David Harsent’s books of poems include Legion, Marriage and A Bird’s Idea of Flight.

Vol. 18 No. 18 · 19 September 1996
page 6 | 1870 words

Poem: ‘The Makers’

David Harsent

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Letters

Vol. 18 No. 20 · 17 October 1996

From David Craig

David Harsent’s fine flaucht of drucken visions, ‘The Makers’, was a wee-thing marred by his misspelling of ae word, ‘aye’, in the repeated phrase ‘this aye night’ (LRB, 19 September). I think he means ‘one’, whose Scots equivalent is ‘ae’ (pronounced like ‘eh’), as in ‘Ae fond kiss’, or in the Northern English ‘Lyke Wake Dirge’, ‘This ae night’. ‘Aye’ (pronounced like ‘I’) means ‘yes’. Of course this may be a creative variant on Harsent’s part, to suggest an affirmative – this is a night on which the poet, like Molly Bloom, can only think: ‘Yes!’

David Craig
Burton-in-Kendal, Cumbria

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