Skin is David Harsent's visionary new collection, consisting of ten dramatic sequences of poems, which, like a planetary system, operate on one another in a dynamic assemblage of propulsion and pull.

A new sequence of startling, haunting poems by award-winning poet David Harsent. These are no guardian angels. They are dangerous, feral. They arrive uninvited, unrefusable and each visceral encounter demands an existential reckoning, an unflinching honesty. They are love's arbiters, though themselves loveless.

Yannis Ritsos (1909-90) is generally considered to be - along with Cavafy, Seferis and Elytis - one of the most significant Greek poets of the last century. His life was, to say the least, troubled. From an early age, he was dogged by the tuberculosis that killed his mother and brother. His father and sister suffered breakdowns and spent time in institutions. His poem Epitaphios (1936), a lament for a young man shot dead by the police during a tobacco workers' strike, was publicly burned by the Metaxas regime and his books banned. During the post-World War Two civil war - because he sided with the left - Ritsos was arrested and sent to prison camps. Then, in 1967, when the Papadopoulos military junta took control of the country, he was again arrested, again his books were banned, again he spent time in prison camps, before being confined to house arrest on the island of Samos. The violence and tyranny of dictatorship is often fractured by the surreal. In the poems collected here, written by Ritsos while in prison and under house arrest, that fracture in perception is a wound. A Broken Man in Flower has an introduction by John Kittmer and includes the text of an illuminating and vivid letter sent by Ritsos to his publisher in 1969 while under house arrest on Samos describing his life - and the lives of Greeks - under the repressive rule of the Colonels. David Harsent's thirteen collections have won a number of awards, including the Forward Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Griffin International Prize. He is also a librettist: his collaborations with composers, chiefly with Harrison Birtwistle, have been performed at major venues worldwide.

Winner Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation Winter 2012. Yannis Ritsos (1909 - 1990) is one of Greece's finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. Louis Aragon called him 'the greatest poet of our age'. He wrote in the face of ill-health, personal tragedy and the systematic persecution by successive hard-line, right-wing regimes that led to many years in prison, or in island detention camps. Despite this, his lifetime's work amounted to 120 collections of poems, several novels, critical essays, and translations of Russian and Eastern European poetry. The 1960 setting, by Mikis Theodorakis, of Ritsos's epic poem Epitaphios was said to have helped inspire a cultural revolution in Greece. In Secret gives versions of Ritsos's short lyric poems: brief, compressed narratives that are spare, though not scant. They possess an emotional resonance that is instinctively subversive: rooted in the quotidian but, at the same time, freighted with mystery. The poems are so pared-down, so distilled, that the story-fragments we are given - the scene-settings, the tiny psychodramas - have an irresistible potency.

Salt is a distinctive assembly of poems by the multi-award winning David Harsent. Resting somewhere between fragment and exposition, these intense and primal pieces stretch out across the measure of the page in the form of brief utterances. One extends to sonnet-length, one consists of a single line; but each piece uniquely completes its own world, and at the same time shades on to the next as a succession of frames and stills and imaginings that lends light and colour in the round. 'The poems in this book are a series, not a sequence,' the author explains. 'They belong to each other in mood, in tone and by way of certain images and words that form a ricochet of echoes - not least the word "salt".' Mineral, eerie, sensory, the poems in the collection are experienced as encounters - some with the surety of daylight, others in dream-life - that refresh with the turning of each page. Like little fictions passed through space from hand to hand, the writings build powerfully to make Salt an unforgettable volume from this most visionary of writers.

Emerging photographer Sam Mellish presents 'Watford Gap', an initmate study of the myriad different people who pass through the doors of the UK's 'first motorway service station'. Created in collaboration with celebrated UK poet David Harsent and prolific photographer Martin Parr, 'Watford Gap' is a light hearted and touching portrait of the UK on the move.

The city never sleeps silence would weaken it when all else fails it talks to itself seamless thrum of machinery dark undertone. It is 00:00 and the full of the night yet to come. A man sits at a window through the dead hours of night, his sleep broken by troubling dreams of a figure in a white landscape. This fragmentary vigil anchors a series of narrative sections in which a dramatic voice gives, first, an account of the man, then addresses him directly. We learn of a conflicted childhood, of love lost to circumstance, of the press of death on the protagonist's waking thoughts. He is a man afflicted by personal loss, but also a man of his time, all too aware of the troubled world in which he lives. In this powerful sequence, Harsent's breathtaking formal skills are always in evidence. Intense, lyrical and passionate, Loss makes for enthralling reading.

A Bird's Idea of Flight describes a circular journey in a sequence of 25 poems. Twelve poems chart the outward journey, the thirteenth is pivotal, and twelve poems bring the traveler back. The subject of his quest is thanatology; in particular, he is deeply curious about the business of his own death. It is an adventure of discovery and disillusionment, during which the figure of death, as companion, mentor and guide, appears along the way, and in various guises.

Winner of the 2014 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry 'A writer we should treasure.' Charlotte Runcie, Daily Telegraph 'With every book [Harsent's] stature as a truly significant writer becomes more undeniable.' Fiona Sampson, Independent The poems in David Harsent's new collection, whether single poems, dramatic sequences, or poems that 'belong to one another', share a dark territory and a sometimes haunting, sometimes steely, lyrical tone. Throughout the book - in the stark biography of 'Songs from the Same Earth', the troubling fractured narrative of 'A Dream Book', the harrowing lines of connection in four poems each titled 'Fire', or the cheek-by-jowl shudder of 'Sang the Rat' - Harsent writes, as always, with passion and a sureness of touch.

Marriage consists of two sequences of poems. The first is loosely based on the relationship between Pierre Bonnard and his muse and model, who became eventually his wife. It is a rich pattern for the study of the mysteries of domesticity, the unspoken privacies and intimacies that can exist between two people. For the painter, problems of seeing become, for the husband, problems of knowing. 'Marriage' is an inspired portrait of conjugality, exact, watchful and understated. The second sequence, 'Lepus', extends an interest in the hare as trickster, traceable elsewhere in David Harsent's work, and most recently in 'The Woman and the Hare', a piece commissioned by the Nashe Ensemble, set to music by Harrison Birtwistle, and first performed at the South Bank Centre in 1999.

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.

In an illustrious career, David Harsent has published eight collections of poetry, from A Violent County in 1969, to Legion, winner of the Forward Prize in 2005. This selection, made by the author himself, draws upon the full arc of his career and offers an outstanding concentration of, and introduction to, the full range and powers of this distinguished poet.