Fire Songs - Tapa dura

With every book [Harsent's] stature as a truly significant writer becomes more undeniable ... Fire Songs teems with images and ideas that manage to be both richly detailed and vividly musical. (Fiona Sampson Independent)

A poet to lose yourself in ... His work is a dark pleasure to read and reread. (Dermot Bolger Sunday Business Post)

A fascinating British poet, a writer we should treasure. (Charlotte Runcie Daily Telegraph)

Reading this marvellous, difficult, essential collection, it is hard to think of any poet working in this country today who is so demanding, both of himself and of the reader; harder still to think of one who is as morally and imaginatively rewarding. (John Burnside)

It is an extremely rare book that goes as deep, as far as Fire Songs ... [it] is both great and important, and you will not leave this book the same. An instant classic, but also the year's most relevant book: read it amid the flames of the news. (Patrick Davidson Roberts The Next Review)

This book was the winner of the 2014 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry. "A writer we should treasure." (Charlotte Runcie, Daily Telegraph). "With every book [Harsent's] stature as a truly significant writer becomes more undeniable." (Fiona Sampson, Independent). 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 touch.