In a seminal poem called "Heredity"—a poem made of one gnomic quatrain—Tony Harrison presents us with an allegory of his poetic fostering:

One realizes, when hearing the poet speak these lines aloud, that they were written in total sincerity. I was familiar enough with Harrison's work to interpret the above with a degree of droll irony, and Joe and Harry as whimsical fictions; but, in fact, they were family relations whose inarticulacy and social ineptitude grounded Harrison as he won a scholarship to Leeds University—a privileged opportunity for someone of his social standing at the time—and would later forge the plain-speaking grammar of his poetry. In another poem, he evokes them triumphantly:

When I saw Harrison read at a local Arts Cinema, promoting his film version of the Prometheus myth, he spoke of the recurring imagery of fire in his work—from his father's ovens at the bakery, to the cremation of his parents, to the fires of the Holocaust. The tongues of fire to which he refers, here, are not the multilingual voices of elect apostles, but quite the reverse: it's a fire that has incinerated speech. Lingua Adamica: in a sense, Harrison feels that he is pioneering for the Working Class in poetry, that he's the first—or one of the first—to give voice to the voiceless. His democratic technique and formal patterning are ways of enabling utterance, itself; of finding modes of expression sympathetic to an ancestral or social lineage, which he believes is inhibited by ineloquence. His vocation as a poet has been fuelled by a 'retrospective aggro' he feels for an English teacher who wouldn't allow him to read poetry aloud at school because of his accent.

Harrison's epigraphs and dedications are telling: he's dedicated a couple of poems to the Yorkshire artist David Hockney, and it's likely that part of the kinship stems from a geographic affinity. One poem is occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the death of D. H. Lawrence, another fierce son of the Midlands, possessing more truck with the industrial North than with the Southern institutes of education. Harrison penned his poem in New Mexico, where, disillusioned with England, the 'priest of sex' had lived in self-imposed exile. Like Lawrence, Harrison was scorned at public school for his gruff voice and humble origins. Like Lawrence, Harrison preserved his dialect in verse, which, in itself, was an act of rebellion against the decaying ruling class. Like Lawrence, Harrison was accused of writing 'sordid' books. Loiners, Harrison's first book of poetry, caused his mother to despair for what she regarded as her son's disgraceful admissions of lust, as though he were a prowling priapic deviant. There's a touching poem about his mother's chagrin on this matter, but it strikes me while rereading it that something is lost in not hearing the author quote the lines. His voice has a blunt, deep gravitas about it, but when his verse is scanned simply as lines on a page, it's exposed as being rhythmically flat. With hardly any supple modulation of cadences, there's a mechanical monotony to his metrics that occasionally makes concentration slip into mindless incantation. Poetry meant for chanting is best when it's enchanting in its themes.

Harrison gained notoriety in the 1980s for his film-poem "v.", in which the English language was seen as being violated by its own practitioner with an excessive onslaught of expletives. The poem was written during the miners' strike, and takes as its template Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", a poem derided by Pound and the Modernists (did Pound write anything better?). In it, he sees himself in the vandal who has defaced his parents' gravestone, and recollects an incident when he sprayed a fire extinguisher at a public band playing operetta:

One can deduce from this that Harrison presumably derides any notion of platonic idealism or visionary afflatus. He's not, however, opposed to a notion of 'high art': he remains the working class Loiner who loves Classical literature. But while Harrison is passionate about the Greeks and the Jacobeans, about Shakespeare, Goethe, Moliere and Racine, a characteristic stamp of his work is his habit of introducing elements often associated with low art into poetry, or the illiterate into the literate. The insistence upon hijacking classical forms and cramming them with intractable material is a conscious act of reclamation. Harrison's poetic self is a hybrid of the appreciative academic and the philistine aggressor. His poems are cultural battlefields; his natural speech and cultivated artistry are opposing battalions locked in a mutually revitalizing conflict of power, making old forms once again fertile. In "The School of Eloquence", Harrison formally adapts and reshapes the sonnet, making it sixteen lines. This is no mere act of vandalism and, as long ago as John Donne, a poet could write a sixteen-lined poem and call it a sonnet. He has said, in an interview, that "one of the important things about familiar form and metricality is that it draws attention to the physical nature of language; the spell-binding nature of it, and the ceremony of articulation". Believing more in the power of drama than in religion, his whole poetic enterprise has been to create something equivalent to the scale and scope and public dimension of dramatic poetry.

His sense of insular social affliction may not be of great interest to the future: filling a poem with expletives is not likely to endear poetry to the ruffians to whom he's giving vent, and greater writers of a Working Class background haven't felt the need to carp on about it in a seemingly unending rigmarole. He's passionate about these schismatic Class divisions, and feels embattled by the Oxfordian refinements that he suggests have monopolized poetry, spraying his territorial scent in a diatribe "all stuffed with glottals":

Sean O' Brien praises him for his "great technical accomplishment", but I'm less certain. I admire his relentless use of formal structure as a means of shaping into coherence the disparities of life, and as a means of resisting what he disparages as the "chopped-up prose" of his contemporaries, but dogged rhythms often procure doggerel and, too often in his poetry, the ictus ticks like a metronome in shoddily composed pentameters—inflexible rhythmical recurrences as automated and monotonous as anything in Alexander Pope.

This book is now regarded as a contemporary classic—in part because it contains a long sonnet sequence not published entire in any previous volume, but which accrued incrementally, and partly because it hasn't been succeeded by a Collected or New Selected Poems. Why this is the case, I'm uncertain, since this reissued volume doesn't achieve a total representation of his poetic career. The poems that have appeared since this book are more comprehensively political. "Initial Illumination", absent from this book, is a very powerful poem on the first Gulf War; its urgency resonates as much today as when it was written. Also excluded from this selection are bawdy and boisterous poems, which scornfully renounced any suggestion that he might be the heir to the laureateship after the death of Ted Hughes. The old forms he employed labored under the weight of his republican polemic. Poetry doesn't wholly succeed as a vehicle for manifesto.

Harrison has been trying to achieve a more prophetic, universal voice, and sometimes he manages this. Other times, he writes entertainingly in verses delightful to intone, such as in the alliterating, tongue-twisting sonorities of this—from a poem about deathwatch beetles mating and gnawing through the trusses and pediments of imperial churches:

These are notable absenses, but we should, nevertheless, be grateful for what we have in this volume: the elegiac poems composed after the death of his parents are strong and tender ("Marked with D" is especially moving); "The Nuptial Torches" adroitly combines the political and the erotic; "v." remains one of the most powerful social poems of our time, and "A Kumquat for John Keats" is magnificent, finding, inherent in the fruit, the grudging affirmation: "Life has a skin of death that keeps its zest."

Harrison has refuted Adorno's notorious dictum that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, insisting, instead, that poetry must not allow itself to be usurped even by the most monstrous acts of genocide; that, indeed, it must in some way be answerable to them. This is the action of the Gorgon's gaze, the unblinking mask of Greek tragedy: to stare at suffering until it becomes comprehensible, analogous to the act of control within poetic utterance, which can be sustaining, and which contains and shields the guttering flame of human optimism, for poetry itself, as an act of shaping and forming. And that's intrinsically affirmative.

I first came to Burnside's work a few years ago when a girl I knew lent me a book of his—Swimming In the Flood. I haven't seen that book since and, perhaps because of this, it's acquired a roseate glow in my memory. The volumes of Burnside which I've read since haven't struck me in quite the way that Swimming did; yet, he retains a voice entirely distinctive, entirely his own. The only comparisons I would venture to make in an attempt to describe his delicious verbal invention are Dylan Thomas and Laurie Lee. The poetry is trance-like and tangible, memorable in its individual notations: "the fat mud fretted with bird-prints/light slurred with oil /and slicked reflections".

For those familiar with Burnside's writing (and his readership is considerable for a living poet), this new book is continuous of his main preoccupations—those of the myth of the twin, 'the other', the notion of the doppelganger in the reflection of Narcissus in the pool; also in the seizure and recognition of the noun, itself:

Formally, Burnside tends to be quite free, even slipshod at times. There are certain poems in this book which seem—as in Geoffrey Hill's Canaan—to have a fractured structure. I don't have to finger-count syllables to hear that the iambic pentameter is prevalent in his work, but often he seems, almost perversely, to break it up into different lines or even stanzas. At best, it's a means of disregarding punctuation, of varying rhythms by enjambment, of modulating tonal effects by measure of breath, a method of ellipsis that contributes to the feeling of disorientation, but the extent of its precise effect and value is difficult to estimate. It may be instinctual and largely indefinable, and would need to be explored at greater length elsewhere.

Here's an extract from a poem called "Annunciation With Zero Point Field", in which he describes the improbable, the "angel that cannot exist":

His poems are conspiracies against the secular world, cryptic intimations that remind us, through a process of forensic detection, that nature is ancient and sacred, its encoded signals of bloom and fragrance operating as mysterious hieroglyphs of the spirit.
There's a shamanistic menagerie of birds and beasts—like the Palaeolithic cave-paintings at Lascaux—half real and half imagined, emblematic of our deepest and most inscrutable instincts.
Every poem is a magical exhortation of ancestry, ceremonious and medicinal, reminding us that there's still something tribal in the community, still something benign and blessed in the notion of an earthly habitation. The title of the collection, The Good Neighbour, comes from Robert Frost's famous poem "Mending Wall", which closes with the line "Good fences make good neighbors", a line typical of Frost in its crafty and paradoxical wisdom. The book is halved into sections; the first, called "Here", is concerned with the comforting idea of home but also of the "dread of belonging". The second half, "There", is concerned with the gravitational tug of unfamiliar territory.
Burnside has a hallucinatory perception of nature, not apprehended as dark and demonic as in Lawrence, but as auspicious and spacious and light. A spiritus mundus animates the physical world as a will o' the wisp, an elusive light which those with visionary insight are gifted to see. Yet, Burnside makes no claim to be elect; it's more that he regards the details that most of us disregard. Each poem acts as both an invocation and an amulet, whereby the unresting spirits are exorcized by being welcomed in. The implication is that the everyday world is also a shadowland of spirits, a threshold to a luminous domain.
His concern—or one of his concerns—is, indeed, spiritual; but spiritual in an earthly, pagan context. He's haunted by the possibilities of the Christian faith to which he once gave credence but, now, no longer believes in. Still, what informs and enables the poems no less are—as he, himself, has said—"botanical texts and drawings, fairy stories, Celtic and Romance literature."

"There's something in the world we cannot name," he intimates, and there is, in this concept of the elemental mysteries, something of the reason and relief we feel when opening one of Burnside's books, as though we voiced our expectation of the author in his own words: