@book{73f35dfd870f48f1b44435cb0308d542,
title = "Loss",
abstract = "A sequence of poems in twenty sections",
author = "David Harsent",
note = "Loss – Faber & Faber, 2020 (January) The verse-patterning in Loss is, so far as can be judged, unique, as is the compositional nature of each of the twenty sections of which the book is comprised. Each section opens with an unrhymed sonnet; then comes a long section of short-lines; the third constituent is a rhymed quatrain. The sonnets are an account of a man{\textquoteright}s personal life – his history; in the short-line sections, the man is addressed; the quatrains are entirely reflective or summary. It might seem that a narrator is giving the book entire: as reflection, as address. Or it could be that the whole is an interior monologue in which, in the sonnets, the man is {\textquoteleft}rehearsing{\textquoteright} his emotional history - a deliberately detached view which will allow him to gain distance on himself, his motives, his indiscretions and his failures; and that in the short-line sections, he is more insistent, more openly self-critical, more intimate in terms of his emotional history. In that version, the quatrains might be his apothegms on self, on politics, a fragmentary account of the world as he lives and perceives it. Between each of the twenty sections there{\textquoteright}s a brief account of a white night: declarative, lyrical, in which a dream is revisited of a man in a white landscape and accounts given of the view from a high window of a city at night. These interludes are part of the through-composed nature of the book: its shape and purpose. Throughout, the dual accounts of the man and the time in which he lives and the aphoristic quatrains, contain references to a wider contemporary history. These references are integral to the book{\textquoteright}s narrative progression. Mentions (though not mere en passant mentions) of the conflict in Syria, of the Bataclan massacre, of ISIL, of corruption in politics, of memories of warfare and of the Shoah, are given as integral to the narrative development of the sequence. ",
year = "2020",
month = jan,
day = "14",
language = "English",
volume = "Faber & Faber",
publisher = "Faber and Faber",
edition = "1st",
}