Collected Poems

Brilliant, passionate, outrageous, abrasive, but also, as in the family sonnets, immeasurably tender

Harold Pinter

Harrison is a masterly technician, and the most fiery and indelible English poet of the age. This book is a vineyard on a volcano

Paul Farley

Tony Harrison changed the entire landscape of British poetry

Don Paterson

Slangy, rooted, erudite, rhythmic, Harrison is a titan among poets; a unique Yorkshire brew of Auden, Byron, Brecht and Kipling, with a slug of Roman satire

The Independent

A pessimist with a relish for life . . . whose work insists that it is speech rather than page-bound silence

Sean O'Brien, Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry

Tony Harrison writes in a style I have all my life been waiting for; combining the uninhibitedly vernacular with a line as taut and astringent as Racine's

Stephen Spender, Observer

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

The war poems are important and moving, obviously, but his personal writing made me wipe away surreptitious tears

Alison Flood

Tony Harrison is a superbly accessible and talented poet

Time Out

Whatever note Harrison strikes, be it melancholy regret or boisterous high spirits, the youthful energy to be found in his verse marks him out as a towering figure in poetry

Glasgow Herald

Scatological satire suits him as much as political wit or meditation. World-wide in its topography, powerful in its effects . . . stunning!

Douglas Dunn

One of the few truly great poets writing in English. His range is exhilarating, his clarity and technical mastery a sharp pleasure

Melvyn Bragg

Some of the most important poems of the present day

Poetry Review

More than any other English poet I have read in recent years, Harrison makes good Camus' claim that the function of art is 'to open the prisons and give a voice to the sorrows and joys of all

John Lucas, New Statesman