Salt
by David Harsent
He cleared snow from the path and laid down salt.
He was conscious of oxygen, then: the word, also the way
his breath came back at him as mist to leave a trace
of ice on his upper lip. This shortly after dawn,
the sleepers in the house fixed like the dead, except the one
who turned in her dream looking for elbow-room, her voice
just short of reaching him, the snowfall soundless white, the salt
finding its way, the scuff of his boots in all that ghostliness.
A thickness in every breath.
The streets are white under hard sunlight.
‘Where my shadow falls just short of me…’
Low skies bringing rain in off the sea, the deep odour
of wet tarmac. How often have you been here before:
those two on the boardwalk going in step, an old man
waiting to cross, the girl muffled in blue,
hand raised to flag a taxi… actors edging the real.
The agéd primagravida does the splits. Forceps are brought.
Her world of pain is such that she stands aside
to watch as the child is born to a season of rain and wind.
Selfhood is everything. Like mother, like son.
In that tiny diorama, she waits at the open door.
She is perfect: nails and lips and hair. The windows
carry reflections of hills, and a river that seems to flow.
She has never been to such a place.
How can there live such loneliness in her?
‘Without salt flesh gathers worms; and though flesh be our foe
we are commanded to sustain it. And we must afflict it.
Habete, inquit, sal in vobis.’ Offer me salt in every sacrifice.
From Poetry London. Reproduced with kind permission from Poetry London.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2016
About David Harsent
David Harsent (b. 1942, Devon) is the author of eleven collections of poetry, that have between them accumulated a wide array of prizes, from Legion’s Forward Prize for Best Collection, to Night’s Griffin International Poetry Prize, to Fire Songs’ 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize. He is currently a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton.
Harsent describes Salt, the work for which he has been shortlisted, as ‘a group of short poems that have a common tone and mood’. Robert Frost talks about the ‘sound of sense’ but Harsent excels at something further – a kind of ‘sound of significance’; a subtle, careful music which urges the reader towards a deeper-than-usual meditation. Music, indeed, is another important aspect of Harsent’s practice. He has collaborated with a number of composers, most significantly with Harrison Birtwistle, and they have several widely performed collaborative works to their credit.
Harsent has recently published a book of versions of poems by the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos, and the works in Salt – with their muted, uncertain backgrounds offering up sudden vivid flashes of colour and significance – evoke something of those Ritsos poems.
Forward Prizes History:
- 2011 Forward Prizes for Best Collection, shortlisted for Night (Faber & Faber)
- 2007 Forward Prizes for Best Single Poem, shortlisted for ‘The Hut in Question’ (The Poetry Review)
- 2005 Forward Prizes for Best Collection, winner for Legion (Faber & Faber)
- 2002 Forward Prizes for Best Collection, shortlisted for Marriage (Faber & Faber)
- 1997 Forward Prizes for Best Single Poem, shortlisted for ‘The Maker’s (London Review of Books)
