Selected Poems

Description

A new edition including some of Harrison's award-winning poems from the Gulf and Bosnian Wars Tony Harrison's Selected Poems was first published in 1984 and has been continuously in print in Penguin, through two editions, ever since. This is the first major new edition for many years. The long early sequence 'Palladas' has been dropped but everything else has been retained including the exquisite sonnets about his parents, the notorious 'V', the beautiful 'A Kumquat for John Keats' and many others that are among the best-loved poems of the later twentieth century. In addition powerful and important work from the last twenty or so years has been added, in particular the Gulf and Bosnian war poems commissioned by the Guardian newspaper, which won him the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry in 2007 - the most powerful war poems of our time. Yet another side of Harrison is represented in the delightfully witty 'Fruitility' - a long poem on the future effects of global warming on the north of England. This is altogether the perfect introduction to the work of one of our best poets.

Tony Harrison was born in Leeds in 1937. His poetry includes The Loiners, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; v., which became a cause cel bre when broadcast on Channel 4 in 1987 and was broadcast again in full on BBC Radio 4 in 2013, and The Gaze of the Gorgon, which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. He has written extensively for film, theatreand opera, producing work for the National Theatre, The Metropolitan Opera, the RSC, the BBC and Channel 4. He has received numerous awards including the inaugural PEN Pinter Prize in 2009, the European Prize for Literature in 2011, and most recently, the David Cohen Prize for Literature in 2015. He lives in Newcastle.