This book belongs in a category of its own. It is an unusual collaboration between the poet David Harsent and his photographer son, Simon – not a poetry collection in an ordinary sense, but a startling and beautiful double act about the moon on the sea at night. Through a glass darkly, we see the sea – never the shore – in a sequence of black-and-white photographs. The stills are never still. The moon keeps changing and the water’s texture changes too: feathers, fur, oil paint. Stippled and amniotic, it is suggestive of an ultrasound scan and tempts one into fancifully seeing this book as a birth of sorts – of an exceptional and elegant hardback.
David Harsent had seen the photographs years before the poems came to him. There was nothing planned about the father-son collaboration. This explains why the poetry is neither laboriously illustrative nor contrived. He begins at the end with the opening line: “This is the last view of the sea.” What follows is unexpected and powerful in that what briefly promises to be a careful bird’s eye view becomes instead the dizzying consciousness of a sightless bird – a blind vision.
As so often in his work, Harsent is drawn to darkness. He has always been a night watchman (think of Night, his 2011 collection).
“nothing but dream and drift, a bird’s idea of flight
all that’s left of instinct, cold thin blood,
updraft to wingspan: so caught, you soar into darkness.”
The writing is monochrome, in keeping with the photographs. The second poem is overseen by a black Madonna in the cliff and Harsent describes how “the last of the lost give themselves over to sorrow”. Sorrow is the inevitable response to a seascape where colour is gone and the sun absent. It infuses this moving double act. Yet in David Harsent’s hands, loss (another of his subjects, and the title of his most recent collection) becomes a form of finding, if only in netting the words to describe it.
An urge to decipher the indecipherable means we never stop trying to read the sea. Harsent is faithful to its spirit in the photographs, not encouraging his imagination to abscond or to indulge in a one-man show. But he does permit himself, as if by sleight of hand, to translate, in the third poem, the seascape into an interior. As becomes clear, we are in a room in a house on a cliff, with a window with
“twelve small panes
that frame twelve views of a salt moon.”
Some of these poems resemble altar pieces but exist on a wing, not a prayer. A bird becomes a “voiceless crucifix”. There is no escaping the bleakness attendant on beauty in poems that describe what it is to be helplessly on the receiving end of the world. Yet I agree with Stevie Smith, who once observed how perversely fortifying it can be to read melancholy work in troubled times. This is the sort of book to read now: a steadying treasure.
• Salt Moon by David Harsent and Simon Harsent is published by Guillemot (£25)
