Tony Harrison 1937-2025

Tony Harrison died last week at the age of 88. The LRB published nearly thirty of his poems, from v. in January 1985 to ‘Polygons’ in February 2015. He will be much missed.

Reviewing Harrison’s Selected Prose and Collected Poems in 2017, Blake Morrison wrote:

Though a two-hander of sorts, a monologue disguised as a duologue, v. is also an elegy: for his parents, for childhood, for a time when gravestones weren’t vandalised. Coleridge described elegy as ‘a form of poetry natural to the reflective mind’, with ‘sorrow and love’ its principal themes. The description fits Harrison’s elegies, except that his disrupt the conventions of elegy, not just with the material they include – class, work, politics – but formally, through puns, dialect and hectic typography. Elegies are about loss but they’re where Harrison found his true voice, grieving less for death than for the thwarted lives that precede it.

‘Polygons’ begins in Delphi, with a wall on which ‘Unspaced Greek capitals cross all the cracks/keeping blocks bonded with alphabet tack-stitch’, the stadium where Harrison’s play The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus was first performed, a column with Byron’s signature carved into it. A few years earlier, Michael Wood observed that ‘mortality, gravestones, statues, displaced or disfigured monuments are everywhere’ in Harrison’s writing. He wrote v. during the miners’ strike, after visiting his parent’s grave in Holbeck Cemetery, Leeds, which ‘stands above a worked-out pit’:

The prospects for the present aren’t too grand
when a swastika with NF (National Front)’s
sprayed on a grave, to which another hand
has added, in a reddish colour, CUNTS.

Which is, I grant, the word that springs to mind,
when going to clear the weeds and rubbish thrown
on the family plot by football fans, I find
UNITED graffitied on my parents’ stone.

On Sunday, 12 October, there will be three live readings of v. in Holbeck, two at the cemetery and one at The Warehouse, organised by the LRB and Slung Low theatre company. The performances have been long in preparation. After discussion with Harrison’s family and longstanding collaborators, some of whom are involved in the project, the event will continue as planned.

At the end of v., the poet looks ahead to the ‘next millennium’:

If, having come this far, somebody reads
these verses, and he/she wants to understand,
face this grave on Beeston Hill, your back to Leeds,
and read the chiselled epitaph I’ve planned:

Beneath your feet’s a poet, then a pit.
Poetry supporter, if you’re here to find
how poems can grow from (beat you to it!) SHIT
find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind.