Product Description

This generous selection of Tony Harrison's poems includes sixty-three poems from his famous sonnet sequence The School of Eloquence and the remarkable long poem ‘v.’, a meditation in a vandalized Leeds graveyard, written during the miners’ strike, which created such a stir when it was broadcast on television in the late 1980s.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #125975 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
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.

Customer Reviews

From the Heart
Poetry is difficult. There. Said it. And you need to persevere to discover its true meaning and worth.

Yet, Harrison is one of many exceptions to these pre set ideas.

In this book (especially in the School of Eloquence sequence) there is a wealth of genuinely accessible poetry about loss, community, and familial relationships. Whilst, at its core, there is the heart rending, and on-going story, of the scholarship boy displaced from his home, his family and his class by his education.

If you get the chance, try Book Ends, a beautiful sonnet about the uneasy relationship between a father and son and the gulf that exists between them following the death of the mother / wife. And you would have to possess a hard heart indeed not to be touched by the gently moving Long Distance.

Pure indulgence.
I've had this book for more than a year now, and despite having read every poem many times, this selection of Harrison's work has gained itself a distinguished place on the bedside table, and I still find myself dipping into it again and again to steal another dose of the pleasure. The poems are extremely accessible and the beauty of them lies in their simplicity. Harrison has the ability to portray the emotions and events of life in simple language yet with immeasurable clarity which one is immediately able to associate with. His poems wholly rely upon the response of the reader and this leads to the poems themselves being staggeringly simple but portraying things that could not be put into words on endless pages of prose.

Excellent, truely.
This book fell into my lap very recently and I've already fallen in love with it. There is such a personal element to the peotry of his family - he defines his fathers character which makes me see what a man he was and also see such characteristics mirrored in my own father.

An excellent book, truely wonderful, I'm glad it's among my collection.