This is the first complete collection of one of Britain's most controversial and critically acclaimed poets.
Tony Harrison was born in Leeds in 1937. His poetry includes The Loiners, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; v., which became a cause cel bre when broadcast on Channel 4 in 1987 and was broadcast again in full on BBC Radio 4 in 2013, and The Gaze of the Gorgon, which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. He has written extensively for film, theatreand opera, producing work for the National Theatre, The Metropolitan Opera, the RSC, the BBC and Channel 4. He has received numerous awards including the inaugural PEN Pinter Prize in 2009, the European Prize for Literature in 2011, and most recently, the David Cohen Prize for Literature in 2015. He lives in Newcastle.
Brilliant, passionate, outrageous, abrasive, but also, as in the
family sonnets, immeasurably tender
*Harold Pinter*
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*
Tony Harrison changed the entire landscape of British poetry
*Don Paterson*
Slangy, rooted, erudite, rhythmic, Harrison is a titan among poets;
a unique Yorkshire brew of Auden, Byron, Brecht and Kipling, with a
slug of Roman satire
*The Independent*
A pessimist with a relish for life . . . whose work insists that it
is speech rather than page-bound silence
*Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry*
Tony Harrison writes in a style I have all my life been waiting
for; combining the uninhibitedly vernacular with a line as taut and
astringent as Racine's
*Observer*
The poem "v." is the most outstanding social poem of the last
twenty-five years. Seldom has a British poem of such personal
intensity had such universal range
*Martin Booth*
The war poems are important and moving, obviously, but his personal
writing made me wipe away surreptitious tears
*Alison Flood*
Tony Harrison is a superbly accessible and talented poet
*Time Out*
Whatever note Harrison strikes, be it melancholy regret or
boisterous high spirits, the youthful energy to be found in his
verse marks him out as a towering figure in poetry
*Glasgow Herald*
Scatological satire suits him as much as political wit or
meditation. World-wide in its topography, powerful in its effects .
. . stunning!
*Douglas Dunn*
One of the few truly great poets writing in English. His range is
exhilarating, his clarity and technical mastery a sharp
pleasure
*Melvyn Bragg*
Some of the most important poems of the present day
*Poetry Review*
More than any other English poet I have read in recent years,
Harrison makes good Camus' claim that the function of art is 'to
open the prisons and give a voice to the sorrows and joys of
all
*New Statesman*
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