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Collected Poems
Tony Harrison published his first pamphlet of poems in 1964 and for over fifty years has been a prominent force in modern poetry. His poetic range is truly far-reaching, from the intimate tenderness of family life and personal love, to war poems written from Bosnia and savage public outcries against politicians. In The Collected Poems, Harrison draws deeply both on classical tradition and on the vernacular of the street. Combining the private and the public in a way Harrison has made distinctly his own, and drawing on his working-class upbringing in Leeds, these are powerful poems for modern times.This is the first complete paperback collection of one of Britain's most controversial and critically acclaimed poets.'Tony Harrison is the greatest poet of the second half of the 20th century. . . He writes brilliantly about class, love and Britain' Daniel Radcliffe'Harrison is a masterly technician, and the most fiery and indelible English poet of the age. This book is a vineyard on a volcano' Paul Farley
- GenresPoetry
440 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 28, 2010
19 people are currently reading
47 people want to read
About the author
Tony Harrison
110 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 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 1, 2020
A substantial collection of work, including many individually ambitious and sometimes lengthy poems, this stands well above the average and has been worth the time given over to reading it through. That said, it is also a bit unsatisfying and self subverting. There are some very thoughtful and insightful passages alongside what I can only describe as platitudes. There is a clear political awareness but I suspect Harrison the poet is far more political than his actual poems.
There is a serious commitment to poetic form, frequently with great success and evident skill, but he favours regular rhyming patterns and simple rhythms that sometimes sound trite at the wrong moments and the lines can be pinched into shape with uncomfortable word choices.
In that silent dark I swore I’d make it known,
While the oil of memory feeds the wick of life
And the flame from it’s still constant and still bright,
That, come oblivion or not, I loved my wife
In that long thing where we lay with day like night.
(Losing Touch)
I can live with “it’s” though it jarred but not really with “that long thing.” I can only imagine that word “thing” as a place holder for a missing word he never did find.
I’ve often heard my fellow poets (or those
who write in metres something like my own
and brood on man’s mortality) bemoan
the insufficiency of rhymes for death
(The Heartless Art)
On a good day, Harrison is wonderfully inventive in his rhymes, but I sense that his style is more suited to humour than to being grave. Late in this collection, his poem Deathwatch Dancethon, concerning the destructive deathwatch beetles with their noisy copulating inside the wooden structures of old buildings, could be said to “go on a bit” but is filled with laugh-out-loud word-play which is probably not going to appear at its best in these examples. “The male bug’s tapping telegraph to / Every female in the rafter” is a rhyme that requires a colloquial pronunciation of “to” as “ter”. Similarly “Bluntly put the bugger’s fucked yer / entire infested infrastructure”, though inconsistently the mispronunciation is spelled out here. [As always, explaining a joke kills it.]
I suppose one feature worth comment is the use of foul language, especially in V, a long poem concerned with the depressed condition of working class youths in his native Leeds, who vandalise his father’s grave. It was broadcast in 1987 and provoked a group of Conservative Party Members of Parliament to sign an ‘Early Day Motion’ in protest; there is everything to be said in favour of an angry, working class poet getting up those Tory noses alongside the twenty pound notes and the posh coke.
On the other hand, he acknowledges in his own writing the mixed reaction of his own dad, who can be taken to epitomize the respectable Leeds working class, who disliked foul language or explicit references to brutish sexual behaviour, and who would not accept or wish to tolerate the vandalism he described.
It was a library copy otherwise
you’d’ve flung it in the fire in disgust ...
... I still see you weeping, your hurt looks:
You weren’t brought up to write such mucky books!
[Bringing Up]
Like many poets, his work comes most alive when it is autobiographical, and when he is prepared to be sincere rather than self deprecating. Those about his father carry the most feeling and Harrison seems to use poetry to work out unresolved tensions, as though he can continue their dialogue after his father has died: "Haunt me and not the house," he says in ‘Clearing’. Other relationships, although covered in some poems, never approach a comparable intensity. One can see that he becomes a parent and indeed a grandparent but in this collection we learn very little about it.
Harrison seems determined to evade establishment style respectability and refers scathingly to fellow English poets who bow to royal patronage, with particular scorn for Ted Hughes and Andrew Motion [“Toadies like Di-deifying Motion” is a reference to Diana Spencer in Laureate’s Block].
“I’d sooner be a free man with no butts,
free not to have to puff some prince’s wedding,
free to say up yours to Tony Blair,
to write an ode to Charles 1’s beheading
and regret the restoration of his heir.”
It’s ridiculous of me to regret that a successful and skilful poet did not aim higher but he could have done and I do regret that he didn’t. I repeatedly had the sense that he was selling himself a little short, undercutting his own work, possibly afraid to be serious without pricking his own bubble. It would have been a short step for him to have successfully emulated Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy for example, but I do not think this collection actually does contain any serious attempt to achieve that, despite the presence of clearly political work, sometimes with sharp effect. Maybe if I read V again in a while I will change my mind about that one.
EDIT: Having said all that, I have since discovered Harrison's collected film poetry and read some of his commentary about his own work and its place in the tradition, including his interest in Shelley (especially Prometheus) and I have to say that there are more dimensions to this poetry than I appreciated at the time of first reading him. Probably just as important is discovering his poetry performed by himself or by others on YouTube, when the simple forms and rhymes actually communicate very well and some [but certainly not all] of the more tendentious rhymes turn out to have a justification.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
This is a great film of Harrison reading his work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5K_2...
There is a serious commitment to poetic form, frequently with great success and evident skill, but he favours regular rhyming patterns and simple rhythms that sometimes sound trite at the wrong moments and the lines can be pinched into shape with uncomfortable word choices.
In that silent dark I swore I’d make it known,
While the oil of memory feeds the wick of life
And the flame from it’s still constant and still bright,
That, come oblivion or not, I loved my wife
In that long thing where we lay with day like night.
(Losing Touch)
I can live with “it’s” though it jarred but not really with “that long thing.” I can only imagine that word “thing” as a place holder for a missing word he never did find.
I’ve often heard my fellow poets (or those
who write in metres something like my own
and brood on man’s mortality) bemoan
the insufficiency of rhymes for death
(The Heartless Art)
On a good day, Harrison is wonderfully inventive in his rhymes, but I sense that his style is more suited to humour than to being grave. Late in this collection, his poem Deathwatch Dancethon, concerning the destructive deathwatch beetles with their noisy copulating inside the wooden structures of old buildings, could be said to “go on a bit” but is filled with laugh-out-loud word-play which is probably not going to appear at its best in these examples. “The male bug’s tapping telegraph to / Every female in the rafter” is a rhyme that requires a colloquial pronunciation of “to” as “ter”. Similarly “Bluntly put the bugger’s fucked yer / entire infested infrastructure”, though inconsistently the mispronunciation is spelled out here. [As always, explaining a joke kills it.]
I suppose one feature worth comment is the use of foul language, especially in V, a long poem concerned with the depressed condition of working class youths in his native Leeds, who vandalise his father’s grave. It was broadcast in 1987 and provoked a group of Conservative Party Members of Parliament to sign an ‘Early Day Motion’ in protest; there is everything to be said in favour of an angry, working class poet getting up those Tory noses alongside the twenty pound notes and the posh coke.
On the other hand, he acknowledges in his own writing the mixed reaction of his own dad, who can be taken to epitomize the respectable Leeds working class, who disliked foul language or explicit references to brutish sexual behaviour, and who would not accept or wish to tolerate the vandalism he described.
It was a library copy otherwise
you’d’ve flung it in the fire in disgust ...
... I still see you weeping, your hurt looks:
You weren’t brought up to write such mucky books!
[Bringing Up]
Like many poets, his work comes most alive when it is autobiographical, and when he is prepared to be sincere rather than self deprecating. Those about his father carry the most feeling and Harrison seems to use poetry to work out unresolved tensions, as though he can continue their dialogue after his father has died: "Haunt me and not the house," he says in ‘Clearing’. Other relationships, although covered in some poems, never approach a comparable intensity. One can see that he becomes a parent and indeed a grandparent but in this collection we learn very little about it.
Harrison seems determined to evade establishment style respectability and refers scathingly to fellow English poets who bow to royal patronage, with particular scorn for Ted Hughes and Andrew Motion [“Toadies like Di-deifying Motion” is a reference to Diana Spencer in Laureate’s Block].
“I’d sooner be a free man with no butts,
free not to have to puff some prince’s wedding,
free to say up yours to Tony Blair,
to write an ode to Charles 1’s beheading
and regret the restoration of his heir.”
It’s ridiculous of me to regret that a successful and skilful poet did not aim higher but he could have done and I do regret that he didn’t. I repeatedly had the sense that he was selling himself a little short, undercutting his own work, possibly afraid to be serious without pricking his own bubble. It would have been a short step for him to have successfully emulated Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy for example, but I do not think this collection actually does contain any serious attempt to achieve that, despite the presence of clearly political work, sometimes with sharp effect. Maybe if I read V again in a while I will change my mind about that one.
EDIT: Having said all that, I have since discovered Harrison's collected film poetry and read some of his commentary about his own work and its place in the tradition, including his interest in Shelley (especially Prometheus) and I have to say that there are more dimensions to this poetry than I appreciated at the time of first reading him. Probably just as important is discovering his poetry performed by himself or by others on YouTube, when the simple forms and rhymes actually communicate very well and some [but certainly not all] of the more tendentious rhymes turn out to have a justification.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
This is a great film of Harrison reading his work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5K_2...
April 27, 2022
An excellent poet, the earlier poems really seem to be looking at the underbelly of life, I really enjoyed the poems relating to his memories of his Father and the poems written whilst in Florida. He's down to earth with great use of all the english language, pulling no puches.
Read
July 27, 2022My students have expressed some shock at Philip Larkin's diction (in "High Windows," "This Be the Verse," etc.) Harrison sometimes makes Larkin's 'aggressive assertiveness' sound more like the Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas Homily for Pre-Schoolers, but Harrison is not merely using contemporary vulgarity for its shock value (any more than Larkin was) and may fairly be said to be rather successful at writing poems that "imitate, and, as far as possible, . . . adopt the very language of men" as Wordsworth put it in 1798. Definitely not for Royalists! His poems on the removal of "King Charles III," on the hilarious possibility of Harrison himself being appointed Laureate, and on the moment when Charles and Camilla were permitted to marry would have had him executed under some earlier monarchs. In fine, Harrison causes the reader to think about the experiences and motivations of people at many levels of society, to engage nature in settings as diverse as industrial England and the southern United States, and to consider what it means to be in love. What more can one ask of a poet?
November 14, 2023
Fantastic. A life carried through a series of poems, from wild poems recounting wilder sex to structured reflections on antiquity and upbringing to reflections on the past through looser rhymes and more irregular rhythms. Through it all is Harrison’s voice, with a similarly strong, smoky cadence to Leonard Cohen. One of my favourite finds this year.
January 27, 2019
Interesting voice
February 27, 2014
vile and beautiful
September 11, 2012
still one of my favorite english writers
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews