David Harsent

The trick was to keep things normal, or so I thought, and what better than this – the sea on one hand, a hillside of fern and furze on the other, the tumulus on Lowland Point as a marker? Everything there was part of the fair-weather future I’d picked out for myself; I could number the gulls and masts, I’d shifted the wind, and just as you might expect I expected a man in a...

It was pride and nothing else made me lift my head from the spit and sawdust of The Prospect of Oblivion, on my cheek a dark naevus that married

a knobby knot in the planking. How long I’d been down and out was anybody’s guess; I’d guess an hour or more by the state of my suit, a foul rag-bag,

by the state of my hair, a patty-cake, of my own ripe keck, unless it was the keck...

After a painting by Jeremy LeGrice

… in London, of course you are, landlocked in your kitchen, but just a step, after all, from the door into the hall, and then just a step from the door into the street where the cabbie is more than happy to wait by the slip-road that takes you out through the wrecked hulks of tower blocks, happy to stop- start-stop in the backed- up traffic, its...

But arrive like this: a sudden shadow on the washed-out fleur-de-lis that paper the breakfast room; a form half-hidden

by some other form, the angle of a door, perhaps, unless I think to make it a shutter, half-open, by which I leave you a single

arm, single eye, single breast, a single link of the scallop- and-anchor motif on your sun-top, except that I can’t quite get it at this...

After Yannis Ritsos

Small squares on the move, merging, pulling apart, building bricks unbuilding, a city of windows inside a city of windows, everything hanging on two right-angles, free-standing, out of whack but somehow holding, somehow safe you decide at the very moment they crack and start to collapse (in utter silence) all of a heap where three fleabitten dogs set off at an...