Night - David Harsent

Among the poems that open Night, David Harsent's follow-up to his Forward Prize-winning collection Legion,
is a startling sequence about a garden - but a garden unlike any other.
It sets the tone for a book in which the sureties of daylight become
uncertain: dark, unsettling narratives about what wakes in us when we
escape our day-lit selves to visit a place where the dream-like and the
nightmarish are never far apart. The book culminates in the seductive
and brilliantly sustained 'Elsewhere', a noirish, labyrinthine
quest-poem in which the protagonist is drawn ever onward through a
series of encounters and reflections like an after-hours Orpheus,
hard-bitten and harried by memory.