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“... there is neither assertive nor apologetic. A preoccupied sense of crisis is not obligatory. Tony Harrison’s Selected Poems includes 14 poems from the Loiners (1970), eight from The School of Eloquence (1978), 36 from Continuous (1981), all of Palladas (1975), and about twenty uncollected poems. (Palladas, is ...”

“... the Titan’s rebellion against Zeus as the original paradigm of all acts of political resistance. Tony Harrison’s first feature film provides a variety of perspectives on this legend, and three different embodiments of the Promethean spirit. It opens in a Yorkshire mining town just as the last pit in the area is about to be closed down. The messenger ...”

“... by the dud rhymes and harum-scarum rhythms foisted so unjustly on the victim of his impersonation. Tony Harrison’s treatment of the quatrain in his long poem V. might, at first glance, look as careless as Reed’s, but to anyone forewarned by his previous work it will soon become clear that a conscious policy of disruption has been followed to bring ...”

“... rather than reporting from them, distinguishes his work from that of his fellow Yorkshireman, Tony Harrison. He offers a vivid and witty eyewitness account of the solar eclipse, as seen through his protective glasses, but handles the more tragic stories of 1999 with protective layers of metaphor. In the case of the high school shootings in ...”

“... tight-lipped woman who, accompanied/By all she knows of love on leather leash’), Tony Harrison (‘In each of our Blackpool photos from those years/and, I’ll bet, in every family’s South Pier snap’) and Philip Larkin (‘We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls/In parodies of fashion, heels and veils’) hit the same sweetly ...”

“... Christopher Reid and Michael Hofmann are classified as love poets but Craig Raine and Tony Harrison as blue versifiers. Only a few poets make both, including Seamus Heaney, who has two poems unworthy of him in the Whitworth (one about unfreezing a vaginal pump, one about a bride-like, much played-on Victorian guitar), and a couple of much ...”

“... Lesson’, which tells the story of the poet’s lack of a musical talent, ends like this: Miss Harrison, my sallow teacher, filled the term’s report with words which gave no hope, and I was left, relieved, to carry home th’iambic tick-tock of her metronome. The pay-off is ingenious, in that the boy’s redeeming vocation, to be a poet, is obliquely ...”

“... But a voice that scorns chorales is yelling ‘Wanker!’ Tony Harrison, ‘V’ 1. There’s oil and backwash from these boats departing Hamburg’s morning wharves. There’s stalking cranes. Men pull and tote. One street back the sleepy whores lean out from clubs. They clutch their towels. They call for milk and fresh-bagged rolls, their wigs in sun like lacquered cowls as Hamburg’s one-note church bells toll ...”

“... There were, and still are, alternatives to Larkin. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Tony Harrison are powerfully present in these books, as are a number of the poets Motion and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol ...”

“... the last, with its perception of the links between political and cultural power, reminding one of Tony Harrison. There is something, too, of Harrison’s angle on the familiar in Dunn’s arresting four-line poem, ‘Glasgow Schoolboys, Running Backwards’. The ‘Ballad of the Two Left Hands’, on the ...”

“... but that this stuff of his would never do. Well, I don’t doubt he will do fine as Poet Laureate. Tony Harrison would do fine, too, in this dodgy capacity, which need not, perhaps, be thought altogether obsolete, and comic. Both poets, in their own inward and intractable way, are patriots – and hardly less so than John Betjeman. 1984 was rightly ...”

“... merely different? For instance, does Robert Lowell’s Life Studies intrigue us more than, say, Tony Harrison’s family reminiscences in Continuous? If so, is it because Lowell’s technique is more sophisticated and fluid than Harrison’s vigorously clanking sonnet sequence in which the rhymes come like a ...”

“... nothing you can teach me about road-sweeping.’ 16 July. Watch the first of two programmes by Tony Harrison about death. It begins at Blackpool, where Harrison was conceived in August 1935. Harrison comes from Leeds, as I do, and August Bank Holiday at the seaside was when I was ...”

“... At the National Theatre to discuss a possible adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, I run into Tony Harrison the poet. He talks about Trackers, the play he has written and is directing about two papyrologists who piece together the fragments of a satyr play and then take on the central roles, cocks and all. It is to open first in a warehouse at ...”

“... with something like guilty pleasure (the critic aware that he might be contradicting himself?) to Tony Harrison’s rough and gutsy A Cold Coming. Yes, it’s polemic, ignores all those important Yeatsian lessons, will speak only to those of like mind and will lose a good deal of its point as the events recede into history. Nevertheless I’m glad in the ...”