‘I fold into the light’

Cloud wrack. Dusk. Seashore. Shadows. Bars. Thresholds. Wraiths. Witches’ thumbstones. The world into which David Harsent draws us in Skin, his fourteenth collection of poems, is a magician’s world of smoke and mirrors where nothing is quite what it seems. Or, more accurately, where things are constantly shifting in and out of being, where grasp is elusive and certainty an illusion.

The collection is prefaced by an (unattributed) illustration of a jester peeking maliciously through his fingers, his mouth in a jackass smile, underscored with the caption: “Fool, the king of spite. His laughter will find your wound”. Wounds are definitely a preoccupation. The “Skin” of the title is breached time and time again, in ways that are by turns eerie, oneiric or gruesome, and always unsettling: “silk is a hair-shirt”; “her swimsuit dropped like sealskin at the tideline”; “Now dwell / On how it was plucked, alive, feet snapped off, alive”. Harsent’s sometimes real, sometimes metaphorical (and sometimes even metaphysical) skinning of the world extends to inanimate objects: stone and sea; mirrors and windows that “skin” our image of ourselves by presenting us in unfamiliar and unwanted aspects. The houses we live in are often curtainless, exposing us to the uncanny light of a full moon where we may run mad.

Claustrophobia is another theme. He emphasizes this both through words (“stone”, “black”, “cage” and “shadow”) woven like leitmotifs throughout the collection, so allowing us no escape, and by using a deliberately restricted palette of colours: white, grey, the half-light of dawn and dusk, with the odd smear of blood. The rooms that the characters, such as they are, move in (“live” would suggest a warmth that Harsent eschews) show no domestic clutter or context: one is reminded of Giorgio de Chirico’s sharp shadows and ambiguous buildings, or Jean-Paul Sartre’s stifling Huis clos.

Formally, however, there is variety: prose poems, tight sequences held together by skilful assonance and half-rhyme – a demonstration of Harsent’s careful use of language. Yet in the final sequence, “Nine”, “a magic number”, designed to wrongfoot us again, even this breaks down. He employs the old trope of an incomplete writer’s notebook, now partially reconstructed: punctuation and syntax are gone, fragments of sentences edge along the page and dark images of violence, loneliness and melancholia surface, only to go under again. This is a final statement of what has accumulated, been even repeated, across 200 pages; there is a relentlessness that becomes in the end, mannered, the product of poetic will rather than poetic attention to experience. It’s a grim place, and the reader is left confronting an empty horizon across which the writer has vanished.

John Burnside’s imagination is altogether more embodied in his most recent volume, Ruin, Blossom. He charts his move from the certainties of a Catholic upbringing towards places where a transcendent immanence comes “dropping slow”, rather than through the invocation of an afterworld. The first section, “Apostasy”, suggests a nostalgic hankering for what he perceives as those long-ago, but increasingly deceptive, certitudes. Titles such as “Nativity” and “Midnight Mass” soon morph into “Heresy of the Free Spirit”, “A Note on the Sethian Heresy” and “Litha”, the midsummer solstice fire festival, when the “pagan gods were out”, and he rejoices simply in the glories of nature, which has “nothing to reveal, beyond the hum / of incarnation: / sun on the backlot, mayweed … No / Hereafter. Always now”.

At the core of the next section, “Asylum”, is a sequence of ten fourteen-line poems (not sonnets) called “Bedlam Variations”. Here Burnside presents us with thoughts, visions and monologues from different inhabitants of this infamous institution, at various times and in its many metamorphoses (it still exists as Bethlem Royal Hospital in south London). He gives a voice to those regarded as “not real” because of mental illness and incarceration, like the inmate at the open window, listening to the bees in high summer “till, word by word, with ruin in my head, / I fold into the light, and I am blossom”. Or the person who hears a nurse singing, “too sweet to bear, / first here, then there, and nowhere to be found”. Whether there really is a song to be heard becomes, in the poignancy of it, immaterial. And, we begin to ask, maybe it is not only Bedlam whence “all our gods have vanished … / disheartened by the beauty of a world / they made, but could not govern”.

The final section, “Blossom”, is more disparate: poems that hint at the regretted end of a relationship; laments for dead friends; and, again, a return to questioning the faith of the poet’s childhood, which he recalls, but to which, reluctantly perhaps, he cannot give assent. It seems the world in all its haecceity is all that is the case, and that that is enough, “the way, in Mediaeval paintings, when the Angel comes to rest … / the swallows in the eaves / are brightened from within, and each least thing, / because, and not in spite of what it seems, / is all it is, and all Annunciation”.

Hilary Davies is a co-translator of Yves Bonnefoy’s Prose, 2020

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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