Tony Harrison’s ‘V’ was first published in the LRB in 1985.
I’d just walked up and down Vesuvio as Goethe did two centuries ago. At the bottom with a bottle of white wine I heard the great poet talking to Tischbein:
Vesuvio puffing smoke out not far off flavours this fine vino that we quaff. That force that belches forth its molten mass has poured this tinkling gold in my raised glass. Devastation, Tischbein, ancient waste gives this Vesuvial...
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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...
These figs missed the picker moved to pluck tokens of love or welcome to strangers, missed bird, missed casual snacker, so are burst and outspread as red as hibiscus, scuffed pistil opera plush, carmine mite-view velveteen the pile of posh bathrobes. The carob pods clatter, as the woman rattles her long pole in the tree, down through the branches to the roadside ditch from which she picks a...
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...
I’ve noticed Donny’s bridal gownshop’s lights are only on, in winter, Saturday nights. Though window shopping for white wedding gear ’s not done this coldest, darkest time of year, maybe, the owner reckons, as they pass those near-nude girls, reflected in the glass, might remember his window’s lacy white, if they get pregnant from their date tonight.
In Donny at...
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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