Book description
A revised edition of Tony Harrison's award-winning Selected
Poems
This indispensable new selection of Tony Harrison's poems includes
over sixty poems from his famous sonnet sequence The School of
Eloquence and the remarkable long poem 'v.', a meditation in a
vandalized Leeds graveyard which caused enormous controversy when it
was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1987 and is now regarded as one of the
key poems of the late twentieth century.
This substantially revised and updated edition now also features a
generous selection of Harrison's most recent work, including the
acclaimed poems he wrote for the Guardian on the Gulf War and
then from the front line in the Bosnian War which won him the Wilfred
Owen Award for Poetry in 2007.
Selected Poems is a collection to be savoured by fans of
Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney, Simon Armitage and Sophie Hannah.
'A voracious appetite for language. Brilliant, passionate,
outrageous, abrasive, but also, as in the family sonnets, immeasurably
tender' Harold Pinter
'In the front rank of contemporary British poets. Harrison's range
is exhilarating, his clarity and technical mastery a sharp pleasure'
Melvyn Bragg
'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
'Poems written in a style which I feel I have all my life been
waiting for' Stephen Spender
'A poet of great technical accomplishment whose work insists that it
is speech rather than page-bound silence' Sean O'Brien, The Oxford
Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry
Tony Harrison's Collected Poems was published by Viking in
2007. Harrison is also a translator, playwright and film-maker. His
highly acclaimed adaption of the Mysteries debuted at the National
Theatre in 1985. In 2006 he won the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award for his
recent war poetry, and in 2009 he was the inaugural winner of the
PEN/Pinter Prize.
Tony Harrison was born in Leeds in 1937 and now lives in Newcastle
upon Tyne. His collections of poetry include The Loiners, Continuous, v,
A Cold Coming, Laureate's Block and most recently Under the Clock -
published as a Pocket Penguin for Penguin's 70th birthday in May 2005.
Recognized as Britain's leading theatre and film poet, Harrison has
written extensively for the National Theatre, the New York Metropolitan
Opera, the BBC and Channel 4. He is the recipient of numerous prizes,
including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Prize,
the Royal Television Society Award, the European Poetry Translation
Prize and the Prix Italia.
