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Harsent, 72, won the prize in the 50th anniversary year of
the death of the American-born Eliot, often ranked as the best
modernist poet of the 20th century for works such as "The Waste
Land" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".
Harsent said "Fire Songs", his 11th collection of poems, had in
part been inspired by his younger son's concern about "the heat
death of the planet".
"I just wish politicians would do something about putting that
into reverse," Harsent told Reuters at the awards ceremony held
in a London museum.
"I sometimes wonder if the people who are responsible for the
way the world works look at the almost apparently insurmountable
problems of planetary depredation and do they have children and
grandchildren - do they think about the future at all?"
He said the collection of poems does not deal directly with
those subjects, but the last "Fire Song" in the volume "is a
sort of black fantasy of the end of the world".
Harsent was chosen by a three-judge panel from a shortlist of 10
finalists for the prize which is administered by the Poetry Book
Society and carries a 20,000-pound ($30,344) top prize funded by
the T.S. Eliot Estate.
"David Harsent is a poet for dark and dangerous days," poet and
writer Helen Dunmore, the chair of the judges, said. "'Fire
Songs' plumbs language and emotion with technical brilliance and
prophetic power."
Previous winners of the prize which was first given in 1993
include Ted Hughes, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Don Paterson,
Anne Carson, George Szirtes, Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney.
(Editing by Michael Roddy; Editing by Christian Plumb)
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