David Harsent Bücher

David Harsent zählt zu den angesehensten Dichtern in Großbritannien. Seine Werke haben viele Preise und Auszeichnungen erhalten - darunter den T. S. Eliot Prize. Er hat zahlreiche Opernlibretti verfasst, die weltweit aufgeführt wurden. »Songs from the Same Earth« ist ein Gedichtzyklus über eine Frau in einer Krise - am Rande des Zusammenbruchs. In blitzlichtartigen Episoden erleben wir die unsichere und bedrohliche Welt, die sie bewohnt. David Harsent schrieb dieses Werk als Auftragsarbeit - zur Feier des hundertsten Geburtstages von Benjamin Britten und des zweihundertjährigen Jubiläums der Royal Philharmonic Society. Der Komponist Harrison Birtwistle vertonte die Gedichte. Dies ist David Harsents erstes Buch in deutscher Übersetzung.

Versions by one of Britain's best-known poets of Yannis Ritsos (1909-90) - along with Cavafy, Seferis and Elytis - one of the most significant Greek poets of the 20th century. Harsent's selection is of poems written while Ritsos was in prison or under house arrest.

Featuring a collection of poems, this book includes dramatic sequences that belong to one another, share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone.

It is 00:00 and the full of the night yet to come. A man sits at a window through the dead hours of night, his sleep broken by troubling dreams of a figure in a white landscape. He is a man afflicted by personal loss, but also a man of his time, all too aware of the troubled world in which he lives.

In an illustrious career, David Harsent has published eight collections of poetry, from A Violent County in 1969, to Legion, winner of the Forward Prize in 2005.

Among the poems that open Night, David Harsent's follow-up to his Forward Prize-winning collection Legion, is a startling sequence about a garden - but a garden unlike any other.

A Bird's Idea of Flight describes a circular journey in a sequence of 25 poems. Twelve poems chart the outward journey, the thirteenth is pivotal, and twelve poems bring the traveler back.

The second sequence, 'Lepus', extends an interest in the hare as trickster, traceable elsewhere in David Harsent's work, and most recently in 'The Woman and the Hare', a piece commissioned by the Nashe Ensemble, set to music by Harrison Birtwistle, and first performed at the South Bank Centre in 1999.

'They belong to each other in mood, in tone and by way of certain images and words that form a ricochet of echoes - not least the word salt.' Mineral, eerie, sensory, the poems in the collection are experienced as encounters - some with the surety of daylight, others in dream-life - that refresh with the turning of each page.