'Fire Songs' by David Harsent, a short review.

I was reading one of the Guardian's long essays recently written by Patrick Barkham. This was a riveting piece about the effect of grouse shooting on raptors particularly the fate of goshawks in Bowland. Then I bought David Harsent's collection Fire Songs published by Faber & Faber which has recently won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Re-reading one of the poems in this collection 'Bowland Beth' I suddenly realised that the subject was one of the same goshawks mentioned in Patrick Barkham's article.
Where the Guardian essay was a wonderful example of contemporary nature writing, well researched and shocking, David Harsent's poem concentrates on the beauty of the goshawk to create an elegy for a bird almost driven to extinction.

 'That she made shapes in the air

  That she saw the world as pattern and light
 moorland to bare mountain drawn by 
      instinct'
Then

 'That the gunshot was another sound amid
     birdcall
 a judder if you had seen it her line of flight
     broken
 That she went miles before she bled out'
I'm hugely enjoying the whole collection. Harsent's language and subject matter ranges far and wide but for me 'Bowland Beth' is my standout poem of the year so far. Highly recommended.

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