The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose

Tony Harrison and Michael Hofmann

Tony Harrison and Michael Hofmann “Deeply ironic structure” is Terry Eagleton’s description of an essential quality of Tony Harrison’s poetry, and he’s right—not only about Harrison, but also about the poets in England who are making a permanent mark on their language. The best poets writing in England—and Tony Harrison and Michael Hofmann are among them—combine an awareness of social conflict with an acute aesthetic sense of how that conflict should be expressed in the language of English poetry. The irony that results is located within complicated cores of social and personal realities—an irony that cuts both inward and outward. V. and Other Poems is the second book by Tony Harrison published in the United States. It appears almost three years after his Selected Poems, which created an enthusiastic American readership beyond the cognoscenti who had known and admired his work in its British editions. At fifty-two, Harrison is generally acknowledged as a major English poet; now working at the National Theatre, he is also a brilliant translator. His achievements are especially unusual in a country as socially divided as England. Born into England’s northern working class, Harrison is a politically engaged writer in the mold of Bertolt Brecht. There has always been continuity in Harrison’s work, and the poems in V. are no exception. In poem after poem, Harrison probes how class, language, and history intricately impose upon personal experience —always through crafty metered and rhymed structures which twist and turn around their subjects, and make the language itself an object of ironic inquiry. “Painkillers” and “Sonnets for August 1945” employ the sixteen-line Meredithian sonnet form that Harrison transformed in earlier sonnet sequences, 21 in The School of Eloquence and Continuous, and fit comfortably within them. “Y,” “Summoned by Bells,” and “The Pomegrantes of Patmos” are less emotive and more satiric—Harrison twitting the twits. But three of the poems in V. and Other Poems—“v.,” “The Heatless Art,” and “The Mother of the Muses”—display an emotional intensity that is new in Harrison’s work. The title poem originally appeared in book form in 1985 from Newcastle’s excellent small-trade publisher Bloodaxe Books, and comes with a quote from the London Times describing it as the “most publicized poem in modern history.” The cause of the hoopla was a feature on “v.” on British television . The Conservative MP who introduced Britain’s Obscene Publications Act wanted the TV show censored because—he accused—“v.” contained “a cascade of obscenities.” The poem is set in the Leeds cemetery where Harrison’s working-class parents are buried. During one of the poet’s infrequent visits to the cemetery, he discovers the tombstones graffitied with “fourletter curses,” “(mostly) FUCK!,” and “Vs” spray-painted—the poet imagines—by unemployed skinhead teenage fans of the Leeds United football team (apparently a perennial loser). Harrison knows quite well that These Vs are all the versus of life from LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White and (as I’ve known to my cost) man v. wife. Communist v. Fascist. Left v. Right. class v. class as bitter as before, the unending violence of US and THEM. personified in 1984 by Coal Board MacGregor and the N.U.M., Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind East/West, male/female, and the ground these fixtures are fought out on’s Man, resigned to hope from his future what his past never found. But when the poet finds “UNITED” graffitied on his parents’ stone the ironies multiply: He is torn between his love and respect for his parents and their burial ground, his political empathy for the unemployed skinhead, and his awareness, as a 22 poet, that he has come upon metaphors that define his entire universe. Harrison takes us through various levels of discourse (the skinhead’s voice is suddenly injected into the poem, arguing with the poet, until the voice merges back into the poet’s); different, conflicting, perspectives are expressed through dialogue . Finally, the dialogue becomes dialectic. The poet’s resolves are classical: Realizations of love—for parents, for “my woman”—are called into relief and measured against the England that he has chosen to see. These realizations—pronounced resolutely—inform other poems in which Harrison digs deeper into old ground. “The Heartless Art” is an elegy to a dear friend whose name, Seth, becomes the poet’s troubling subject; knowing...