In the late 1960s and early 1970s David Harsent was an important member of the group of poets associated with the literary magazine the Review, edited by Ian Hamilton. In addition to Harsent and Hamilton, this group also included Colin Falck, Michael Fried, Hugo Williams, and Peter Dale. Harsent achieved early success and critical recognition with Tonight's Lover (1968) and A Violent Country (1969), and was considered to be one of the most promising of the young poets in Britain.

The external facts of Harsent's life are guarded carefully: he was born in Devonshire, studied at Oxford, and has worked since then in the bookselling and publishing trades; he is divorced, and has three children. As Sean O'Brien has written in a recent appreciation of his work, "Harsent's books must be studied hard for any strong sense that outside privacy there is an economy, a regime, a public realm with...