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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $213.00

Format:
Hardback
252 pp.
138 mm x 216 mm

ISBN-13:
9780198184300

Publication date:
August 2004

Imprint: OUP UK


Tony Harrison

Loiner

Edited by Sandie Byrne

Tony Harrison: Loiner is published to celebrate the poet and playwright Tony Harrison's sixtieth birthday through an exploration of his work, including his best-known poem v.. Harrison (1937- ) has been called `our best English poet', and has been awarded a number of prizes for his poetry, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Royal Television Society Award, the Prix Italia, and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. This book gives his work the serious critical attention it merits, with essays from a number of prominent contributors, including Richard Eyre and Melvyn Bragg, and a foreword by Grey Gowrie. The collection ranges from personal recollections of working with Tony Harrison and personal responses to his poems, to detailed critical analyses of his techniques and themes, covering Harrison's short poems and sonnet sequence, his plays, his television poem-films, and his libretti, spanning the years 1955-1997.

A `loiner' is a native of Leeds, where Tony Harrison was born and spent the early part of his life, and from which he was dispossessed by the enforced translation of the state scholarship system. The word also connotes other aspects of Tony Harrison: the `loins' of his poetry--its energy and physicality--and the `loners' who are its main protagonists--men and women dispossessed of their class, nation, language, and identity. At sixty, Harrison is at his poetic peak, producing plays, film-scripts, libretti, journalistic responses to social and national strife, impassioned speeches of love and outrage--always in poetry. Tony Harrison: Loiner introduces the major themes and forms of our most exciting and cosmopolitan as well as technically accomplished poet, and reassesses his achievement and place in twentieth-century literature.

Readership : Students and scholars of English literature, especially twentieth-century poetry and drama.

Reviews

  • `Harrison is a lucky loiner in this collection of tributes to his considerable talent. There are not catcalls. There is only collective adulation.'
    Alan Bold, The Herald (Glasgow)
  • `it opens with a new sonnet of his, ends with verse by Bernard O'Donoghue and Desmond Graham, and fills the 200 pages between with memoirs and admiring essays.'
    Poetry Review, vol.87, no.2, Summer 1997

Abbreviations
Lord Gowrie: Foreword
Sandie Byrne: Introduction: Tony Harrison's Public Poetry
1. Desmond Graham: The Best Poet of 1961
2. Richard Eyre: Tony Harrison the Playwright
3. Melvyn Bragg: v. by Tony Harrison, or Production No. 73095, LWT Arts
4. Sandie Byrne: On Not Being Milton, Marvell, or Gray
5. Jem Poster: Open to Experience: Structure and Exploration in Tony Harrison's Poetry
6. Christopher Butler: Culture and Debate
7. N. S. Thompson: Book Ends: Harrison's Public and Private Poetry
8. Alan Rusbridger: Tony Harrison and the Guardian
9. Rick Rylance: Doomsongs: Tony Harrison and War
10. Martyn Crucefix: The Drunken Porter Does Poetry: Metre and Voice in the Poems of Tony Harrison
11. Oliver Taplin: The Chorus of Mams
12. Jonathan Silver: Poetry or Bust: Tony Harrison and Salt's Mill
13. Peter Forbes: In the Canon's Mouth: Tony Harrison and Twentieth-Century Poetry
14. Bernard O'Donoghue: `Command of English'
15. Desmond Graham: `Pericles in Tynemouth'
Notes
Contributors
Select Bibliography
Index

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Sandie Byrne is Lecturer in English at Balliol College, Oxford.

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Special Features

  • A new assessment of Tony Harrison's achievement and place in twentieth-century literature