Collected Poems

by Tony Harrison

Overview

Tony Harrison published his first pamphlet of poems in 1964, and for more than 50 years he has been a prominent force in modern poetry. His poetic range is truly far-reaching, from the intimate tenderness of family life and personal love, to war poems written from Bosnia and savage public outcries against politicians. In The Collected Poems, Harrison draws deeply both on classical tradition and on the vernacular of the street. Combining the private and the public in a way Harrison has made distinctly his own, and drawing on his working-class upbringing in Leeds, these are powerful poems for modern times. This is the first complete paperback collection of one of Britain's most controversial and critically acclaimed poets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780241974353
Publisher:	Penguin UK
Publication date:	09/19/2016
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Tony Harrison is a poet whose poetry includes The Loiners, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; v., which became a cause célèbre 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, theater, and 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 the David Cohen Prize for Literature in 2015.

Editorial Reviews

"Brilliant, passionate, outrageous, abrasive, but also, as in the family sonnets, immeasurably tender." —Harold Pinter, playwright, The Homecoming


"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, poet, The Dark Film


"Tony Harrison changed the entire landscape of British poetry." —Don Paterson, poet, Landing Light


"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." —Independent


"A pessimist with a relish for life . . . whose work insists that it is speech rather than page-bound silence ." —Sean O'Brien, 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, author, A Very Private Gentleman


"The war poems are important and moving, obviously, but his personal writing made me wipe away surreptitious tears." —Alison Flood

From the Publisher