- Paperback: 80 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber; First Edition edition (2 Mar 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0571193293
- ISBN-13: 978-0571193295
- Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 13 x 2.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 887,427 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
David Harsent's latest book takes the form of a dream-journey, starting at a tarot reading and then proceeding surreally through strange yet familiar places and faces; the book consists of 25 poems, the first 12 being an outward journey, the 13th titled "Turning Point", and the final 12 gently returning to the beginning. The journey is a quest, but a mysterious one; it is about existence, death, memory. Throughout its flickering logic and sudden shifts of time and place, Harsent's imagined characters--barmen, hangmen, whores, talking hares, vivisectors, drinking companions--frequently question his goal:
"Stay with us, drink with us, sleep on it, come to it later in dreams if you must uncover the nub, if you really want the gist - which might, after all, be just the kind of hocus-pocus dreams deliver ?"What Harsent is after is apparently "the bird's idea of flight"--an evocative and unstable image, encompassing variously instinct, existence and survival. What the bric- a-brac of rescued memories (at one point portrayed as the contents of "The Old Curiosity Shop") proves is that these questions cannot be answered except from within; that Harsent has had his answers all the time, but, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, has required a journey to learn this. There is an explicit allusion to Yeats's final weary recognition in his late poem The Circus Animals' Desertion--"I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart."
The book is undeniably difficult, though intensely pleasurable for all that. Sensual and compelling in its oneiric narrative, it owes a clear stylistic debt to the vivacious linguistic logic of the poetry of Paul Muldoon, delighting in homophony, half-rhymes, linguistic quibbling ("is this dearth / or death? Is this lorel or Lorelei?") and the repeated images and phrases that are so appropriate for an exploration of the subconscious. Harsent writes beautifully, and readers will gain more from this unusual and ambitious exploration every time they read it. --Robert Potts
Product Description
A sequence of 25 poems which charts a circular journey: 12 of them trace the outward journey, the 13th is pivotal, and the remainder bring the traveller home. The subject of the quest is thanatology, and in particular the author is deeply curious about the business of his own death.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
'World is crazier and more of it than you thought',
By A Customer
This review is from: A Bird's Idea of Flight (Paperback)
So what is a bird's idea of flight? Well, I guess you'd have to be a bird and have the experience to know - an idea seemingly essential to this sequence of 25 lyric / dramatic poems. Indeed, in the majority of these poems, Harsent places his reader - in medias res - into the heart of a rare experience, often without too much knowledge of what that experience is exactly, turning it out as if from the inside. The effect is compelling, and often disorientating, as one senses the essential urgency and importance without being in the privileged position of being able to extract the colonel of wisdom or point a moral. All you can do is engage your intelligence and enter into a realm of dazzling complexities, circling around multiple personifications of life and death.Yes, I found this an attractively ambitious, ingeniously shaped sequence. Harsent gives us a rich and varied canvas, leads us into encounters with curators, archivists, archaeologists, imposters, prostitutes, tricksters, shape changers, waning custodians - the keepers and connoisseurs of living and dying Culture and cultures. There is a refreshing scale to this work. There is far more here than a myopic accumulation of minutiae. Harsent has all the relish in the world's slipperiness of a Byron or a Browning, all the delight in language of a Muldoon, all the sense of the power of an image of a Pound or an Eliot. It might sound like I'm piling on the superlatives, and maybe I'm writing whilst still under the spell of a poet who is entertaining, delightfully sophisticated and obviously experienced and learned, but this is a work that restlessly plumbs the depths, seeks out the essence, but is skeptical , nevertheless, of the world not being exactly what it might seem. I've read it twice now and I'm still not exactly sure what it's about. All I know is that I feel enlivened by the challenge of tackling the question.
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