While reading Martha Schwer’s blog this morning, I learned that the Whitebread Book Award nominations have been published. One of the poetry nominations caught my eye: David Harsent’s book of poetry titled Legion.
David Harsent’s biography is impressive. He has published eight collections of poetry. His last collection, Marriage, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and won the Forward Prize for Best Collection. He is also known for his collaborations with the composer Harrison Birtwistle: their works include a libretto, Gawain (performed by the Royal Opera House) and The Woman and the Hare (which was performed at the South Bank Centre and Carnegie Hall).
This year’s nomination, Legion, which just won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in October, is (as described by Whitebread) "a gathering of reports from an unnamed war-zone: a series of discrete images, voices, events, and intermittent despatches – immediate and vivid – that come together to give witness to the experience and consequences of war and conflict."
He wrote an intriguing article for The Guardian, London, "Sounding the Alarm," in which he described how the idea of Legion was born. Consider his opening paragraph:
In 2001, Jo Shapcott asked me to send her a poem for an anthology she was editing for the Royal Institution. Contributors were to take as a subject any lecture recently given at the RI. I chose "From metals with a memory to brilliant light-emitting solids", not least because the commission was obviously a challenge and it seemed the least hospitable subject on offer. We were bombing Afghanistan at the time and images of that conflict were everywhere. My poem changed, under my hand, from something chipper and defiantly inconsequential to a piece in which "metals with a memory" were smart bombs whose targets (people) became "brilliant light-emitting solids". It was an ambush; I'd never written anything like it before.
To read a few excerpts from Legion, please read "Art" here and "At the Bedside" and "Barlock" here. I hope you enjoy these extraordinary, though at times disturbing, poems.
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