Fire Songs
by David Harsent
Summary
Fire Songs burns from end to end: the book is threaded on a sequence of fire poems, among them Fire: a song for Mistress Askew, which opens the collection and goes as close as it can to the flames that consumed the Protestant martyr Anne Askew, and around those pyres David Harsent assembles a landscape of drought, scorched fields, feverish dreams, and end times weather, a collection pitched at the apocalyptic register that the T.S. Eliot Prize's own page later caught in a phrase, calling him a poet for dark and dangerous days. Harsent had spent a career earning the description. His previous books had entered war zones and interrogation rooms, and his long collaboration with the composer Harrison Birtwistle, operas and vocal works staged at the Royal Opera House and beyond, had trained a gift for the incantatory line, verse built to be sounded, dark liturgies with real musical architecture under them. Fire Songs runs that instrument at full power: the martyr's burning rendered without anesthetic, fire as punishment, purification, prophecy, and appetite, the natural world going down not in metaphor but in heat, and among the visions a thread of personal reckoning, the poet interrogating his own witness the way his poems have always interrogated everyone else's. It is not comfortable reading and does not intend to be; the book's wager is that the oldest lyric subjects, fire, death, and judgment, are also the morning's news. The 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize agreed, crowning a poet who had already been shortlisted four times, and the win read as recognition of a whole body of work arriving at its darkest, most concentrated form.
Historical Context & Significance
Harsent was born in Devon in 1942 and came up through the circle around the critic Ian Hamilton, supporting the poetry for years with television scripts and crime novels published under the pseudonyms Jack Curtis and David Lawrence, a double life that amused profile writers and visibly fed the poems' feel for menace and violence; he later held professorships including at Roehampton university. The long Birtwistle collaborations, meanwhile, made him Britain's leading poet librettist by common consent. Fire Songs appeared in 2014, as drought and burning summers were becoming the era's imagery, and its Eliot win placed the prize's laurel on the generation's great poet of dread, whose subsequent collections kept the register while the weather kept catching up with the poems.