Marriage [Paperback]

In 1998 there was a big Pierre Bonnard exhibition at the Tate. You could stroll round the exhibition space feeling that you were in some kind of installation, each wall echoing and developing what appeared elsewhere. You could draw up rules for the ideal Bonnard: bright, challenging colours; a frame within the frame - maybe a window, maybe a mirror; unusual cropping; elements of still-life; a cat; a naked woman. You could buy a really expensive catalogue.

David Harsent's new book of poetry is presented in two unequal halves. In the first half he explores imaginatively the relationship between Pierre Bonnard and Marthe de Méligny, the woman who appears in so many of Bonnard's paintings wearing so few clothes; in the second, he writes a series of poems in which a central character is Lepus the Hare.

If you like Ted Hughes and those pretentious things he did, like Crow, when he'd run out of things to say, then you might like the much shorter second section, Lepus, but more likely you'll just spot the connexion and wonder what exactly it is that Faber is up to.

The Bonnard poems are written from a complex standpoint. We are listening to the voice of the artist, but he is speaking, as often as not, as the character depicted in the paintings. This is one of the games Harsent plays. Poem III begins, We are naked: as it might be, after sex. The artist voices that 'might be', the character voices the 'we are naked'. A frame within a frame.

Sometimes the relationship between poem and painting is exact; elsewhere is it approximate and allusive. Poem III uses motifs and images from L'homme et la femme from 1900, in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. It includes that frame within a frame device again - there's a painting on the back wall and the canvas is divided in two by the dark vertical of a screen; there are two cats, and a naked woman. Harsent offers this to us pretty literally:

We are naked: as it might be, after sex; but there's a screen
cutting you off from me, or me from you. I stand
much closer to the world, although you seem

to take most of the light, and lean
back on the bed, one leg tucked up, one hand
reaching out to pet the cat.

In a sense, it's not immediately obvious who's written this: Harsent or Bonnard, and that may be a problem with the whole series. Even those poems where the imagery seems distinct from Bonnard's, well, you do tend to think that this may just because there's a painting you've not remembered or you're not familiar with. On the other hand, some poems become ironically anachronistic simply because they leave Bonnard's world behind:

You remember that movie, don't you? - the rain like grapeshot
on a drum, the banged-up Pontiac
pulling over at the pump

Even so, such poems underline the overall debt to Bonnard by standing out so starkly.

Harsent, to be fair, finds more to imitate than the central imagery: his poems are as allusive as Bonnard's paintings, impressionistic and patterned; they are unusually cropped, some beginning half-way through a sentence; cats and still-lifes make slight but repeated contributions.

In the end, though, Marriage is a collection of domestic poems, featuring cooking and bathing and walking in the countryside. All seem imbued with a distinct sexuality, endowing the most casual act with erotic overtones. The woman, for example, will step

... down from the door to a cold silver-slub

of dew and cross the terrace, the ankle-deep lawn, the almost-blue
of our geranium wall, searching, I guess,
for mint for mint tea. Still naked.

It's interesting reading a collection of poems which work like an exhibition - similar themes and motifs rearranged and re-emphasised. Poets don't often get this freedom. One of the strengths of Harsent's collection is that he is allowed the scope to worry at this material, re-jigging it into slightly new shapes from slightly new perspectives. Though is an obvious sense that Harsent is celebrating a contemporary relationship of his own in exploring the relationship between Bonnard and Marthe - the book is dedicated to 'Julia' - there is another sense in which the poems fall between two stools.

In 1900 Bonnard collaborated with Paul Verlaine on Parallélement, a book which printed poems by Verlaine alongside Bonnard's elegant and erotic illustrations. In Harsent's book, the process has been reversed: he's given us some elegant and erotic poems to illustrate Bonnard's work. Unfortunately, and it's a fairly big unfortunately, Faber have not given us reproductions of any paintings, which leaves the whole enterprise somewhat unbalanced and incomplete.