Thursday 10th July 2025
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Friday Favourite: David Harsent

Josie Moir
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Friday Favourite: David Harsent

There is something about poetry that makes it more potent than fiction in times of need. With its raw, brash and yet strangely beautiful depiction of the darkest parts of humanity, the work of award-winning English poet David Harsent is the perfect example. Though often put on an inaccessibly lofty plane, Harsent showcases the gritty, emotional realism poetry can depict, and though sometimes apocalyptically bleak, his works remind us how alive we still are in times of crisis. 

There was admittedly no crisis when I first read my favourite of Harsent’s extensive works, his 2011 collection, Night. It came out of an ordinary Google search when I spotted his name in a book review, and I was expecting just to scan a poem or two before forgetting about the whole thing. Instead what I found was, in an ironic cliché, like nothing I had ever read before. It was instantly unforgettable. 

As soon as you open Night, there is a sense of trepidation, of letting yourself into something with an intensity beyond the everyday. For someone not used to casually picking up poetry collections, I was surprised by its accessibility, the immediacy with which the language captured my focus. The tension is palpable: in the final lines of the unnamed introduction, Harsent warns the reader that “there’s a smell of scorch in the air. And the time to be gone has gone.” The night is upon us, and there is no turning back. 

This onset of darkness sets the tone for the whole collection, opening up a world of depravity and intense feeling that can, as the titular poem suggests, ‘only occur at night’. From the opening poems, “Rota Fortunae”, and “Ghosts”, death, life, grief and sin are splayed across the pages in ‘black and white’; the following series of exquisite “Garden” poems capture a scene at varying times of night, intensifying this strangely raw atmosphere, dreamlike and yet wholly nightmarish. Harsent packs the collection with a myriad of rich cultural allusions, and yet it doesn’t feel vital to understand them. The many reoccurring motifs – night, dreams, gardens, the open road – guide us instead, weaving together a world in which these disturbing sensations can emerge from the darkness.

Yet despite the ‘hum in the air’ as the collection powers on, buzzing in adrenaline in “The Duffel Bag”, murderously dark in “The Death of Cain’” its merit does not come from mere shock factor. Beneath the visceral imagery (Harsent’s successful career in crime fiction is unsurprising), and behind the pulsing heartbeat of masterful rhymes and tumbling rhythms, at core, Harsent displays a sharp perception of emotion. 

Poems such as “Scene One: A Beach” provide these profound moments in their slower pace and stillness: the first three stanzas, though possessing their own internal motion – ‘the subtle traction of a rising tide’ – are hauntingly meditative. We ‘begin in silence, the sea drawn back/ to a distant smudge beneath a fading moon,’ moving through a landscape of ‘dust’ where we hear a voice declare, ‘your starting point is grief; you must/ get used to this’. It feels an especially poignant notion in our current times, navigating a world where, as Harsent puts it, ‘everything I once recognised as mine/ is strange to me now’. 

The final poems, “Night” and the sixteen-page “Elsewhere”, give little closure in their winding cyclical nature, but the open-ended journey is oddly comforting. Harsent’s poetic ‘wilderness’ reflects many of the longings and uncertainties of our own lives, yet seems driven by the bitter inevitability of human survival, ‘whatever the truth of it is’. His work is surprisingly not auto-biographical, instead filled with ‘little fictions’, but this is perhaps what gives it more universal understanding. Though in recent years, Harsent has begun to read his poems aloud, I feel his previous decisions to refrain were sensible: the shock, the stillness, the vivid beauty of his words are at their best and most blinding in print. There, we cannot avoid that brutal confrontation with our own condition. It may not always be pleasant, but I can never tear myself away from the explosive intensity of Night. The words seem to read themselves countless times over, always as potent as when I first encountered them. Harsent’s extensive works contain countless other gems, but it is this collection that first showed me the force of his style and skill, and the value of a living poetic voice. His expert choice of language, his genius for rhyme, creates something fantastically immersive, and I think it is this sheer vitality that resonates so acutely with me today.

Hard Pressed

Danielle Rae Childs
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Hard Pressed

I stumble upon some unlikely, perennial blossoms
amongst the weeds of my
walk.

Because I love pressing
flowers, and I love to have pressed flowers, I bent
low
to the ground in search of choice
blooms.

I find myself reaching
for the best ones,
the most perfect buds,
bright and breathing.

This instinct for careful discernment is odd. Why do I need to pick
those flowers that are screaming, “I am alive!” to kill
between
the pages of a heavy book?

I pause.

The question confounds me but I go on reaching for those
stems with the most whole offerings.

The truth is, I like to watch the flowers die;
to see them fade and
to myself be the cause of their deterioration.

But it is equally true that I feel the keenest pleasure,
relief almost,
when I notice how much my
pressed flowers
retain their pigmentation, hold fiercely onto their color.

I bury
these blooms in dust and paper,
with all the zeal of one holding a lump of coal, trying to make a diamond through squeezing and strife, only to then
pluck them out
from between the pages of the book, and marvel that they are vibrant matter still.

Changed, but still lovely, despite all my efforts.

Movement

Anna Ticehurst
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Movement

The energy in the trees was palpable-
at once pulsating and swirling

I parked my bike.
I felt compelled to allow myself
the pleasure of being its witness.

No. Watching wasn’t enough
I wanted to be it- be them- I was jealous of their artistic freedom to sway and flutter
and cough their leaves up and out
Over the heads of mortals as I

Inexplicably I began to sway.
Their breaths were louder than mine,
were deeper and went through me
But I mattered and so I too deepened my breath but they didn’t care.

I shouted and screamed and their lack of judgement
was almost touching- they were blind
to my dancing and now frenzied jumping

Even when I took my shoes off
there were no whispers, only magic between the trees themselves.

My toes furled and spread, rooting me-
My arms spanning, my fingers twigs
Perhaps my fingernails then could be leaves
or better still my hair that disobeyed
me could be my fruit, my orange flower. What

would be my eyes?
No one saw me but them- even still
They had no opinion.
I could tell them anything, be anything before them,
I could hurl abuse at them, fucks and shits, but my voice doesn’t matter and the trees still sway

as one but not, somehow.

Conversations with my Lover

Kitty Blain
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Conversations with my Lover

Sometimes my lover talks sickly sweet
Of words a custard coating –
a yellow, sunshine cream.

They are thick dollops of cloud,
sweetened milk, soft smell of baby heads.
The fat little curves of cats’ bellies,
and stiff white peaks of egg.
Spooned with a clank of best silver cutlery
into tiny little dishes.

He speaks like whipped cream jammed straight out the can
with fizzy out-of-season strawberries,
and that mushy musty kind of smell; like the inside of a cupboard.
those red fleshy berries seem punctuated with pretty pink and soft
or maybe taste like metal and aerosol.

He winds a cream to wrap around my eyes and bind my ears
that yellow skin, yes, he films and veils with sun skimmed surfaces,
with fogs of cottony candyfloss, chemical pink,
that tacky stick, strings of gunk that lace up my hair
and melt down filthy like slushy old snow.
Silky pink strands beaded with dark red shards.

His voice is bound together with cornflower,
emulsified eggs,
and lumps of watery hot chocolate powder,
the marshmallow all tangled and crusty.
We have big fat droplets of cloying conversations
with condensed milk trickles in my eyes and
the smell of old cream and sad milk in my hair.

His voice flickers and glimmers like
slimy silver fish skins’ scales.
This iridescence which glitters and flutters
Like we are inside a kaleidoscope, all the glowing dregs of colour scattered
and those glassy eyes roll up at the supermarket white lights gleaming
Reclining, sleek limpidity on ice chips,
Like origami only just uncrumpled with creases cut still.

He has glossy scales that spill purple red hot green guts –
this blood steams as it gushes, choking, splutters
and the smooth and the hot collide
in the slippery feel of my cheek on his back – sticky with sleep –
snuggly, snuggly intestines curling up against one another
like warm gummy worms, sugar dusted.
Squishy doughnuts and floppy flumps.

But then sometimes he talks thin and weak
and we have these crystal conversations,
with fine little granules dried out at the edges like fried snowflakes.
Like bowls of sugar left out in cafes to collect
Clumps of candied bunches that crumble, dry out in lumps
Cling together hopefully, hopelessly
Dusty white dandruff drifting listlessly into peaks.

When he talks like that he spreads
That thin whitish smear on iced buns, hesitantly pale,
sickly – translucent stains, a smudge of sweetness.
Like sugar that burns into blackened, smoking caramel,
He spins soft syrupy sculptures, that collapse and dissolve
and chases old sugar mice, blind and singing,
and our laced up bodies seem nothing more than confectionery.

Those conversations of sugar were swimming with water
bleeding out drippy icing, moulding white,
and leaking gluey jam.
They were sunken sponge cakes collapsed under frosting.
and the sucked in sore cheeks of a toffee.

Fleeting pleasure perhaps – yes, ok, let’s say that.
But even in our jammiest red heart of hearts, we knew;
all they left us with was numb gums and fillings,
too sweet a tooth
and empty bellies.

Image credit: Tiger500; image has been cropped

Personal History

Kavya Deshpande
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Personal History

 

CW: sexual harassment

1.

AKTHAR: There was a contract between him and his class. Quite what the contract was or what it involved would be hard to say. But it was there.
                                                    — Alan Bennett, The History Boys

If you must go to Cuba, go with a toothache. Reclining under a ceiling fan in a dental clinic off some side street in Havana will situate you in a place far removed from its image. Here is where the Bay of Pigs and the spectre haunting Europe and the CIA assassination plots (and the poisoned scuba suit and the exploding cigar) and the revolution that happened as well as the one perpetually in motion are all momentarily relegated in significance. What begins to matter more are the quieter workings of the past. The literacy drives. The efforts towards social welfare. A national striving for dignity when dignity is denied by external forces that operate without it. You will get your broken crown fixed for nearly nothing, and you will leave understanding that history is not made of straight lines.

I learnt this when I was sixteen, in a classroom with windows that faced away from the sun and tables arranged in a horseshoe. There were other things I learnt that year, too.

I learnt that everybody in the world knew the limits of their understanding of mathematics and science, but most did not know what they did not about the past. I learnt that I was being trained in a delicate and arcane art, that I would live my life as a custodian of its secrets and that they in return would exempt me from a blindness to complexity that apparently afflicted all those who were not sitting in this classroom with windows facing away from the sun and tables arranged in a horseshoe. I learnt to look for holes in everything, and if I couldn’t find any, to make them, because a well-constructed challenge to an accepted interpretation would not just please an examiner, but would stand in its own right as something beautiful. Every argument had an architecture, and we were in the business of building cathedrals. I learnt to receive everything I read or heard with suspicion so as to better counter it — everything, that is, except all of the above.

I did not learn, until much later, about the small distance that exists between learning something and being taught it. I was never told about the many delusions and compunctions that this fissure is capable of holding.

In hindsight, I don’t think I learnt very much about history at all.

2.

“Shinto belief: division btwn real world of today and spirit world of past is a permeable gauze. Past is always superimposed onto present.”
—My notes from a lesson on nineteenth-century Japan

To understand why I would happily trade the clarity with which I remember all that I am about to tell you for a better ability to recall where I left my keys or for a few more memories from early childhood or, frankly, even for a biscuit, you have to understand how it all happened. You have to understand Michael.

I must admit that I am still yet to. In the years since, all of us who were taught by him have cautiously approached the problem amongst ourselves, and each time the conversation arrives at the same precipice. Here is what we know. We were anxious children who, for two years in a classroom that remained half-dark in the equatorial afternoon, had our nerve endings stitched back together. He made change and continuity, decline and reform, feel urgent and personal. It was demonstrated to us that everything had its cause, and everything had its future. We were encouraged to believe that, despite rejections from universities and acrimonious families and that constant grinding cycle of self-loathing and loathing others that lends the experience of adolescence its apocalyptic quality, so did we.

And in the end, everyone I have discussed the matter with concludes that a person so skilled in helping one understand remains himself beyond understanding. I myself have only fragments of evidence with which to approach even the edges of who he was.

He was the only teacher I ever saw cry. In the beginning, nobody participated in the class discussions he initiated because they often took imaginative detours from the syllabus and demanded a level of engagement that most of us found unnecessary for passing an exam. One day, after an invitation to talk about Che’s dress sense met another prolonged silence, he broke down. He told us that he had grown up poor. That what had rescued him from the ineluctable shape of his own life was the ability to care about art and literature and history. “You won’t get anywhere without it,” he said, welling up. “Passivity is not your friend. Trust me.”

“Ah, the speech, did he cry?” said a friend who was in the class he taught an hour before ours.

“Ah, the speech, did he cry?” said a girl from the year above when she heard people discussing the incident in the library.

I may have wondered for a second about the precision of the performance. But it was only for a second. I had been won over by the sight of an adult man crying. I had learnt to care.

There was enough reason to. “When the Fascist Italian government put the Communist theorist Antonio Gramsci on trial for writing subversive material, d’you know what the prosecutor said in his concluding remarks? We must find a way to stop this brain from working. You now need to knuckle down, to commit yourself to your craft in the same way, so that the examiner reading your essay will be forced to say the same thing about you.” This is what Michael told us after he marked our mock papers, and found them to be more than lacking. Michael had a special talent for making you feel human when the circumstances would not allow for it. Perhaps this was another warning.

“He’s so unprofessional,” complained Jake as we exited the classroom one day. Jake came from a fairly-large-c Conservative family and he had attempted to argue in line with his allegiances during a class discussion on the EU referendum before Michael summoned every major historical example of failed democracy to silence him. “I mean, this isn’t even history. It’s happening now. He had no right.”

We laughed it off because none of us were old enough to vote for anything, and had we been we most certainly wouldn’t have voted Leave.

“He’s kind of creepy, too. Have you noticed how all his favourites are girls?”

And we didn’t laugh this time but neither did we think too much of it because Jake was getting on everybody’s nerves by this point.

Michael thought I was clever, and he let me know this on occasion. He told me I saw things the same way as he did. I liked the beautiful parts of history — the geometry of Soviet propaganda, the way sentences fit together in Castro’s early speeches, the theatricality of the Tokugawa shogunate. I received an email from him the day he found out that I worshipped Bowie just as much as he had when he was my age. Knowing your love for Dave, I think you might enjoy this, it read, and contained links to songs by a band called The Tears. I think, on reflection, him believing I was clever was more a function of him being convinced that he was. I can listen to The Tears these days without being reminded of the email. I have learnt by now that it brings me no closer to understanding.

The last thing he ever taught us was a saying that he had discovered in his reading. It was the final class before we dispersed for study leave, and he was telling us what a pleasure we had been over the past two years. “In Ubuntu philosophy, they say that people are people through other people,” he said, looking over the tables arranged in a horseshoe. “I want to thank you all for making me feel like a person.” And for a moment I thought he was welling up again.

“I’m telling you, there’s something off about him,” said Jake later that day.

3.

“[O]ne of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen.”
—Richard Hofstadter

He slipped through our lives, and we let him because we believed him to be a quantifiable presence. He listened and advised. He followed up the next day to check whether the advice had been taken, and if it hadn’t, he would listen all over again. He helped read over personal statements before they were submitted though it was not his responsibility to. I remember a comment that he made on a friend’s draft: “You’ve explained very well why you’d make an excellent candidate for this course in terms of your skill and extracurricular activities. But I think it might be worth mentioning something else — that you are an unusually kind individual.”

Michael believed firmly in kindness. It was presented to us as a kind of first principle in the study of the past, more important than economic factors or political shifts, and every twitch of history could ultimately be explained by its absence. He made this so obvious to us that it would only make sense that he himself was kind. I no longer think that history can be explained in terms of kindness. I did not know who Richard Hofstadter was then or what he had suggested fifty years prior, but I do now.

So here it is. Here is how we were taught that the things that we thought we understood did not happen.

The news came in slowly, then very quickly, and then stopped altogether. Kindness had been a front for deeper ambiguities, ones that nevertheless emerged as damning on paper. There had been instances of indiscretion. Testimonies of discomfort. Liberties taken. Jake, in short, was finally validated, although I think he had long stopped caring about what became of Michael. After he was let go and subsequently vanished, the rest of us tried to follow suit. It was the quick way of negotiating betrayal. Not thinking too much, consigning it to a lesson learnt.

You have to understand what it is you are learning though, and I don’t think anybody did. You want to understand how someone could be two people. Why you failed to recognise it at the time. How it was possible for you to have believed that the things you were being taught rescued you from a blindness to complexity, when in fact you were plainly blind to the convolutions of the person teaching them to you. I wish there was some way of locating a grander logic in the way things turned out, some way of extracting the general from the particular, of making social history out of the personal so as to distance myself from the specific discomforts of what happened. Something to do with personality or intent or to substantively prove that giving unhappy children a sense of worth will make them turn the other way when you need them to.

I have tried, and have found nothing. History is not made of straight lines.

You

Lily Kershaw
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You

The pain starts to burn before I realise that it is there at all. Opening my fist, I glance down to see four angry half-moons, indented on my palm. No matter how many times I go through this, I am always nervous just before I see you. I have managed to build up a tolerance for almost everything else, feeling a sense of indifference towards most things – grieving over friends and loved ones has developed into a habit, if not, almost a chore, and work has become a form of silent meditation. Very little can anger or frustrate or scare me. Sometimes I feel like an iceberg, a total zenith of peace and security, adrift in an ocean that is still and silent, except for a mild wind.

When I was young, I used to miss you. I used to spend days, weeks, decades weeping over you, visiting your many graves spread over many continents. I remember placing flowers in Tuscany, Adelaide, São Paulo, Bombay. I have lain upon the moist ground above your two unmarked graves and I have slept in the cool marble of your first mausoleum. Each time we meet, we fall back in love and we age together: sometimes we have children, sometimes we exist in a peaceful solitude. Until you die, and it all starts again. Each time I feel as if everything is ripped away from me; as if nothing matters anymore. Each time, I am stripped of all the wrinkles and scars that I gain while by your side, slowly returning to how I was when we first met, all those centuries ago.

Strangely, watching my white hairs turn black, and feeling my arthritis disappear always provokes a profound sense of melancholy within me. Regaining my youth only means losing you all over again. It is like rewriting my own personal history, as if all the experiences which we have shared are wiped clean – almost as if they had never existed at all. Witnessing myself age before returning to my late adolescence is rather distressing. I am constantly peering over a cliff, preparing to jump, before being ripped away. Starting a journey which I know I can never complete.

Slowly this deep, raw warmth returns to my cheeks. All these feelings are so foreign and yet I recognise them so well. My chest tightens and my mind races. I am overwhelmed by a kind of nervous excitement, as if the whole world has taken on a soft glow. Hazy and amaranthine. As I emerge, leaving behind this chrysalis of apathy, I feel the warmth of the sun’s fervid rays upon my skin. I become aware of the dew drops impearled on every leaf, and of the butterflies who hover about them like sleep-walkers. The sky seems to expand before me as if it were some kind of vast ocean. I am ready to find you again.

We were always destined to be with each other, but the constant waiting often makes me feel impatient and hopeless. While you have been reborn a total of thirteen times, I have lived through 1494 years, about five hundred of which I have spent alone. In that space of time, I have acclimatised to solitude, never allowing myself to form new friendships and relationships until I start my life with you once again, fearing that these additional bonds would just create additional complications. Five hundred years of immortality, I know now, is five hundred years of lassitude and boredom.

I can never really predict when you will come back. All I can do is regularly check my reflection, waiting to see the familiar eyes of that girl who turned nineteen over a millennia ago and who has returned to that same age a dozen times since. I never know what you would look like, how you would talk or even who you would truly be. Meeting you again is always like meeting a completely new person, raised in a different place, with a different language, with different customs. Yet, despite all these differences and this vast chasm of time which always exists between us, I can always tell that it is you.

I always get nervous as if it were the very first time.

As I await seeing you once again, I vividly recall being near you, lying on the moist grass of a nation whose borders have since been squeezed far tighter. The weight of your hand in mine as we gazed upwards, searching for meaning in a universe which seemed so great and impersonal. The porcelain serenity of the moon fixed in place alongside silky constellations, filling the vast forgetfulness of the sky. Yet, despite the intimidating emptiness of this expanse, you were able to translate the silence of the stars. Speaking in a language that is now long forgotten, you traced out the invisible bonds between each pinprick in the sky with your index finger and, in doing so, linked them to us. The warmth of your touch brought context to this dark immeasurable abyss. I could not have longed for anything more than to stay there, touched and touching you.

Yet, in these empty moments when I feel adrift in my self-imposed isolation, my sense of self has only strengthened. In the silent decades, between wars, between deaths and between loves, I have come to find a kind of bliss in my own company. I am always there, a universal constant. It may have taken well over a millennia, but I feel that I have come to appreciate myself in the way that only an immortal being truly can. While my eternal life used to feel like a burden, I have now lived long enough to realise my own joy.

I still feel this shaky impatience. My heart races as my eyes scan the street, hoping to sense you pass me by. We cannot be severed as we are one, and to lose you, when I am this close, is to lose myself. I miss you. I long for you. You may be different people from different generations, but your soul always remains the same. I wouldn’t wish you to be anything other than who you are. It hurts to know that you are so close by, and yet you are a stranger to me. I am on fire. I want you. Need you.

And then I see you. The sense of yearning remains, but all the tension inside of me evaporates. I can already feel your touch again.

At the Station

Klara Zhao
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At the Station

The station has become the gathering place of the men and women in bright orange vests: the station staff, who hang about to watch the trains come and go. How lonely they must be, not the staff (who have the company of each other, at least) but the empty trains, which make the long journeys across the country only to be greeted by some laughter into the silence, to be watched by the station guards who wave their little white flags to the bare hills in the distance. The occasional leaf blows by from a nearby tree, grown full in its springtime form and happy to be rid of the excess burden. But otherwise, the stations are still, frozen in a perpetual wait. The steam keeps pumping, the engines keep running, yet one could not help noticing how painfully embarrassing this wait was, knowing, even before the arrival, that the invitation to the journey would be declined. Sometimes, the driver might change: a friendly exchange at the head of the train, but one that passes all too quickly. One driver steps off, the other one on, and all is silent again.

And imagine all these empty tubes, travelling like dreamy snakes across the plains… travelling, as though in a sort of daze. Some run underground, too, and as they pass from tunnel to tunnel, daylight occasionally breaks in as a series of flickering squares that seem to turn on and off as though controlled by some mechanical device. In the empty compartments they come and go, acting as entertainment for the one or two masked men sitting metres from one another, barely daring to make eye contact for fear of getting too close to each other.

The train will arrive with the station with relative fluency, if louder than usual as the screeching of the rails echoes into the silent station. And as one disembarks this hollow metal beast, one receives the very same greeting as the lonely train previously observed. A laugh into the silence, a step into the stillness, and a single breath seems to make the station tremble.

En Attendant

Klara Zhao
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En Attendant

For what, then, is there to wait?
For last season’s wind to abate,
For the summer that has come too late,
Or for the blossoms that have bloomed, at any rate…
———
Sitting amongst the greenery,
By the river that smiles serenely
At a sky, bare and lonely…
———
Waiting for a dream that sits idly, and
Twiddles its thumbs in mockery,
Hanging about like the last unwanted crumb.
———
One might well, then, say,
For Nothing, does one wait.
And for that, it is never too late.
———
To hope for Godot to come some day,
For the years to come by and say,
This time, let’s leave it up to fate.
———
So sit on the roof and watch remotely
The wind that makes the spires dance there, slowly
As in the dream told by the blackbird’s singing.
———
Waiting about like the hollow men, who
Still in the remnants of their souls make room
For the hope cast by illusions on the moon.
———
So let us wait then, let us wait,
And see how the world turns in the shade
Of the river that flows by coolly,
—
Of the blossoms that come and go so quickly,
Of the tolling of the bells that cry,
“Hurry up please it’s time,”
—
To sit by and simply watch time running,
To sit by and watch the geese come, hurrying
To keep the lone man company.

round

Maria-Minodora Grosu
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round

the world is round so I find it natural
     I find it only natural
         to walk in circles

                      it makes you feel natural

it makes you feel grounded
     even
         philosophical
             it channels new ways

                     of feeling directional

like
     new oranges
         rolling out of foliages
             round all year round

like
     memories
         from thrown
             away
                 frisbees
                     ultra
                 dimensional

like
     multi
coloured
     CDs
storing
     laughter
         and pleas

like
colour-coordinated plastic
rings

eyelids and
eyebags

like
iris

and others

other planets
quick tours

the world is round so why
would I not rotate with it
until it all feels
extra-terrestrial

Now That’s What I Call… Poetry?

Calum Taylor
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Now That’s What I Call… Poetry?

Somebody once told me there are a lot of bad song lyrics out there. Imagine, for every subtle, elegant song you hear, there’s bound to be a hundred clumsy ones that, sadly, are never gonna say goodbye. Some will try to fix you; others will continue to bless the rains. If anyone asks if we’re human or if we’re dancer, they don’t deserve an answer. Such, it seems, is the state of popular music: trite, sentimental, trivial. True, everyone might have a song in them, but that, in most cases, is where it should stay…

Complaints like this are common. It’s so easy to do. Far too easy. The issue is that it gets you nowhere. For the most part, popular music never claimed to be poetry, nor does it need to be. For most people, its joy comes from rhythm, melody, stirring vocals; its value, from feeling, memory, raw emotion. What’s more, you can find clumsy writing everywhere, from tabloids to tweets to romance novels. Why should it be any different here? With pop lyrics, I guess, it’s more noticeable. They’re everywhere, and you can’t escape. But if you are approaching The Beatles expecting Blake, you’ll be disappointed. If you search for Milton in Morrissey, Keats in Kate Bush, Coleridge in The Cure, you will be searching forever.

That said, anyone who bemoans our apparent morass of insipid lyricism really ought to readjust their focus. The strength of a chain might be in its weakest link, but it is surely the opposite with art. We ought to praise artforms on the merits of their finest examples, not their most glaringly awful ones—and that, I think, is where we are at now with these lyrics. In recent years, there’s been a growing shift towards allowing certain pop lyrics through the pearly gates of literature. The past few years alone have seen the illustrious Faber and Faber publish, among others, the lyrics of Lou Reed, Kate Bush, and Neil Tennant. Even Shaun Ryder has been granted entry. And while this might twist the melons of some high-brow purists, song lyrics as a form are now much harder for them to ignore. When Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy seemed, in essence, to canonize this tradition, a previously undermined outlet for literary expression. And certainly, ranging from Joni Mitchell to Joy Division, there are so many songs worthy of recognition and praise.

But the history book on the shelf is always repeating itself. Throughout time, music and poetry—both, in origin, oral traditions—have been tangled up together. From Ancient Greek lyre-accompanied recitations to the countless songs in Shakespeare’s plays, the two arts share a rich past. Don’t forget, the word ‘lyric’ comes from the ‘lyre’, the musical instrument itself. We hardly have to scratch the surface of our own literature before we see the omnipresence of music, in Middle English lyrics, folk ballads, Auden’s libretti, the songs of Burns, Blake, and Paul Muldoon… a long and winding list. It is perhaps only when the written page became the perceived ‘home’ of literature that their two paths appeared to diverge.

Then, if the distinction between pop lyrics and ‘literature’—low-brow and high-brow—is essentially a fallacy, why has it taken the wider literary establishment so long to accept it? There are many reasons, not least because of how relatively recent the form (as we know it) is. Issues as far ranging as perpetuating poetic faults (cliché, overuse of rhyme), depreciating the worth of poetry by effectively equating the two forms, even corporate interests come into play. But for me, the most vital part of all of this is remembering the simple fact that these words exist within music. Reading Nick Cave’s Complete Lyrics will only ever be a secondary supplement to the songs themselves. As Bob Dylan articulately grumbles in his Nobel lecture, ‘songs are unlike literature’ in that they’re ‘meant to be sung, not read’. Being tied to music, they are simultaneously limited by the temporal and generic constraints of song, and also unlimited in the boundless potential of the two media, playing off each other.

While it’s important for us to conserve the esteemed literature of the past, it’s equally important to welcome new forms into the so-called ‘canon’. And with the lyrics of popular music, we enter an intriguing situation. After all, song lyrics are for so many people their most immediate access to any kind of poetic expression, and while they will never be able to replace the nuance and formal delight of poetry, they can at least accompany them, respectfully and respected, as yet another platform for beauty. There are many bad song lyrics, yes. But remember, there are good ones too, worth our appreciation: shooting stars that break the mould.

Illustration: Isobel Falk.

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