. This work is a selection, made by the author himself, that draws upon the full arc of his care

Marriage consists of two sequences of poems. The first is loosely based on the relationship between Pierre Bonnard and his muse and model, who became eventually his wife. It is a rich pattern for the study of the mysteries of domesticity, the unspoken privacies and intimacies that can exist between two people. For the painter, problems of seeing become, for the husband, problems of knowing. 'Marriage' is an inspired portrait of conjugality, exact, watchful and understated. The second sequence, 'Lepus', extends an interest in the hare as trickster, traceable elsewhere in David Harsent's work,...

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.

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.