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A favourite for Poet Laureate, Tony Harrison effectively scuppered his chances when he published the title poem of this collection in the "Guardian". This book has a section of similar republican poems including "The Abdication of King Charles III" as well as a short sequence on the Bosnian War. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Not his best work
Although I am generally a fan of Tony Harrison's work, I cannot bring myself to recommend this collection. Harrison's seems fed up with it all and has decided to reuse his old tricks which by this recycling loose their attraction. Read his Collected Poetry and discover how technically skilled and emotionally challenging his work can truely be. This is a waste of money unless you have a particular attraction to occasional verse. ... Read more

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A play set at Greenham in the days when the women's Peace Camp was at its most active. Like the original text - Aristophanes' "Lysistrata" - the play is about war and peace, the relations between men and women and the differences between the sexes, while its location and time is specific. ... Read more

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Advertising is a major expense for most businesses, yet it is one that is often approached haphazardly. This book presents a practical approach to this problem. It divides the development of an advertising campaign into a series of logical stages, beginning with the positioning of a product or service, and moving on to developing selling ideas and executing individual advertisements. It uses numerous and illustrations from many different types of business and allows the reader to benefit from the lessons others have already learned the hard way. It offers practical advice on legal problems, fact finding and researching, and preparation of documentation. It shows how to achieve professional results cost-effectively and without waste (a vital consideration for the advertiser with a modest budget) and provides working methods and techniques for both large and small companies. The late Tony Harrison was creative director of Saatchi and Saatchi in Frankfurt. He is the author of the products manager's handbook. ... Read more

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This comprehensive and innovative text provides a practical approach to the issues of child sexuality and sexual development. Written by well-known experts in this field, it brings together a range of issues all of which are vital to a full understanding of this poorly understood and sometimes controversial subject area. Research-based and addressing sexuality, sexual development and sexual health in children and adolescents, this ground-breaking book will be welcomed by all health care professionals working with children and adolescents.Features: * Chapter on abuse and child protection * Includes material on gender and sexuality * Addresses cultural influences on sexuality * Analyses research methodologies in this field * Practical and down-to-earth approach to controversial subject ... Read more

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Poetica 5

`The Greek Anthology', as Cyril Connolly wrote, `contains some great and some near-great poets, who would be quite unknown outside it, and who have still not received their due. Palladas, for example, who has touches of Swift and Juvenal, has never been properly put together.'

Tony Harrison's selection of poems by the fourth-century Alexandrian epigrammatist compellingly recreates the bitter wit which he describes as `the authentic snarl of a man trapped physically in poverty and persecution, and metaphysically in a deep sense of the futile'. As he writes in his preface, `Palladas... is generally regarded as the last poet of Paganism, and it is in this role that I have sought to present a consistent dramatic personality... His are the last hopeless blasts of the old Hellenistic world, giving way reluctantly, but without much resistance, before the cataclysm of Christianity.' ... Read more

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Tony Harrison's translations of Palladas, the Nietszche of Antiquity
First published in 1975 and then reprinted by Anvil Press in 1984 with a photo of a Pompeian Necropolis on the cover, Tony Harrison's Palladas is still the best introduction to this bitter, cynical, darkly comic poet of the 4th Century CE.Dubbed "the last pagan," Palladas watched the Classical Age fall to the hands of fanatical Christians from his Alexandrian home and consoled himself by berating them (and bemoaning his disappearing world) in some of the most nihilistic poetry of all time.British poet Harrison translates 70 poems, a small percentage of Palladas's work which has come down to us, but a fine taste of this man's acidic wit.

My only problem is that Harrison translates into a rhyming scheme.The thing is, most Greek and Latin poems did not rhyme.Translators however feel the need to enforce rhyme in their work, doubtless because they wish to cater to the common misconception that if it don't rhyme, it ain't poetry.Harrison I'd say enforces a rhyming scheme moreso because he's trying to replicate the feel of the Greek original, as the sound of ancient Greek verse was as important as the words themselves.Still, I can't help but wonder how much better this would be if Harrison didn't hinder himself with his self-enforced rhyming scheme.

Palladas ridicules Christians, married life, sickness, and even life itself in his snappy poems.What can be gleaned from between the lines is that Palladas suffered from an unhappy marriage and lack of funds; employed as a "grammarian," he taught Homer and the like to children.Only, these children were Christians, the prototypes of the victorious believers who would one day so destroy the Classical World that Palladas's poems would be forgotten in the West - along with the Greek in which he wrote them - for nearly a thousand years.Sad to say, even in his most nihilistic poems Palladas never once suspects something so terrible could happen.

But yet here we are, two millennia later, and Palladas seems like an old friend, that bitter yet side-splitting cynic you might see in the local bar, filled with hate over what the world has become and longing to go back to what it once was.More than just about any other personality of the ancient world, Palladas is the only one you'd probably enjoy hanging out with.(I mean, could you imagine hanging out with that fussy prude Augustus?)

Selections of Palladas appear in Kenneth Rexroth's "Poems from the Greek Anthology," Willis Barnstone's "Greek Lyric Poetry," and even Sherod Santos's dire "Greek Lyric Poetry."Yet none of them capture Palladas as well as Harrison; something Peter Jay realized when he put together his "Greek Anthology" for Oxford in 1973.There you will find early versions of many of these Harrison translations, though in the revised "Greek Anthology" Jay published through Penguin in 1981 Harrison's revised translations are used.

In sum, this is the best source for Palladas in English, despite its incompleteness and forced ryhming scheme.Long out of print, it can be found for relatively cheap.Seek it out and share a few bitter laughs with the Saul Bellow of Late Antiquity.And to wet your whistle, here are a few samples of Harrison's work:


Poem 4:

Born naked.Buried naked.So why fuss?
All life leads to that first nakedness.


Poem 9:

Agony comes from brooding about death.
Once dead, a man's spared all that pain.

Weeping for the dead's a waste of breath -
they're lucky, THEY can't die again.


Poem 14:

Life's an ocean-crossing where winds howl
and the wild sea comes at us wave after wave.

With Fortune our pilot, weather fair or foul,
all alike drop anchor in the grave.


Poem 53 (which just about any married man could agree with):

The theft of fire.Man's worst bargain yet.
Zeus created woman, He was that upset!

A woman dessicates a man with cares
and soon gives golden youth his first great hairs.

But Zeus's married life in Heaven above
`s no cloudy mattress of ambrosial love.

Zeus with Hera of the golden throne
longs to be divorced and on His own.

He often has to shove Her from the sky
to a dog-house cumulus to sulk and cry.

Homer knew this well and shows the two
squabbling on Olympus as mere mortals do.

Thus a woman nags and haggles though she lies
beside the Deity of Deities.
... Read more

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This volume features "The Prince's Play", "The Misanthrope", and "Phaedra Britannica", translated from French. ... Read more

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Also available in paperback.Please see page 00 for a full description. ... Read more

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Queen - Slave - Animal...
This book was an assigned book for a composition class I'm taking. Still - I feel in love with the translation - reading the play through and through again. The language and rhythms - the Greek tragedy is no surprise - and everyone is dead, dying, will die or prophesied to die - but I loved the control that Hecuba exerts over everyone even as a slave heading to her now service - her kingdom of Troy in ruins. After finishing I went into the notes and intro which were nearly as good as the play. Now - onto King Lear!

A first look by Euripides at the tragic character of Hecuba
Troy has fallen and its queen, Hecuba, has become the slave of Odysseus, who takes away her daughter Polyxena to be slain on the grave of Achilles.However, in this drama it is the earlier death of another child, Polydorus that provides the motivation for what comes to pass.This was a child who had been sent (according to Homer, there are various versions of this tale) for safety to the Thracian Chersonese.But now, after Hecuba hears of the death of Polyxena, the body of Polydorus washes up on shore.Apparently Hecuba's son-in-law Polymnester murdered the boy for the gold, which King Priam had sent to pay for his education.Agamemnon hears Hecuba's pleas, and Polymnester is allowed to visit the queen before she is taken away into captivity.

The most fascinating aspect of "Hecuba" is that it gives us an opportunity to contrast the character of the queen of fallen Troy in this play by Euripides with that in his more famous work, "The Trojan Women."This play was performed ten years before the other and its events take place right before the other play as well, although there is some overlap when Talthybius informs Hecuba of the death of Polyxena.In both dramas Hecuba is a woman driven by a brutal and remorseless desire for vengeance; however she proves much more successful in this drama than she does in "The Trojan Women."

This is an unusual play for Euripides is that the gods do not appear; the prologue is given by the ghost of Polydorus and the exodos are the slave women heading off to the ships (again, contrast this with "The Trojan Women").Hecuba has harsh words for Helen, as in the other play, but her son Paris receives his fair share of approbation as well.This play also makes reference to the myth that Hecuba would meet her own hideous death, which reinforces the idea that there is much more of a moral degradation of her character in this play (set up by much more humiliation and degradation in the first half).On an entirely different level, "Hecuba" is comparable to Aeschylus' "Orestia," since he addresses the question of the difference between revenge and justice, so while the "Hecuba"/"Trojan Woman" analog is the most obvious and the most fruitful, it is not the only possibility.

The Destruction of the Human Soul
Hecuba is one of the most profound, and profoundly pessimistic dramas ever written.It shows Hecuba, who had been Queen of Troy, now facing the ultimate devastation.She has already lost everything except her twoyoungest children.Now she will lose them, not to war but to politics andhuman greed.She loses herself to the need for vengeance, succeeds andloses her humanity.It is a shattering story and the Introduction byKenneth Reckford in which he examines the meaning of the play is worth theprice of the book.

War and loss driving Hecuba mad.
Hecuba was the wife of Priam, King of Troy, and the mother of Hector, Paris, Cassandra, and others. At the start of this play of Euripedes, the war between the Greeks and Troy is over and Hecuba is now a slave ofAgamemnon. The ghost of Achilles had appeared and demanded a sacrifice overhis tomb before the Greeks can set sail for home. They vote to sacrificePolyxena, Hecuba's young daughter, despite the tears and entreaties ofHecuba. After Polyxena's noble death, Hecuba learns that her last childPolydorus had been murdered by the King of Thrace, Polymestor, to whomPolydorus had been sent for safe keeping. This finally drives Hecuba madand she seeks vengence for Polydorus's death. Euripedes shows in this playthe effects of war and vengence on innocent lives and how cruel men at warcan be. ... Read more

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Chapters: Barry Cryer, John Smeaton, Tony Harrison, Gerald Kaufman, Colin Montgomerie, Guy Sigsworth, William Nicholson, 1st Baron Nicholson, Geoffrey Crowther, Baron Crowther, John Ireland, Ralph Thoresby, Lawrence Wager, Joseph Bancroft Reade, John Hawkshaw, Howard Devoto, Barnett Stross, George Dixon, Robin Blaze, Richard Peacock, Ken Hodcroft, Alan Davidson, Jack Hibbert, Nigel Waterson, Robin Flower, William Henry Brookfield, John Diamond, Baron Diamond, Patrick Munro, William Arthur Brown, Donald Kaberry, Baron Kaberry of Adel, George Francis Robert Henderson, Geoffrey Anketell Studdert Kennedy, Keith Cox, Samuel W. Johnson, Christopher Price, John Rowe Townsend, Albert Braithwaite, Jeremy Dyson, Ernest Farrar, Philip Wilby, Peter Knight Walker, Arthur Michael Hollis, Robert Crosthwaite, James Buchanan Seaton, George Edward Holderness, Ralph Emmerson, Alston James Weller May, John Berkenhout, Joseph Milner. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 191. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Colin Stuart Montgomerie, OBE (born 23 June 1963) is a Scottish professional golfer often referred to by one of his nicknames 'Monty'. He has had one of the finest careers in European Tour history, having won a record eight Order of Merit titles including a streak of seven consecutively from 1993 to 1999, and 31 European tour victories, placing him fourth on the all time list. He is renowned also for both his extraordinary Ryder Cup performances as well as the dubious distinction of being one of the most accomplished players never to have won a major championship after finishing runner-up on five occasions. His career high world ranking is second. Although Scottish by birth and ethnicity, he was raised in Yorkshire, England, where his father James was Managing Director of Fox's Biscuits. Montgomerie spe...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=379616 ... Read more

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Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Wole Soyinka, Harold Shipman, Barry Cryer, Tony Harrison, Carole Hayman, Mark Byford, Mark Knopfler, Jack Straw, David Kelly, Naweed Syed, Little Boots, Paul Dacre, Clare Short, Corinne Bailey Rae, Murder of Lindsay Hawker, Irvine Laidlaw, Baron Laidlaw, V. Craig Jordan, Hage Geingob, Thomas Edmund Harvey, Mark Gatiss, Stephen Mumford, Michael Asher, Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o, Vernon Scannell, Herbert Read, Gordon Adam, Andy Kershaw, David Gauntlett, Daniel Byles, Alistair Mcgowan, Rebecca Grinter, Christopher Snowden, Frank Parkinson, Tom Palmer, Piers Sellers, Gavin Esler, Leslie Hardman, David Cox, Sayeeda Warsi, Baroness Warsi, Patrick Woodroffe, Peter Morgan, Ron Geaves, Chris Harman, Karl Shuker, William James Hughes, Julian Dutton, George Porter, Robin Bullough, Kenton Cool, David Chaytor, Jacqui Oatley, Peter Bowker, Nambaryn Enkhbayar, Fiona May, Graham Allen, Michael Lawrie, Ian Duhig, John Battle, David Henry Lewis, Richard Hoggart, Barry John, Rupert Hamer, Barnett Stross, Alan Yentob, Nicholas Witchell, Alan Campbell, Michael Clapham, Alan Harper, Liz Kershaw, Steve Bell, Diederick Santer, Edward Kessler, Richard Freeman, Jonathan Clements, Roderic Lyne, Chelsy Davy, Joe Moran, Richard Quest, Jenni Falconer, Eric Illsley, Jon Trickett, Jennifer Wilby, Andrew Herbert, Niyi Osundare, John Edwards, Michael Colclough, Nick Strutt, Wayne Brown, Paul Morris, Robert Sherlaw Johnson, Peter Nazareth, Cec Thompson, Steve Shill, Michael Daniels, Farad Azima, Paul Scoon, James Gourlay, Bill Ind, John Gunnell, Mark Collett, Colin P Flynn, Keir Starmer, Trevor Averre-Beeson, Lisa Lutz, Richard Douthwaite, Lola Almudevar, Richard Profit, Georgie Thompson, Peter Bullock, John William Hind, Christopher Leslie, Albert Hugh Smith, Cecilia Galloway, Daniel Percival, Geoffrey Lofthouse, Baron L... ... Read more