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Selected Poems
This is a second edition of Tony Harrison's "Selected Poems" containing 13 additional poems. It includes ten new sonnets for "The School of Eloquence" and his long poem "V".
256 pages, Paperback
First published November 6, 1984
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About the author
Tony Harrison
112 books36 followersSee http://www.contemporarywriters.com/au...
He has written for the National Theatre in London, the New York Metropolitan Opera and for the BBC and Channel 4 television. He was born in Leeds, England in 1937 and was educated at Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University, where he read Classics and took a diploma in Linguistics.
He became the first Northern Arts Literary Fellow (1967-8), a post that he held again in 1976-7, and he was resident dramatist at the National Theatre (1977-8). His work there included adaptations of Molière's The Misanthrope and Racine's Phaedra Britannica.
His first collection of poems, The Loiners (1970), was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1972, and his acclaimed version of Aeschylus's The Oresteia (1981) won him the first European Poetry Translation Prize in 1983. The The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992) won the Whitbread Poetry Award.
His adaptation of the English Medieval Mystery Plays cycle was first performed at the National Theatre in 1985. Many of his plays have been staged away from conventional auditoria: The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus was premièred at the ancient stadium at Delphi in 1988; Poetry or Bust was first performed at Salts Mill, Saltaire in Yorkshire in 1993; The Kaisers of Carnuntum premiered at the ancient Roman amphitheatre at Carnuntum in Austria; and The Labours of Herakles was performed on the site of the new theatre at Delphi in Greece in 1995. His translation of Victor Hugo's The Prince's Play was performed at the National Theatre in 1996.
His films using verse narrative include v, about vandalism, broadcast by Channel 4 television in 1987 and winner of a Royal Television Society Award; Black Daisies for the Bride, winner of the Prix Italia in 1994; and The Blasphemers' Banquet, screened by the BBC in 1989, an attack on censorship inspired by the Salman Rushdie affair. He co-directed A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan for Channel 4 in 1994 and directed, wrote and narrated The Shadow of Hiroshima, screened by Channel 4 in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the first atom bomb. The published text, The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film/Poems (1995), won the Heinemann Award in 1996. He wrote and directed his first feature film Prometheus in 1998. In 1995 he was commissioned by The Guardian newspaper to visit Bosnia and write poems about the war.
His most recent collection of poetry is Under the Clock (2005), and his Collected Poems, and Collected Film Poetry, were published in 2007.
He has written for the National Theatre in London, the New York Metropolitan Opera and for the BBC and Channel 4 television. He was born in Leeds, England in 1937 and was educated at Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University, where he read Classics and took a diploma in Linguistics.
He became the first Northern Arts Literary Fellow (1967-8), a post that he held again in 1976-7, and he was resident dramatist at the National Theatre (1977-8). His work there included adaptations of Molière's The Misanthrope and Racine's Phaedra Britannica.
His first collection of poems, The Loiners (1970), was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1972, and his acclaimed version of Aeschylus's The Oresteia (1981) won him the first European Poetry Translation Prize in 1983. The The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992) won the Whitbread Poetry Award.
His adaptation of the English Medieval Mystery Plays cycle was first performed at the National Theatre in 1985. Many of his plays have been staged away from conventional auditoria: The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus was premièred at the ancient stadium at Delphi in 1988; Poetry or Bust was first performed at Salts Mill, Saltaire in Yorkshire in 1993; The Kaisers of Carnuntum premiered at the ancient Roman amphitheatre at Carnuntum in Austria; and The Labours of Herakles was performed on the site of the new theatre at Delphi in Greece in 1995. His translation of Victor Hugo's The Prince's Play was performed at the National Theatre in 1996.
His films using verse narrative include v, about vandalism, broadcast by Channel 4 television in 1987 and winner of a Royal Television Society Award; Black Daisies for the Bride, winner of the Prix Italia in 1994; and The Blasphemers' Banquet, screened by the BBC in 1989, an attack on censorship inspired by the Salman Rushdie affair. He co-directed A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan for Channel 4 in 1994 and directed, wrote and narrated The Shadow of Hiroshima, screened by Channel 4 in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the first atom bomb. The published text, The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film/Poems (1995), won the Heinemann Award in 1996. He wrote and directed his first feature film Prometheus in 1998. In 1995 he was commissioned by The Guardian newspaper to visit Bosnia and write poems about the war.
His most recent collection of poetry is Under the Clock (2005), and his Collected Poems, and Collected Film Poetry, were published in 2007.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
August 26, 2012
Harrison is one of this country's great poets. He is equal to Milton. His verse is reminiscent of Pope: disciplined and sharp. The poetry brings the 20C issues in to touching clarity.
February 11, 2009
Do not confuse this Tony Harrison with the pink shaman in The Mighty Boosh! Harrison is our top Northern poet who came to public attention after 'V's performance on Channel 4 – the furore from right wing newspapers and MPs over the 'FOUR LETTER TV POEM FURY' raised, ironically, the issue of language and power, which is what the poem is about. 'V' is a duologue between the poet/speaker Harrison and his alter-ego, a Skinhead who crudely articulates the resentment of the unemployed underclass during the time of the Miner's Strike (1984-5) Their lives have become as ''worked-out' as the coal pit beneath the dead of Leed's Beeston cemetery, a 'rabblement of bone and rot / shored slack, crushed shale, smashed prop.' Harrison, seeks to 'redeem' the 'versuses of life' the 'class v. class' tensions within fractured Thatcherite Britain. This also includes the contradictions between his own working class Northern background of Leeds and the middle classes he entered due to a Classical education articulated in the contrast between the poet/speaker's language of standard English and the Skin's Northern dialect. The disconnection between the poetic language of the fortunate Harrison and the disempowered Skinhead who never gets 'a hearing' is contextualised within the epigraph from Arthur Scargill that 'power' depends on an ability to 'master words'. The power of the poem comes from the Skinhead's direct vulgar assault on the poet/speaker for being a class traitor. Harrison's poem is in essence about guilt; how his Grammar and university education provided him with the privileged existence of a celebrated poet, but at a cost; a 'bard', barred from his working class lineage of his father's profession of 'butcher, publican and baker'. The poem cleverly combines higher and lower registers and the form alludes to Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' to lament this now 'blackened dynasty' of the Thatcher's degraded North.
November 2, 2022
Not worth the paper it was written on.
August 29, 2022
‘Long Distance’ is perhaps the best poem on grief I have ever read.
Alack, none of the other poems really did it for me.
Sorry, Tony.
Alack, none of the other poems really did it for me.
Sorry, Tony.
February 3, 2019
This is a glorious collection that remains fresh and varied all the way to the end. Intelligent and frank, Harrison's poems are earthy and life-affirming., with all manner of ingenious rhymes.
There seem to be three 'periods' of Harrison's poems. The earlier poems have a modernist feel, and really make you work. The middle part of the collection is drawn from his 'The School of Eloquence' sonnets which revolve around his relationship with his father, the educational gulf between them, and his leaving behind Leeds and his working class background. The final group of poems (which contain my favourites) are generally longer, including the wonderful 'v.', and themes include the gaps between things, when something is neither one thing nor the other, the natural world (there are several nods to D H Lawrence), and war poetry. Love, sex, death, history and religion thread their way through the whole collection.
I decided to read this after reading his poems 'Book Ends I, II' and 'A Kumquat for John Keats', and having finished this collection I can safely say that Tony Harrison is now one of my favourite poets.
There seem to be three 'periods' of Harrison's poems. The earlier poems have a modernist feel, and really make you work. The middle part of the collection is drawn from his 'The School of Eloquence' sonnets which revolve around his relationship with his father, the educational gulf between them, and his leaving behind Leeds and his working class background. The final group of poems (which contain my favourites) are generally longer, including the wonderful 'v.', and themes include the gaps between things, when something is neither one thing nor the other, the natural world (there are several nods to D H Lawrence), and war poetry. Love, sex, death, history and religion thread their way through the whole collection.
I decided to read this after reading his poems 'Book Ends I, II' and 'A Kumquat for John Keats', and having finished this collection I can safely say that Tony Harrison is now one of my favourite poets.
June 7, 2021
Never let anyone tell you Geoffrey-can’t-fart-without-quoting-Latin-Hill was worth a patch on Tony Harrison’s pants.
Favourites:
Then and Uz
A Kumquat for John Keats
Long Distance I and II
Palladas: Poems
Heredity
Timer
Favourites:
Then and Uz
A Kumquat for John Keats
Long Distance I and II
Palladas: Poems
Heredity
Timer
November 2, 2021
read for *uni* for cl4668 - classics & the left
i wanted to get a bit more of a general overview of harrison's poetry, since we're only spending an hour or so on him with edith hall. the poems about his parents and the class divide between them that ultimately broke his father's relationship with him down to quite a serious extent were the ones that spoke to me, but i also found the poem about the accident his daughter was involved in quite interesting ('ghosts: some words before breakfast').
harrison has a way with poetry that makes it feel as you are having a conversation with him, that strips away the upper-class associations of verse and turns it into a bastion of working-class, northern spite. brilliant.
i wanted to get a bit more of a general overview of harrison's poetry, since we're only spending an hour or so on him with edith hall. the poems about his parents and the class divide between them that ultimately broke his father's relationship with him down to quite a serious extent were the ones that spoke to me, but i also found the poem about the accident his daughter was involved in quite interesting ('ghosts: some words before breakfast').
harrison has a way with poetry that makes it feel as you are having a conversation with him, that strips away the upper-class associations of verse and turns it into a bastion of working-class, northern spite. brilliant.
January 24, 2020
has its moments certainly, but often tainted by i) the disengenuous attempts to wed The North with third-worldism ii) conflation of poetry + labour iii) 'bein' working claz means when yu 'awk like 'is'
December 3, 2020
Reading chronolgically I was drawn into Tony Harrison's rich oeuvre. Sharp observation, breadth of scope, personal insight and universal truths are to be savoured here and kept handy; investments for engaging with language and life.
January 22, 2023
I’m just not clever enough to get this. One or two moments I enjoyed but most of it went over my head.
April 1, 2023
I did enjoy one poem called isolation hence the one star ⭐️
February 19, 2026
Tony Harrison's poetry is beautiful. Studying his work has been so fun. I would highly recommend listening to him read it as he has a wonderful voice.
October 24, 2015
For me, this collection is at its most powerful whenever Tony Harrison writes about his parents' death, which might be a hard thing to tell a writer. The rawness of the emotion coupled with the universality of the theme means that it communicates very clearly and his casting of moments in aspic works incredibly well. His strict rhythm and structure is the framework on which to display the feelings and experiences and these poems are deeply moving. There is a cluster of these around the middle of the book, as he reflects upon his role as the first poet (or indeed graduate) from his family and his incongruity with his working class roots. Interestingly, the closing poem "V" and some others tackle this as a key theme, which also runs through the collection at times. Them and Uz is another well known example.
The collection begins with poems of some complexity and rich in allusions that passed me by, as a comprehensive boy. Unacceptably really - in my modern haste - if I am not snagged by a tweet-length of metre then I flit on regardless. No doubt better readers would peel these poems back to discover more.
Before the book closes with the aforementioned stand-out poem, there is a small series seeming to cover a lengthy sojourn to the US, where he negotiates a new community with his neighbours in a near wilderness of farmland, particularly focusing on his battles (or not) with a snake. At times this put me in mind of the later novel The Imposter by Damon Galgut (obviously not intentional) with its conjuring of a semi-barren landscape. What it really evoked was D H Lawrence's Snake, which I must say, communicated more to me in its few lines that these poems did in their many pages.
So, to conclude, I enjoyed the collection very much but, as an impatient reader, preferred it the closer to home it got.
The collection begins with poems of some complexity and rich in allusions that passed me by, as a comprehensive boy. Unacceptably really - in my modern haste - if I am not snagged by a tweet-length of metre then I flit on regardless. No doubt better readers would peel these poems back to discover more.
Before the book closes with the aforementioned stand-out poem, there is a small series seeming to cover a lengthy sojourn to the US, where he negotiates a new community with his neighbours in a near wilderness of farmland, particularly focusing on his battles (or not) with a snake. At times this put me in mind of the later novel The Imposter by Damon Galgut (obviously not intentional) with its conjuring of a semi-barren landscape. What it really evoked was D H Lawrence's Snake, which I must say, communicated more to me in its few lines that these poems did in their many pages.
So, to conclude, I enjoyed the collection very much but, as an impatient reader, preferred it the closer to home it got.
April 5, 2013
A quarter century ago the joke was that you couldn't be a great English poet unless your surname began with H. There was Hughes and Hill and Harrison, with Heaney, not English but writing in English, making up the H quartet.
Harrison's poetry is distinct and I'd give this five for 'V' alone, which may be one of the most honest poems about modern urban England, but some of the others don't live up to it.
Held together by the tensions of his own formalism and the risk of being accused of writing occasional doggeral, the clash between Harrison the classicist and Harrison the working class boy plays out across a surprising range of topics, but what is distinctive of his poetry is that it concerns recognizable people, in recognizable situations.
Harrison's poetry is distinct and I'd give this five for 'V' alone, which may be one of the most honest poems about modern urban England, but some of the others don't live up to it.
Held together by the tensions of his own formalism and the risk of being accused of writing occasional doggeral, the clash between Harrison the classicist and Harrison the working class boy plays out across a surprising range of topics, but what is distinctive of his poetry is that it concerns recognizable people, in recognizable situations.
July 7, 2022
One of Harrison’s main themes is language, and in particular the language of the working class, reflected in his employment of graffiti, expletives, dialect and representations of inarticulacy. A related theme is the distance between speakers of this language and Harrison, who is highly educated.
Acquired Oct 19, 2002
City Lights Book Shop, London, Ontario
Acquired Oct 19, 2002
City Lights Book Shop, London, Ontario
November 28, 2014
Reminded me a lot of modernist writers. Mina Loy and T.S. Eliot are the first to come to mind! In regard to subject matter and how numbingly depressing some of the poems are, they reminded me a lot of Philip Larkin!
February 5, 2008
British poet - from the north of England, very good & accessible
June 16, 2010
Vigourous, visceral poems for our time. Includes much of Harrison's best work, and ends with v - perhaps the greatest long poem in living memory.
July 16, 2016
One of the few poetry anthologies that I read from cover to cover. Felt I was in the company of someone who understood the working classes from inside and out. A wise man. A fine poet.
February 14, 2013
Incredible use of elegantly constructed language to describe the baseness and euphoria of human existence. Exquisite.
February 27, 2014
some beuaty and some ugliness, which i guess is what good poetry should be
February 21, 2016
The poems I remember enjoying most from first year uni. 6
December 15, 2016
An odd mixture of earthy working class language and high brow academic references especially to the classics.
It contains V; the excellent meditation on "the meaning of it all?
It contains V; the excellent meditation on "the meaning of it all?
July 5, 2022
Personal, often very sweet poetry about 20th century changes to working class life in Britain. Lacks imagination in idea or form, however
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews