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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
26 of 27 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Tony Harrison's shows genius in this epic poem. Leading us to his past in Leeds and memories of his parents we witness the tragedy of destruction political and industrial. He demonstrates in verse the effects of the miners strike and the undermining of a great people. Harrisons poem will haunt you and tug at your emotions. Its for everyone who believed in socialism and for everyone who parents are ageing. This poem was once banned from media broadcast because of its language. It is provoking and beautiful. It will become a classic of the 20th century.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I'm not sure if our age has a lot of great poems, but then I'm not sure if any age has a lot of great poems. I saw, rather than read "v." back in the 1980s, when Channel 4 broadcast a highly controversial film of the poem. It was a time when Margaret Thatcher's government was at the post-Falklands zenith of its popularity and was throwing its weight about in the cultural sphere. Semi-literate Tory politicians were cutting arts funding to, and in some cases through, the bone. The British government seemed to be made up entirely of wealthy, white, right-wing, middle-class, Southern English men who regarded anybody unlike themselves with fear and contempt. Tony Harrison is a poet from a working-class family in Leeds. He is also a distinguished translator from classical Greek, which is far beyond the mental capacity of most MPs except, it has to be said, Enoch Powell, who was a brilliant Greek scholar when he wasn't being a paranoid nutcase.
Harrison wrote "v." after visiting his parents' grave in Leeds and discovering that the cemetery had been vandalised by racist skinheads. (You don't really get skinheads anymore, they look like everyone else nowadays.) He wrote a poem about it, in formal terms a sort of urban eclogue, which consists largely of a dialogue between Harrison, the working-class boy turned professional poet, and an angry, foul-mouthed, eloquent skinhead who isn't interested in poetry - the Northern cousin of Tim Roth's Trevor from Alan Clarke's contemporary and equally brilliant TV film "Made in Britain". "v." is riddled with appropriately vile language from the skinhead and it was this, as much as anything else, that made MPs protest at the idea that someone was going to read it out on the telly. After all, wasn't poetry on telly usually John Betjeman saying something nice about trains and churches?
There is room for both, of course, and the film was duly broadcast, and the world did not come to an end. It did change people's lives, though. When I saw the film I was a teenager who wasn't much interested in poetry and who would have largely agreed with the skinhead, although I would have been too intimidated to hang around with him. But I was riveted by the grave, plain language of the poem and Harrison's own delivery of it. I got a copy of the poem soon after and it was one of the first poems to have the effect on me that poems are, I think, supposed to have. I must have only heard it once, and I never read it through more than a couple of times, but I can still quote bits of it from memory, especially the mysterious final line: "Find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind."
"v." is probably taught in schools now, which would be a pity. It's the sort of poem you should discover and think forbidden. The Tories would have banned it, but they didn't get away with it because at least one MP had the courage to point out in the House that most of them hadn't read it, and if they had read it, they hadn't understood it.
One MP commented that the poem amounted to "Probably another bolshie poet wishing to impose his frustrations on the rest of us." The story goes that when Tony Harrison was told about this remark, he replied "Probably another idiot MP wishing to impose his intellectual limitations on the rest of us." Dead on.
Harrison wrote "v." after visiting his parents' grave in Leeds and discovering that the cemetery had been vandalised by racist skinheads. (You don't really get skinheads anymore, they look like everyone else nowadays.) He wrote a poem about it, in formal terms a sort of urban eclogue, which consists largely of a dialogue between Harrison, the working-class boy turned professional poet, and an angry, foul-mouthed, eloquent skinhead who isn't interested in poetry - the Northern cousin of Tim Roth's Trevor from Alan Clarke's contemporary and equally brilliant TV film "Made in Britain". "v." is riddled with appropriately vile language from the skinhead and it was this, as much as anything else, that made MPs protest at the idea that someone was going to read it out on the telly. After all, wasn't poetry on telly usually John Betjeman saying something nice about trains and churches?
There is room for both, of course, and the film was duly broadcast, and the world did not come to an end. It did change people's lives, though. When I saw the film I was a teenager who wasn't much interested in poetry and who would have largely agreed with the skinhead, although I would have been too intimidated to hang around with him. But I was riveted by the grave, plain language of the poem and Harrison's own delivery of it. I got a copy of the poem soon after and it was one of the first poems to have the effect on me that poems are, I think, supposed to have. I must have only heard it once, and I never read it through more than a couple of times, but I can still quote bits of it from memory, especially the mysterious final line: "Find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind."
"v." is probably taught in schools now, which would be a pity. It's the sort of poem you should discover and think forbidden. The Tories would have banned it, but they didn't get away with it because at least one MP had the courage to point out in the House that most of them hadn't read it, and if they had read it, they hadn't understood it.
One MP commented that the poem amounted to "Probably another bolshie poet wishing to impose his frustrations on the rest of us." The story goes that when Tony Harrison was told about this remark, he replied "Probably another idiot MP wishing to impose his intellectual limitations on the rest of us." Dead on.
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