TONY HARRISON
Selected Poems
THIRD EDITION
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Thomas Campey and the Copernican System
Ginger’s Friday
The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe
Allotments
Doodlebugs
The White Queen
1. Satyrae
2. The Railroad Heroides
3. Travesties
4. Manica
5. from The Zeg-Zeg Postcards
The Heart of Darkness
The Songs of the PWD Man I, II
The Death of the PWD Man
Schwiegermutterlieder
The Curtain Catullus
The Bedbug
Curtain Sonnets
1. Guava Libre
2. The Viewless Wings
3. Summer Garden
4. The People’s Palace
5. Prague Spring
The Nuptial Torches
Newcastle is Peru
Durham
Ghosts: Some Words Before Breakfast
Sentences
1. Brazil
2. Fonte Luminosa
3. Isla de la Juventud
4. On the Spot
Voortrekker
The Bonebard Ballads
1. The Ballad of Babelabour
2. The Ballad of the Geldshark
3. ‘Flying Down to Rio’: A Ballad of Beverly Hills
Social Mobility
from The School of Eloquence
ONE
On Not Being Milton
The Rhubarbarians I, II
Study
Me Tarzan
Wordlists I, II, III
Classics Society
National Trust
Them & [uz] I, II
Working
Cremation
TWO
Book Ends I, II
Confessional Poetry
Next Door I, II, III, IV
Long Distance I, II
Flood
The Queen’s English
Aqua Mortis
Grey Matter
An Old Score
Still
A Good Read
Isolation
Continuous
Clearing I, II
Illuminations I, II, III
Turns
Punchline
Currants I, II
Breaking the Chain
Changing at York
Marked With D.
A Piece of Cake
The Morning After I, II
Old Soldiers
A Close One
‘Testing the Reality’
The Effort
Bye-Byes
Blocks
Jumper
Bringing Up
Fire-eater
Pain-Killers I, II
Background Material
THREE
Self Justification
Divisions I, II
History Classes
Stately Home
Lines to my Grandfathers I, II
The Earthen Lot
Remains
Dichtung und Wahrheit
Art & Extinction
1. The Birds of America
i. John James Audubon (1785–1851)
ii. Weeki Wachee
iii. Standards
2. Loving Memory
3. Looking Up
4. Killing Time
5. Dark Times
6. t’Ark
Facing North
A Kumquat for John Keats
Skywriting
The Call of Nature
Giving Thanks
Oh, Moon of Mahagonny!
The Red Lights of Plenty
The Heartless Art
The Lords of Life
The Fire-Gap
Following Pine
Cypress & Cedar
V.
The Mother of the Muses
Initial Illumination
A Cold Coming
Three Poems from Bosnia
1. The Cycles of Donji Vakuf
2. The Bright Lights of Sarajevo
3. Essentials
Fruitility
Fig on the Tyne
The Krieg Anthology
Shrapnel
Acknowledgements
SELECTED POEMS
Tony Harrison
Tony Harrison was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, in 1937. His many collections of poems include The Loiners (awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize in 1972); Palladas: Poems (1975), from The School of Eloquence (1981); Continuous (1981); Selected Poems (Penguin, 1984; third edition 1995); v. (Bloodaxe Books, 1985; new enlarged edition 1989); The Gaze of the Gorgon (Bloodaxe Books, 1992; awarded the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 1993); The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film Poems (Faber, 1995; awarded William Heinemann Prize 1996); Laureate’s Block (Penguin, 2000); Under the Clock (Penguin, 2005); and Collected Poems (Penguin, 2007). Tony Harrison is Britain’s leading theatre and film poet. He has written several pieces for the National Theatre, including The Misanthrope (1973 and 1989); Phaedra Britannica (1975); Bow Down (1977); The Oresteia (1981, awarded the European Poetry Translation Prize); The Mysteries (1985 and 2000); and The Prince’s Play (1996). He has also written and directed for the National Theatre The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, which had its world premiere in the ancient stadium of Delphi, Greece, and opened at the Olivier, NT, in 1990; and Square Rounds in 1992, a play he directed in Russian translation at the Taganka Theatre, Moscow, in 2007. He has also written and directed plays for unique theatrical spaces: Poetry or Bust (1993) at Salts Mill, Saltaire; The Kaisers of Carnuntum (1995) in a Roman amphitheatre at Petronell-Carnuntum on the Danube between Vienna and Bratislava; and The Labourers of Herakles on a mountainside in Delphi, Greece. These plays are published in five volumes: Plays 1, Plays 2, Plays 3, Plays 4 and Plays 5 (Faber). All the volumes have introductions either by the poet himself or by critics. His most recent work for the stage is Hecuba for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2005, playing in London, Washington and New York, and a new work, Fram, in 2008 at the National Theatre. His version of The Mysteries appeared at Shakespeare’s Globe in the summer of 2011. Tony Harrison has also written libretti for opera including The Bartered Bride (1978) for the Metropolitan Opera, New York; Yan Tan Tethera (1983) with Harrison Birtwistle; and Medea: A Sex-War Opera (1985).
Tony Harrison’s TV and film poetry includes Arctic Paradise (1981); the music drama The Big H (1984); Channel 4’s version of his poem v. (awarded the Royal Television Society Award in 1987); the BBC four-part series on death and burial in Europe Loving Memory (1987); and the film poems The Blasphemers’ Banquet (1989); The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992); Black Daisies for the Bride (1993, awarded the Prix Italia in 1994 and a Mental Health Media Award). He has both written and directed the film poems A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan (1994), The Shadow of Hiroshima (1995) and the feature film Prometheus (1999), and Crossings (2002). The texts of all these film poems appear in Collected Film Poetry (Faber, 2007). Tony Harrison was awarded the Northern Rock Foundation’s Writers’ Award 2004, the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry 2007, the inaugural PEN/Pinter Prize 2009 and the European Prize for Literature at Strasbourg in 2011.
Thomas Campey and the Copernican System
The other day all thirty shillings’ worth
Of painfully collected waste was blown
Off the heavy handcart high above the earth,
And scattered paper whirled around the town.
The earth turns round to face the sun in March,
He said, resigned, it’s bound to cause a breeze.
Familiar last straws. His back’s strained arch
Questioned the stiff balance of his knees.
Thomas Campey, who, in each demolished home,
Cherished a Gibbon with a gilt-worked spine,
Spengler and Mommsen, and a huge, black tome
With Latin titles for his own decline:
Tabes dorsalis; veins like flex, like fused
And knotted flex, with a cart on the cobbled road,
He drags for life old clothing, used
Lectern bibles and cracked Copeland Spode,
Marie Corelli, Ouida and Hall Caine
And texts from Patience Strong in tortoise frames.
And every pound of this dead weight is pain
To Thomas Campey (Books) who often dreams
Of angels in white crinolines all dressed
To kill, of God as Queen Victoria who grabs
Him by the scruff and shoves his body pressed
Quite straight again under St Anne’s slabs.
And round Victoria Regina the Most High
Swathed in luminous smokes like factories,
These angels serried in a dark, Leeds sky
Chanting Angina –a, Angina Pectoris.
Keen winter is the worst time for his back,
Squeezed lungs and damaged heart; just one
More sharp turn of the earth, those knees will crack
And he will turn his warped spine on the sun.
Leeds! Offer thanks to that Imperial Host,
Squat on its thrones of Ormus and of Ind,
To dust, and leisure of the simplest kind.
Ginger’s Friday
Strawberries being bubbled in great vats
At Sunny Sunglow’s wafted down the aisle.
He heard the scuffled vestments through the slats
And could not see but felt a kindly smile.
Grateful, anonymous, he catalogued his sin,
The stolen postcards and allotment peas;
How from his attic bedroom he’d looked in
On Mrs Daley, all-bare on her knees,
Before her husband straddled in his shirt,
And how he’d been worked up by what he saw;
How he’d fiddled with his thing until it hurt
And spurted sticky stuff onto the floor.
And last his dad’s mauve packet of balloons
He’d blown up, filled with water, and tried on;
And then relief. The hidden priest intones:
Remember me to Mrs Kelly, John.
He loitered, playing taws until the dark
Of bad men with their luring spice and shell-
shocked feelers edged onto the empty park,
And everything that moved was off to tell.
His gaslamp shadows clutched him as he ran
Shouting his Aves. Paternosters stuck
At peccata, and the devil with his huge jam pan
Would change his boiled-up body back to muck.
And no Hail Marys saved him from that Hell
Where Daley’s and his father’s broad, black belts
Cracked in the kitchen, and, blubbering, he smelt
That burning rubber and burnt bacon smell.
The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe
‘Poor old sport,
he got caught
right in the mangle.’
The -nuts bit really -nis. They didn’t guess
Till after he was dead, then his sad name
Was bandied as a dirty backstreet Hess,
A masturbator they made bear the blame
For all daubed swastikas, all filthy scrawl
In Gents and Ladies, YANK GO HOME
Scratched with a chisel on the churchyard wall;
The vicar’s bogey against wankers’ doom.
We knew those adult rumours just weren’t true.
We did it often but our minds stayed strong.
Our palms weren’t cold and tacky and they never grew
Those tell-tale matted tangles like King Kong.
We knew that what was complicated joy
In coupled love, and for lonely men relief,
For Joe was fluted rifling, no kid’s toy
He fired and loaded in his handkerchief.
Some said that it was shell-shock. They were wrong.
His only service was to sing The Boers
Have Got My Daddy and The Veteran’s Song
And window-gazing in the Surplus Stores.
In allotment dugouts, nervous of attack,
Ambushing love-shadows in the park,
His wishes shrapnel, Joe’s ack-ack ejac-
ulatio shot through the dark
Strewn, churned up trenches in his head.
Our comes were colourless but Joe’s froze,
In wooshed cascadoes of ebullient blood-red,
Each flushed, bare woman to a glairy pose.
‘VD Day’ jellies, trestle tables, cheers
For Ruskis, Yanks and Desert Rats with guns
And braces dangling, drunk; heaped souvenirs:
Swastikas, Jap tin hats and Rising Suns.
The Victory bonfire settled as white ash.
The accordion stopped Tipperarying.
It was something solemn made Joe flash
His mitred bishop as they played The King.
Happy and Glorious … faded away. Swine!
The disabled veteran with the medals cried.
The ARP tobacconist rang 999.
The Desert Rats stood guard on either side.
Two coppers came, half-Nelsoned, frog-
marched poor Penis off to a cold clink.
He goosestepped backwards and crowds saw the cock
That could gush Hiroshimas start to shrink.
A sergeant found him gutted like a fish
On army issue blades, the gormless one,
No good for cannon fodder. His last wish
Bequeathed his gonads to the Pentagon.
Allotments
Choked, reverted Dig for Victory plots
Helped put more bastards into Waif Home cots
Than anywhere, but long before my teens
The Veterans got them for their bowling greens.
In Leeds it was never Who or When but Where.
The bridges of the slimy River Aire,
Where Jabez Tunnicliffe, for love of God,
Founded the Band of Hope in eighteen odd,
The cold canal that ran to Liverpool,
Made hot trickles in the knickers cool
As soon as flow. The graveyards of Leeds 2
Were hardly love-nests but they had to do –
Through clammy mackintosh and winter vest
And rumpled jumper for a touch of breast.
Stroked nylon crackled over groin and bum
Like granny’s wireless stuck on Hilversum.
And after love we’d find some epitaph
Embossed backwards on your arse and laugh.
And young, we cuddled by the abattoir,
Faffing with fastenings, never getting far.
Through sooty shutters the odd glimpsed spark
From hooves on concrete stalls scratched at the dark
And glittered in green eyes. Cowclap smacked
Onto the pavings where the beasts were packed.
And offal furnaces with clouds of stench
Choked other couples off the lychgate bench.
The Pole who caught us at it once had smelt
Far worse at Auschwitz and at Buchenwald,
He said, and, pointing to the chimneys, Meat!
Zat is vere zey murder vat you eat.
And jogging beside us, As Man devours
Ze flesh of animals, so vorms devour ours.
It’s like your anthem, Ilkla Moor Baht ’at.
Nearly midnight and that gabbling, foreign nut
Had stalled my coming, spoilt my appetite
For supper, and gave me a sleepless night
In which I rolled frustrated and I smelt
Lust on mys
elf, then smoke, and then I felt
Street bonfires blazing for the end of war
V.E. and J. burn us like lights, but saw
Lush prairies for a tumble, wide corrals,
A Loiner’s Elysium, and I cried
For the family still pent up in my balls,
For my corned beef sandwich, and for genocide.
Doodlebugs
Even the Vicar teaching Classics knows
how the doodled prepuce finishes as man,
a lop-eared dachshund with a pubis nose,
Casper the friendly ghost or Ku-Klux-Klan,
and sees stiff phalluses in lynched negroes,
the obvious banana, those extra twirls
that make an umbilicus brave mustachios
clustered round cavities no longer girls’.
Though breasts become sombreros, groins goatees,
the beard of Conrad, or the King of Spain,
bosoms bikes or spectacles, vaginas psis,
they make some fannies Africa, and here it’s plain,
though I wonder if the Vicar ever sees,
those landmass doodles show a boy’s true bent
for adult exploration, the slow discovery
of cunt as coastline, then as continent.
The White Queen
1. Satyrae
I
Professor! Poet! Provincial Dadaist!
Pathic, pathetic, half-blind and half-pissed
Most of these tours in Africa. A Corydon
Past fifty, fat, those suave looks gone,
That sallow cheek, that young Novello sheen
Gone matt and puffed. A radiant white queen
In sub-Saharan scrub, I hold my court
On expat pay, my courtiers all bought.
Dear Mother, with your hennaed hair and eyes
Of aquamarine, I made this compromise
With commodities and cash for you, and walk
These hot-house groves of Academe and talk
Nonsense and nothing, bored with almost all
The issues but the point of love. Nightfall
Comes early all year round. I am alone,
And early all year round I go to town
And grub about for love. I sometimes cruise
For boys the blackness of a two-day bruise,
Bolt upright in the backseat of the Volks,
Or, when the moon’s up full, take breathless walks
Past leprosarium and polo grounds
Hedged with hibiscus, and go my rounds
Of downtown dance and bar. Where once they used
To castrate eunuchs to be shipped off East,
I hang about The Moonshine and West End,