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“... 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 farm fences, ditch and lane ...”

“... and one forty years back from the Festival Hall, a reading with Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and me, Tony Harrison, sadly the only one still alive. Both those I’ve read with have been in this kitchen. Along with the makars I’ve already mentioned, Aeschylus, Virgil, Ovid, Egil, Byron, Seferis, Kazantzakis, Ted Hughes, I move towards an in ...”

“... i. One reason why we stay in Mergellina in our favourite city Napoli ’s to eat fresh shellfish with volcanic Falanghina at Pasqualino’s outside in the street in the Piazza Sannazaro, a small square named for the poet I’m inviting you to meet. Two greater poets’ tombs are close to there, Virgil and Leopardi, whose verse nurtured mine but ignore for now that more illustrious pair, and make a pilgrimage before you dine to a poet of some significance though far less great, to Jacopo Sannazaro in his shrine ...”

“... Queuing for Charon 1 Cretans still can’t stand ‘the Krauts’ but don’t turn them away, gaga ex-Nazis, lager louts, cramming Crete on holiday. Fifty-odd years of so-called peace fill beaches with old foes. Northern Europe flocks to Greece to warm its frozen toes. And my old carcass likes these coasts, archaeology and joy, but even in Greek sun the ghosts come back to haunt the boy ...”

“... We may be that generation that sees Armageddon. Ronald Reagan, 1980 My brother, my bright twin, Prochorus, I think his bright future’s been wrecked. When we’ve both got our lives before us he’s gone and joined this weird sect. He sits in a cave with his guru, a batty old bugger called John and scribbles on scrolls stuff to scare you while the rabbi goes rabbiting on ...”

“... Fruitility What a glorious gift from Gaia, raspberries piled on papaya, which as a ruse to lift my soul I serve up in my breakfast bowl, and, contemplating, celebrate nature’s fruit, and man’s air-freight speeding my fruit breakfast here through tropo- and through stratosphere. I praise papaya and celebrate the man who packed it in its crate, the worker or Hawaiian grower in Kipahulu or Pahoa, the worried cultivator who scans the sky from Honomu, with global warming getting higher than is good for his papaya; worries I myself had known when, in Nigeria, I’d grown what we called pawpaws of my own; picked, deseeded, served fridge-fresh I fed my kids their orange flesh ...”

“... In memoriam Emmanuel Stratas, born Crete 1903, died Toronto 1987 After I’ve lit the fire and looked outside and found us snowbound and the roads all blocked, anxious to prove my memory’s not ossified and the way into that storehouse still unlocked, as it’s easier to remember poetry, I try to remember, but soon find it hard, a speech from Prometheus a boy from Greece BC scratched, to help him learn it, on a shard ...”

“... When a plumber glues some lengths of PVC that pipe our cold spring water from its source, or a carpenter fits porch-posts, and they see, from below or from above, the heartwood floors made from virgin lumber, such men say, as if they’d taught each other the same line: Boards like them boards don’t exist today! then maybe add: Now everything’s new pine ...”

“... hoisted for the British ruling class and clandestine, genteel aggro keeps them up. And there’s HARRISON on some Leeds building sites I’ve taken in fun as blazoning my name, which I’ve also seen on books, in Broadway lights, so why can’t skins with spraycans do the same? But why inscribe these graves with CUNT and SHIT? Why choose neglected tombstones ...”

“... 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 background, but their poetry isn’t usually interested in doing so – not at its most characteristic and not to an extent that would make the term ‘working-class poet’ a useful one ...”

“... argument on behalf of the Scots, avoids this mistake, detecting in a provincial Englishman like Tony Harrison a fury and resentment not surpassed by any Scot. But this is hardly a novel perception, for Harrison has achieved fame on the strength of it. In fact, it’s hard to find any English writer who isn’t ...”

“... 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 Northern (or Midlands in my case) English worry about what happens to us socially when we drop our ‘h’s and pronounce our ‘u’s as in ‘wuss’ rather than as in (the Southern form of) ‘lustre’, the next he is wondering how to memorialise the dead of Hiroshima or the Gulf War ...”

“... 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 and twenty or more poetry collections and pamphlets, not to mention the essays and addresses assembled in Edith Hall’s edition of his selected prose ...”

“... for Tony Harrison Happiness, therefore, must be some form of theoria. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, X.8 Theoria: ... a looking at, viewing, beholding ... ‘to go abroad to see the world’ (Herodotus) ... 2. of the mind, contemplation, speculation, philosophic reasoning ... theory ... II. the being a spectator at the theatre or the games ...”

“... 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) dictionaries. Craig Raine has produced a manifesto, ‘Babylonish Dialects’, on dialect’s behalf. And several of the books under review here – by Scots, Welshmen and British West Indians – cannot be read without the glossaries which they thoughtfully provide ...”