Selected Poems Read online

  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

  Timer

  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,

  For bringing Thomas from his world of dust

  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,