Marriage

by David Harsent

Marriage consists of two sequences of poems. The first is loosely based on the relationship between Pierre Bonnard and his muse and model, who became eventually his wife. It is a rich pattern for the study of the mysteries of domesticity, the unspoken privacies and intimacies that can exist between two people. For the painter, problems of seeing become, for the husband, problems of knowing. 'Marriage' is an inspired portrait of conjugality, exact, watchful and understated. The second sequence, 'Lepus', extends an interest in the hare as trickster, traceable elsewhere in David Harsent's work, and most recently in 'The Woman and the Hare', a piece commissioned by the Nashe Ensemble, set to music by Harrison Birtwistle, and first performed at the South Bank Centre in 1999.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 18, 2002

About the author

David Harsent is an English poet and TV scriptwriter. Harsent also writes crime fiction novels under the pseudonyms David Lawrence, David Pascoe and Jack Curtis. He has published eleven collections of poetry which have won several literary prizes and awards. Legion won the Forward Prize for best collection 2005 and was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot and Whitbread Awards.

He lives with his wife, the actress Julia Watson and their daughter in London.

Reviews

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

a good long way from some of the brilliance we see in Fire Songs, Marriage is much more Ted Hughes and David has a great ear and I think he's very good at naturalising a conversational style - in the phrasemic cadence if i had to guess. Still, not especially worth one's time

[Best · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were some good lines or interesting turns of phrase, but overall not a particularly memorable read.