Tony Harrison’s ‘V’ was first published in the LRB in 1985.
Cancer carried off his cherished wife as Florida floundered in a freak harsh freeze and let the fahrenheit out of his life never to gain back its lost degrees. He still can’t quite believe she’s wholly lost. He no more thought he’d see his dear one go than that he’d see in Florida a frost with that sudden drop last year to 12 below.
Grapefruit first froze then splurted...
One year in Washington DC a girl I got to know said she came from Germany. She looked quite like Bardot.
And her first name was Brigitte (rhymes with bitter not with sweet) and though things turned out bitter we met for walks, for drinks, to eat.
In a little while she let me see her total tan, breasts, belly, legs. And that Easter Sunday in DC she brought me Easter eggs.
She’d...
Pig pyres are crackling in the snow-flecked fields, dawn bonfires next to cleaned out byres and folds. I know my taxi driver. FMD, the tragic traincrash (ten dead) yesterday are what we talk about: Heddon-on-the-Wall may be infected from untreated swill, the micro virus and the cattle plague that could cross borders between bloc and bloc when the world was so divided, let alone unpatrolled...
Why is it, Lord, although I’m right I find it hard to sleep at night? I often wake up in a sweat they’ve not found WMDs yet! The thought that preys most on my mind, is maybe the only arms they’ll find (unless somehow I get MI6 to plant them to be found by Blix, that’s if the UN sneaks back in) are Ali’s in the surgeon’s bin.
Under Dyson’s clock in Lower Briggate was where my courting parents used to meet. It had a Father Time and Tempus Fugit sticking out sideways into the street above barred windows full of wedding bands, ‘eternities’ to be inscribed with names, like that I felt on Dad’s when we held hands, or on Mam’s crumbling finger in cremation’s flames.
Today back on...
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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