Selected Poems
Authors: Tony Harrison
Selected Poems
THIRD EDITION
PENGUIN BOOKS
Thomas Campey and the Copernican System
The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe
The Songs of the PWD Man I, II
Ghosts: Some Words Before Breakfast
The Bonebard Ballads
2. The Ballad of the Geldshark
3. ‘Flying Down to Rio’: A Ballad of Beverly Hills
Lines to my Grandfathers I, II
i. John James Audubon (1785–1851)
2. The Bright Lights of Sarajevo
SELECTED POEMS
Tony Harrison
Tony Harrison was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, in 1937. His many collections of poems include
The Loiners
(awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize in 1972);
Palladas: Poems
(1975), from
The School of Eloquence
(1981);
Continuous
(1981);
Selected Poems
(Penguin, 1984; third edition 1995);
v.
(Bloodaxe Books, 1985; new enlarged edition 1989);
The Gaze of the Gorgon
(Bloodaxe Books, 1992; awarded the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 1993);
The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film Poems
(Faber, 1995; awarded William Heinemann Prize 1996);
Laureate’s Block
(Penguin, 2000);
Under the Clock
(Penguin, 2005); and
Collected Poems
(Penguin, 2007). Tony Harrison is Britain’s leading theatre and film poet. He has written several pieces for the National Theatre, including
The Misanthrope
(1973 and 1989);
Phaedra Britannica
(1975);
Bow Down
(1977);
The Oresteia
(1981, awarded the European Poetry Translation Prize);
The Mysteries
(1985 and 2000); and
The Prince’s Play
(1996). He has also written and directed for the National Theatre
The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus
, which had its world premiere in the ancient stadium of Delphi, Greece, and opened at the Olivier, NT, in 1990; and
Square Rounds
in 1992, a play he directed in Russian translation at the Taganka Theatre, Moscow, in 2007. He has also written and directed plays for unique theatrical spaces:
Poetry or Bust
(1993) at Salts Mill, Saltaire;
The Kaisers of Carnuntum
(1995) in a Roman amphitheatre at Petronell-Carnuntum on the Danube between Vienna and Bratislava; and
The Labourers of Herakles
on a mountainside in Delphi, Greece. These plays are published in five volumes:
Plays 1
,
Plays 2
,
Plays 3
,
Plays 4
and
Plays 5
(Faber). All the volumes have introductions either by the poet himself or by critics. His most recent work for the stage is
Hecuba
for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2005, playing in London, Washington and New York, and a new work,
Fram
, in 2008 at the National Theatre. His version of
The Mysteries
appeared at Shakespeare’s Globe in the summer of 2011. Tony Harrison has also written libretti for opera including
The Bartered Bride
(1978) for the Metropolitan Opera, New York;
Yan Tan Tethera
(1983) with Harrison Birtwistle; and
Medea: A Sex-War Opera
(1985).
Tony Harrison’s TV and film poetry includes
Arctic Paradise
(1981); the music drama
The Big H
(1984); Channel 4’s version of his poem
v.
(awarded the Royal Television Society Award in 1987); the BBC four-part series on death and burial in Europe
Loving Memory
(1987); and the film poems
The Blasphemers’ Banquet
(1989);
The Gaze of the Gorgon
(1992);
Black Daisies for the Bride
(1993, awarded the Prix Italia in 1994 and a Mental Health Media Award). He has both written and directed the film poems
A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan
(1994),
The Shadow of Hiroshima
(1995) and the feature film
Prometheus
(1999), and
Crossings
(2002). The texts of all these film poems appear in
Collected Film Poetry
(Faber, 2007). Tony Harrison was awarded the Northern Rock Foundation’s Writers’ Award 2004, the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry 2007, the inaugural PEN/Pinter Prize 2009 and the European Prize for Literature at Strasbourg in 2011.
The other day all thirty shillings’ worth
Of painfully collected waste was blown
Off the heavy handcart high above the earth,
And scattered paper whirled around the town.
The earth turns round to face the sun in March
,
He said, resigned,
it’s bound to cause a breeze
.
Familiar last straws. His back’s strained arch
Questioned the stiff balance of his knees.
Thomas Campey, who, in each demolished home,
Cherished a Gibbon with a gilt-worked spine,
Spengler and Mommsen, and a huge, black tome
With Latin titles for his own decline:
Tabes dorsalis
; veins like flex, like fused
And knotted flex, with a cart on the cobbled road,
He drags for life old clothing, used
Lectern bibles and cracked Copeland Spode,
Marie Corelli, Ouida and Hall Caine
And texts from Patience Strong in tortoise frames.
And every pound of this dead weight is pain
To Thomas Campey (Books) who often dreams
Of angels in white crinolines all dressed
To kill, of God as Queen Victoria who grabs
Him by the scruff and shoves his body pressed
Quite straight again under St Anne’s slabs.
And round Victoria Regina the Most High
Swathed in luminous smokes like factories,
These angels serried in a dark, Leeds sky
Chanting
Angina –a
,
Angina Pectoris
.
Keen winter is the worst time for his back,
Squeezed lungs and damaged heart; just one
More sharp turn of the earth, those knees will crack
And he will turn his warped spine on the sun.
Leeds! Offer thanks to that Imperial Host,
Squat on its thrones of Ormus and of Ind,
For bringing Thomas from his world of dust
To dust, and leisure of the simplest kind.
Strawberries being bubbled in great vats
At
Sunny Sunglow
’s wafted down the aisle.
He heard the scuffled vestments through the slats
And could not see but felt a kindly smile.
Grateful, anonymous, he catalogued his sin,
The stolen postcards and allotment peas;
How from his attic bedroom he’d looked in
On Mrs Daley, all-bare on her knees,
Before her husband straddled in his shirt,
And how he’d been worked up by what he saw;
How he’d fiddled with his thing until it hurt
And spurted sticky stuff onto the floor.
And last his dad’s mauve packet of balloons
He’d blown up, filled with water, and tried on;
And then relief. The hidden priest intones:
Remember me to Mrs Kelly, John
.
He loitered, playing taws until the dark
Of bad men with their luring spice and shell-