On David Harsent’s Of Certain Angels and The Wound – Versions of C.P. Cavafy
(Dare-Gale Press, 2022/2025)
I
David Harsent’s particular angels astound. In his library of lines
Each is ecstasy edged and yet easeful. And plucked from the shelf
This prized pamphlet will move you back and forth between worlds.
As the Dare-Gale Press pass Of Certain Angels now earthwards,
The reader reviews love’s smeared ley-lines across a sex-stormed bed,
Hearts unfurled to let seep the other substance within, one part blood,
One part burden, as The Angel of Transformative Light sigils lipstick,
Legs spread, like a wingspan ‘to allow that fusion of lust and prayer’
To take hold. Harsent’s unrhymed odes to the ache found within
‘A shadow’s shadow’ are not only the prodding keys to desire,
But to all of the things love makes bold; How a woman transforms
Across light, as her angelic order soon trickles beside sweat
And sperm and the language that lovers lick into place. Transmutations
Take shape amidst the ‘faint scent of fallen ash, walls scuffed with
Light, her hand-print at the cave-mouth,’ Flesh alters. As it always will
Reading Harsent, in which even horror and hurt achieve grace.
From Mr. Punch through to Loss; from Salt to From an Inland Sea
His work wavers between earthstate and dreamscape, and
‘A Skara Brae of the mind’ As the angel of lost things reveals
‘the ache of estrangement’, ‘ghost limbs’ with their names
Amputated revive the ‘light in low rooms’ and day-blind.
Here then are some of Harsent’s own conjurings. He is a modern
Mage in these poems, or perhaps a former wing-worker worshipping
As a male, female flight. As The Angel of the Surrogate Quotidian
‘Offers herself to this, to the faint half expected pain behind your eyes,’
She is ‘matched to the music’ of all endured, spent and squandered
In this way she is balance. She is reason and belief. She is rite.
And so each angel accrues, from that of Delinquent Poetries (all too
common); with ‘the timelock of your life coded to her palm-print,’
The precision of each image and ache steals the breath, while granting
Hope for the dead, as life can only echo ascension. The Angel of Death
Knell Chorales sings for Shelley, for Celan and Crane, charming death.
Each sentence, each strain attains God graced stature. The elegance
Of each image, Anhedonian or risk wrecked is its own from of salt
From the spray that washes over us daily, dispensing despair
And mind oceans, before teasing the tongue with fear flecked.
From Furtive Eschatologies in which the angel ‘will play for you on
a bone aulos’ precipitating the faux apocalypse, to the Skyborne
Mirage’s peripheral reinvention, this slim book burns, breaks
And bibles the means to make Saints secular. From The Angel of
Stopless Sorrow’s tamed dovecote dove, to she of the Venereal
Nocturne’s ‘blood-beads plucked on her skin by the churn of bramble’
We witness, not only the tones in white silence, but also the numbed’s
Nebulae, in which a broken dream drives you mad and a haunting
Hurts the skin more than reason. This slim book then is a season
In which a scant 20 pages cool to the touch lights the hand, signalling
Both warning and warmth as The Angel Of the Good Death brings you
Whisky. Harsent stirs, spits, seduces and is a sorcerer of the sentence
That penitents and sky dwellers and those still wanting wings
understands.
Ii
From Cavafy’s three score and ten come these thirty pages;
David Harsent’s free versions of he who was not bound by books,
For Harsent after Ritsos rebuilds his Hellenic homage to Greek Poets,
Although it was to Alexandria and old Egypt that Cavafy was bound.
Each line looks towards both future and past as former wounds fall
Reopened. For this supreme pamphlet releases poetry long suppressed,
As the love that had no name regains speech, heard in the haunting
House Of Shame in which two committed lovers pass in shorn silence,
And back to The Art of Poetry, as first entry in which the poet locates
Rhyming for the phrase: ‘They get out of bed. They get dressed.’
These bright but brief interludes are conveniently coated in shadow,
As in all of Harsent, where the ambient air textures light. And his poet’s
Touch caresses Cavafy’s words lost for decades. Nine since the passing
Of he who could not ever claim what felt right. Cavafy’s love then was
Lent to insecured space and dark structure which Harsent designs
With more detail than any before. His craft carves ‘the daydreams
Of love and lust’ which may come in ‘the midday glare’, to ‘nightfall’s
Dark forbidden pleasure,’ the cream-like sheen of these pages
Makes the words elements in the ointment rubbed on broken
Hearts duly halved. In Windows the man walks in a ‘blind house’
Seeking daylight But the tyranny he would find there keeps him
Captive no doubt evermore. While the souls of old men ‘lie
Skin-deep inside their wasted bodies.’ A delivery boy leaves
His beauty in a hallway mirror’s stalled stare by the door.
Harsent lifts the veil on, if not a virgin groom, then one chastened.
His erotic art makes sex surface not through the sweat on skin
But through soil from which we all grow, while desperate
Within darkness. Gardening guilt in bound bedrooms or with
The sound of a step on stairs. His words boil, emitting steam
As hearts burn, and eyes pulse with excitement. Despair trumps
Desire as a man tracks his lost lover in every boy he takes into bed.
92 years on from his death, Harsent’s sleek adaptations recolour
What’s whitened, transfusing heart hue and blood fire across
The ashes and aches of the dead. But this is what Harsent does.
His work is both muscular and exquisite. He makes this former
Civil Servant uncivil, albeit with none of Quentin Crisp’s faded flair.
Instead there’s true pain, as in the title poem, in which a bright
Blooded bandage is held to the lips after care. There are lost
And lonely men in the halls along which Cavafy roamed, dead
While living. And yet there must have been roused revivals.
Did Lazarus fuck once returned? Cavafy walked, wasted, won
And lost on night time streets haunting heroes. These he prized
In the poems which would have at the time seen him spurned.
But that was in some old century. And so Harsent reintroduces
For the homosexual home and its neighbours a martyr for whom
Life brought pain at every turn and long look, in every unsaid
Word and strained silence. And yet in the pamphlet’s final prayer,
What’s Hidden there is a rallying cry, a refrain which can now
Fully play, as the gay can live without fear for love’s future.
Instead at the current time it’s the future, irrespective of love
And sex all must mark. But in these words now worn on
The moon-smoothed skin of these pages the poet David Harsent
Rehouses the homed exile from the dark, casting him in new light
Shone in and around versed inventions. In the laboratory of love
DH fuses CPC with desire in a near magnesium moment.
The resultant light stuns and startles. Read then close your eyes.
Life sends sparks.
David Erdos 26/10/25
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