A Bird's Idea of Flight Book

David Harsent's latest book takes the form of a dream-journey, starting at a tarot reading and then proceeding surreally through strange yet familiar places and faces; the book consists of 25 poems, the first 12 being an outward journey, the 13th titled "Turning Point", and the final 12 gently returning to the beginning. The journey is a quest, but a mysterious one; it is about existence, death, memory. Throughout its flickering logic and sudden shifts of time and place, Harsent's imagined characters--barmen, hangmen, whores, talking hares, vivisectors, drinking companions--frequently question his goal: "Stay with us, drink with us, sleep on it, come to it later in dreams if you must uncover the nub, if you really want the gist - which might, after all, be just the kind of hocus-pocus dreams deliver ?" What Harsent is after is apparently "the bird's idea of flight"--an evocative and unstable image, encompassing variously instinct, existence and survival. What the bric- a-brac of rescued memories (at one point portrayed as the contents of "The Old Curiosity Shop") proves is that these questions cannot be answered except from within; that Harsent has had his answers all the time, but, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, has required a journey to learn this. There is an explicit allusion to Yeats's final weary recognition in his late poem The Circus Animals' Desertion--"I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart." The book is undeniably difficult, though intensely pleasurable for all that. Sensual and compelling in its oneiric narrative, it owes a clear stylistic debt to the vivacious linguistic logic of the poetry of Paul Muldoon, delighting in homophony, half-rhymes, linguistic quibbling ("is this dearth / or death? Is this lorel or Lorelei?") and the repeated images and phrases that are so appropriate for an exploration of the subconscious. Harsent writes beautifully, and readers will gain more from this unusual and ambitious exploration every time they read it. --Robert PottsRead More