Skin, David Harsent's new collection, consists of ten dramatic sequences of poems, which, like a planetary system, operate on one another in a dynamic assemblage of propulsion and pull. The stage is charged and minimal. Harsent works from an image-bank of 'touchstones' accrued over the course of a long poetic career and rich with symbolic import: doorways and windows, a bed, a mirror, the sea, the moon. To which, the players arrive in various configurations: a man, a woman, a chorus of feral angels, a caged bird, the breath of animals.Conveyed in language that is profoundly musical, preoccupied with signs and portents, numbers and repetitions, driven by the mutable nature of desire, the ensuing drama is intense, domestic-mythic and visionary.
