Tony Harrison

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Tempting Venom

80,000 Hours

A Taste For Murder

The Make-Believe

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.

Part of a major relaunch of Penguin's contemporary poetry - an ongoing programme featuring both new and established poets

A revised edition of Tony Harrison's award-winning Selected Poems 
 
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. 
 
Selected Poems is a collection to be savoured by fans of Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney, Simon Armitage and Sophie Hannah. 
 
'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

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 célèbre 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.

Selected Poems

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