Tony Harrison’s ‘V’ was first published in the LRB in 1985.
1.
So much black ink expended and still speared!
From here, where I’ve been happiest, and my most down, I can see the last place you’d been happy in. Down from Apollo’s wrecked temple with caper plants flowing out of the cracks of once sacrosanct columns, across Amphissa olives to Itea and sea. Twenty years since then, I still can hear, above the squeak of sneakers on the...
Those golden hairs I’m stroking on your thigh I only get to glimpse in this Greek light and only here do claw-snags on my hand, (from grappling with our lunch of garavides, the Greek word for the local langoustines) the back of which has those dark freckle marks my grampa called his ‘grave-spots’, catch on your glittering Galaxidi-gilded hairs.
MulberryThis...
This ladder creaks. Take that ring off I bought for you in Gdansk, first token of my growing love, with the 40-million-year-old fly embalmed in its amber, resin oozed before Man, not to bruise the apples I drop for you to catch from the Bramley I planted after that Polish trip.
The best wood to make chips with for our fire was from bakehouse boxes Dad brought smeared with lard. It had a whiplash crack. Its sparks leaped higher. You had to look sharpish with the fireguard.
Primed with Posts Mam plaited the greased chips lit with a purple sputter and deep hiss. More than childhood’s pier-machines or sherbet dips this fire I learned to lay’s what I most...
I’m always quoting le coeur bat l’iambe – Jean-Louis Barrault on the metre of Racine. Blood recorded on an echocardiogram in synch with karaoke squid shapes on the screen, I hear now with a woman in white coat. Though not iambic, more fluttery trochee, the odd dochmaic, anapaest, I note the verse in my pounding heart at least’s not free.
The beat’s in a blood...
If his English teacher hadn’t been so snootily discouraging, it’s unlikely that Tony Harrison would have gone on to write as much as he has: by my calculation, 13 plays, 11 films...
One of the great pleasures of reading Tony Harrison is the sense of quick passage between worlds, the sudden switch from the local to the international and back. At one moment he immerses us in a...
The first literary appearance of the mythical figure of Prometheus (whose name means ‘foresight’) is in the writings of Hesiod. Hesiod’s Titan is something of a trickster, of...
‘Dates, dates are of the essence; and it will be found that I date quite exactly the breakdown of the imaginative exploit of the Cantos: between the completion of the late sequence called...
Amy Clampitt is a most spirited and exhilarating performer. An enormous appetite for observation and zeal to describe precisely what she has observed are transmitted through both the best and the...
Poetry written in dialect seems to be undergoing a resurgence. Tony Harrison has made extensive use of Northern idioms. Tom Paulin has been busy raiding Ulster (and, I suspect, Scottish)...
A year or two ago, Geoffrey Hartman urged literary critics to declare their independence. They should not regard criticism as an activity secondary to the literature it addressed, but as an art...
There are grounds for thinking Tony Harrison the first genuine working-class poet England has produced this century. Of course, poets from D.H. Lawrence to Craig Raine can boast a proletarian...
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