Selected Poems, Paperback

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. '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