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This generous selection of Tony Harrison's poems includes sixty-three poems from his famous sonnet sequence "The School of Eloquence" and the remarkable long poem 'v', a meditation in a vandalized Leeds graveyard, written during the miners' strike, which created such a stir when it was broadcast on television in the late 1980s. ... Read more

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Tony Harrison: A Modern British Poet
This collection of the work of Tony Harrison I found to be excellent.His accounts of his working-class background in Leeds, and his struggle to reconcile the conflicting worlds of his background and his present statusas an acclaimed poet, constitutes the bulk of his work.He has a moderntone to his voice which speaks of universal themes of breaking away fromone's past. ... Read more

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Reliance on devices like the photograph and slide will lead, I rather fear, to linguistic suicide. We must keep on challenging language to engage with all we suffer from in this new modern age. This epic sweep of a play takes us from a contemporary Westminster Abbey to the Arctic ship Fram - or Forward - specially built by the famous Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen who, with his suicidal companion, Johansen, makes a bid on foot for the North Pole in the 1890s. Though incompatible, they share a bear fur sleeping-bag through the long winter. Nansen, still haunted by Johansen's ghost is appointed to the League of Nations. As a figurehead of Russian famine relief in 1922, he conducts the first celebrity campaign, searching for means, however shocking, to make people care. Tony Harrison's major new work for the theatre, Fram, premiered at the National Theatre in April 2007. ... Read more

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Introduction by Bernard O'Donaghue.

Bold, contemporary verse adaptations of the medieval Mystery Plays by England's greatest modern theatrical poet.

This first collection of Tony Harrison's poetry for the stage compiles his masterly adaptations of various medieval mystery plays. Rendered in highly alliterative verse, Harrison's plays are, as were their medieval counterparts, intended to make colloquial Northern English language and form a vehicle for the profound religious texts that describe the biblical epic of salvation. Original documents from the Middle Ages are the basis for Harrison's three-part cycle: The Nativity encompasses Creation, The Expulsion, The Flood, Abraham and Isaac, and The Birth of Christ; The Passion covers The Life and Crucifixion of Christ; and Doomsday takes in The Harrowing of Hell and The Last Judgment. Traditionally, mystery plays were acted and produced by the trade guilds, and Harrison recalls this in his use of props: a forklift transports God, a screwdriver serves as Christ's scepter, and a manhole cover is the mouth of Hell.

Drawing on pre-Renaissance English religious, linguistic, and theatrical tradition, these plays are part of a movement to celebrate English literature as it existed before the widespread cultural influence of continental Europe. In addition, this volume contains an Introduction that places these classic works in the context both of their medieval origins and of Harrison's own poetry. ... Read more

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In "V", Tony visits the graves of his parents in his native Leeds and finds the cemetery desecrated with graffiti. The passion and language contrasts with the tender reminiscences of life in "The School of Eloquence". Poems from "Selected Poems" are also included. ... Read more

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Wonderful contemporary poems in traditional forms
Harrison's niche is combining contemporary language (including obscenities and slang) with traditional poetic forms. Working class Leeds meets classicism. Harrison does this beautifully, his many fine moments well outweighing his occasional metrical or rhyme difficulties. The long title poem is a painful meditation on the speaker's self and heritage occasioned by finding his parents'gravestones defaced by obscene graffiti. Other poems extent and enrich Harrison's reflections on his working class background and painful relationship with his father. There are other powerful, moving and memorable poems in this slim volume which, dear reader, you should have if you enjoy traditional forms and devices, all in the service of a keen mind and open heart. And hunt down his Selected Poems while it's still in print. ... Read more

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This study focuses on the post-Holocaust writers Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, and Ted Hughes, while also stressing the links between their work and the Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan, Miklos Radnoti, Primo Levi, and Janos Pilinszky.

Developing his theory of "awkwardness," Antony Rowland argues that post-Holocaust poetry can play an important part in our understanding of Holocaust writing. Rowland examines post-Holocaust poetry's self-conscious, imaginative engagement with the Holocaust, as well as the literature of survivors. He illuminates how "awkward" poetics enable post-Holocaust poets to provide ethical responses to history and avoid aesthetic prurience. This probing and sensitive reassessment of Holocaust-related poetry offers an important new perspective on postwar poetry.

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Some fine poems, some strained poems
Camille Paglia recently observed that many of our most famous poets have written many very good poems, but not a single truly memorable one. I find it difficult to imagine a poetry reader not finding among Tony Harrison's work at least two or three such memorable poems, given his frank but not self-indulgent meditations on his uncomfortable family life, his skilled use of traditional forms and the expectations they bring, his ear for English, and his memorable blending of a working class Leeds background, contemporary terms and events, and a classicist's toolbox of allusions. As an example, one poem about an agricultural inspector observing the destruction of livestock in response to the mad cow disease epidemic begins "He wanders lonely as a cloud/to watch the cattle being culled." Harrison does not shrink from the dark counterpoints to pastoral romanticism.) Tony Harrison is well known in part for his satiric political epigrams, although the ones in this small collection attacking Bush and Blair ("The Krieg Anthology") for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem overwhelmed by rage, prime examples of intense emotion elbowing craft and nuance aside (nonetheless some are wonderful, e.g. "Illinois Elegy"). The best poems here seem to me to be the more reflective and personal, although political awareness is seldom completely absent. Readers with a taste for contemporary takes on traditional forms will likely find this book and Harrison's Selected Poems, and his V, among the books they return to with pleasure. ... Read more

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The letters H, v., and O are central to Harrison’s poetry. "H" in the play The Big H, and many of Harrison’s poems on language and class, stands for dropped aitches--missed rungs in his "ladder of aspiration," and for the chain of association he makes from the [h]owl of the Leeds City coat of arms to Herod, H-block, H-bomb, and Hiroshima. "H" is also celebrated in its absence, in loving reaffirmations of the bonds of dialect, class, and family. The verses/versus of Harrison’s most controversial piece, v., are echoed in the "v-signs" and other invective of the angry dispossessed to whom his polyphonic writing gives a voice. "V" also stands for victory--the dearly-bought victories of wars, explored with the concomitant themes of imperialism and political propaganda. The black O haunts Harrison’s work. The abyss; the nothingness of death, the extinction of personality, of art, of languages, of species, perhaps even of humankind; is figured in black burn-out circles, pits, mines, and empty skies. Its obverse is another O, where life is affirmed--the acting circle of Harrison’s theatre work. Lucid and trenchant, Byrne’s study is now the benchmark for students of Harrison’s work.
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The poetry of Tony Harrison is discussed from his early work in the 1970s through to poems on the legacy of the two Gulf Wars, and his status as Britain's greatest living poet is affirmed. ... Read more

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This book, published to commemorate the sixtieth birth of Harrison, called "our best English poet," contains essays, reminiscences, and critical studies by such luminaries as Melvyn Bragg and Richard Eyre. ... Read more

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Tony Harrison has been acclaimed worldwide, not only for his poetry but for his lyric sequences and long poems, for his adaptations and original plays for the theatre, his opera libretti and his verse films for television. ... Read more