Introduction to the Pack and Legion by David Harsent

One of my Christmas presents this year was a pack of Faber and Faber poetry playing cards. Each card has picture of a different Faber poetry title on it. They are highly desirable and I like them a lot. I have read a few of the titles but I was surprised that there were so many I hadn't read (or even heard of).  With this in mind I decided that it would be a great idea to attempt to read all fifty-two books featured in the pack - and to do it in the next year if I can!  I will also re-read the books that I have already read as it never hurts to read a collection again.  


A good place to start seemed to be with Legion by David Harsent, a book I had coincidently taken out of the library just before Christmas. Legion won the Forward Prize for best poetry collection in 2005. 


David Harsent is a great writer this book left me with no doubts about that, but this collection also left me feeling somewhat uncomfortable and more than a little unsettled.  The title sequence of the book is a series of poems about war. The war is not specific, indeed it is probably more than one war and the poems are not written in one particular voice and I think that this might be where my problems with it stemmed from. 


I am not a big fan of War Poetry in general and somehow feel a kind of ethical discomfort when poets write about wars that they clearly have no actual experience of. What is odd though is that I don't feel the same discomfort when reading fiction. Writer's like Anne Michaels and Louis de Bernières have written graphically about the second world war in their novels and I have not felt the same level of discomfort and I found I was asking myself why this was.  I think that the answer (and especially with this collection) is the lack of a specific voice. A novel gives the reader the space and time to develop a relationship with the characters and the wartime setting,however horrific, is an integral part of their specific story. 


I might have felt more at ease with Harsent's collection if the voice had been a constant that I could build some kind of relationship with.  However what Harsent gives is a series of disjointed and slightly disturbing snapshots of some unspecific conflict which at times felt a little jarring. And perhaps this is deliberate - war is after all an unnerving and uncomfortable experience for everyone involved and these poems certainly give us a glimpse into some darker aspects of the world.  


Harsent has a beautiful mastery of language and there are some breathtaking moments even in the war sequence:


A milky, dead-eye sky. That steel and cordite smell
you get with a lightning strike. Ripples underfoot. A taste
of nickel behind your tongue.


(The Wall)


Harsent has a light and adept touch and there are some glorious descriptive moments that any poet would be envious of.  I am looking forward to reading some of his earlier collections.