In 1948, aged eleven, the baker’s boy from Beeston took up a scholarship at Leeds Grammar School. So began the education that would put ‘books, books, books’ between Tony Harrison and his working-class background, books that turned him into a major poet and dramatist. This edition of Harrison’s poetry has been selected for students. It shows the poet finding his voice, staking a claim to a seat in ‘the school of eloquence’, and talking with his predecessors – Milton, Keats, Lawrence. It shows the continual regeneration of his abiding concerns: language, class, education, and the ownership of culture; negotiations between the sexes; social preoccupations – grudges, rages and self-interrogation. Harrison’s public voice is represented in a selection of his longer poems, and in extracts from his theatre poetry: The Oresteia, Medea: a sex-war opera, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, The Common Chorus, Square Rounds and Poetry or Bust.
Carol Rutter’s introduction and annotations are informative rather than interpretative. Her aim is to enable students to read Harrison’s poems for themselves, using background material and textual glosses to support their findings, not to impose readings of her own.
- ISBN13 9781852242626
- Publish Date 27 April 1995
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 16 May 2001
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
- Format Paperback
- Pages 176
- Language English