David Harsent in conversation with James Byrne, The Wolf issue 11

James Byrne talks to David Harsent in issue 11 of The Wolf, shortly after Harsent won the Forward Prize for his collection Legion. A headnote traces his route from bookselling through publishing to writing for a living, and lists earlier books such as Mister Punch, News from the Front and his versions of the Bosnian poet Goran Simic in The Sorrow of Sarajevo.

The first questions concern money and time. Harsent says the prize was a surprise, since he had reached the Forward and Eliot shortlists before without winning. It is generous, but gaining time means being able to turn down paid work, which a freelance writer rarely finds easy. He recalls an early Arts Council bursary that let him leave a bookshop job, and describes a much older customer, a devoted amateur translator of Baudelaire, who became his mentor and helped him take his own poems seriously.

Most of the interview concerns Legion. Harsent suggests that translating Simic's siege poems helped prepare the ground for the title sequence. The book began with a commissioned poem for an anthology edited by Jo Shapcott for the Royal Institution. He chose a lecture title about metals with a memory and light-emitting solids, expecting a light, ironic piece, but the bombing of Afghanistan turned the metals into smart bombs and the solids into people, and the invasion of Iraq carried the poem into the sequence. He insists it is imaginative work, not agitprop. Byrne also asks about a play he has written using the poems as dialogue, and about the hare that recurs in Legion and in Marriage, which Harsent traces to John Layard's The Lady of the Hare, found in his mid-teens.

The later questions move wider. Harsent compares writing libretti, crime fiction and poetry, and describes leaving a well-paid publishing job because poems were dying under his hand. He talks about the poetry-versus-Booker gap in press attention and about making English versions of the Somali poet Gaarriye for the Poetry Translation Centre, working from literal translations and glosses, and borrowing the Hiawatha metre's feminine endings. He names the poets he rereads, from Lowell and Bishop to the Border Ballads, and ends with crime fiction and research by imagination. A reader interested in how commission, public events and private symbols meet in one book will find a candid, often funny account.

Work

Legion

Author

David Harsent

I don't like agitprop; I don't like art with an agenda.

David Harsent, The Wolf, issue 11