I didn’t know Tony Harrison well; I only came to a handful of his poems. But even in those few, I heard something that reminded me of the principles of gurbani—that while the world divides us by class, voice, and circumstance, the truth of oneness still runs underneath. Harrison’s distinct, unyielding cadence refuses to smooth over the raw edges of grief and silence, and in this refusal I recognized a kinship: eloquence is not in polished words but in unflinching truth. For him, poetry was a public act of resistance against everything—propriety, political power, personal pain—that seeks to silence the individual. “Poetry is all busking,” he declared, and his verse stands as a testament to that belief. (For some of the poems I talk about, please see the end of this essay)
A Poet of Divisions
Harrison was, fundamentally, a poet of divisions: between classes, between fathers and sons, between public graffiti and private grief. His poems inhabit these fractures, compelling readers to confront the uncomfortable realities they represent.
In “Turns,” he captures the painful self-awareness of class mobility by trying on his father’s cap, a self-conscious attempt to look:
“more ‘working class’
(as if a bit of chequered cloth could bridge that gap!).”
The line is both comic in its youthful posturing and tragic in its recognition that identity is not a costume. The poem’s devastating conclusion—his father collapsing dead, his cap turned inside out in a final, futile gesture—crystallizes the division. The son then vows to speak where his father could not:
“He never begged. For nowt! Death’s reticence
crowns his life’s, and me, I’m opening my trap
to busk the class that broke him for the pence
that splash like brackish tears into our cap.”
Here, filial grief is transformed into social indictment, pitting a father’s dignified silence against a son’s educated outcry.
Elegies of Division
This theme of intractable division continues in Harrison’s elegies for his parents. In “Long Distance II,” the separation is from the dead. His father, unable to accept his wife’s absence, performs rituals of denial:
“Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.”
The haunting detail of the slippers is a testament to love made visible through small, desperate acts. Harrison, the rational son, claims, “I believe life ends with death, and that is all,” yet confesses he still dials his father’s old, disconnected number. The poem leaves the reader suspended in this contradiction between reason and ache, a division Harrison refuses to resolve because it is so central to the human experience of loss.
“Book Ends” frames this division as silence. A mother’s observation, “You’re like book ends, the pair of you,” becomes a painful irony after her death, as father and son are left holding nothing together. Harrison writes: “only our silence made us seem a pair.” Their shared grief does not close the gap but sharpens it:
“Back in our silences and sullen looks,
for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between’s
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.”
This is the central paradox of Harrison’s art: the language that empowers him also isolates him. The books that gave him a voice built a wall between him and the man who raised him, a schism that persists powerfully in cultures where education and accent still sort people into insiders and outsiders.
Ashes and Endurance
“Marked with D.” may be his most brutal elegy, but it, too, insists on fracture. The baker father is returned to the ovens of his trade:
“When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven
not unlike those he fuelled all his life…”
Ash becomes flour; cremation becomes a form of baking. The pun feels almost indecent until it is understood as an act of fidelity to a working-class life, stripped of euphemism. The poem then pivots from this stark metaphor to a moment of piercing intimacy, recalling the name his father used for his mother:
“not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie.”
The poem is built on this division—between brutal punning and profound tenderness, between the crematorium fire and the memory of a beloved’s name.
If Book Ends depicts silence between men, Marked with D. shows how plain, unsentimental words can preserve what death extinguishes. Harrison admits, “Sorry for his sake there’s no Heaven to reach,” but offers poetry as a more enduring monument than faith.
This endurance is symbolized in “Timer,” where his mother’s wedding ring survives the cremation:
“Gold survives the fire that’s hot enough
to make you ashes in a standard urn.”
The burnished circle is both an ordinary object and a sacred relic, locating permanence not in grand cathedrals but in crematoriums, dog-eared phone books, and worn-out caps.
Private Grief, Public Rage
Harrison’s exploration of division extends from the private to the public sphere. His most notorious poem, “V.,” confronts the desecration of his parents’ gravestone in Leeds during the miners’ strike. Faced with obscene graffiti, football chants, and political rage, Harrison does not recoil but writes directly into the violence of the language itself:
“the Leeds United scarf, the beer, the fags,
the same graffiti, litter, dogshit, stones.”
Critics who called the poem obscene missed the point; its necessity lies in its confrontation. V. stages a battle between the cultivated lyric and the profane demotic, honoring the validity of both. It is not merely about a vandalized wall but about the walls of class, politics, and language that run through Britain—walls that remain firmly in place.
Why Harrison Matters Now
Harrison’s legacy is a reminder that grief is not linear but fractured, marked by fury, silence, and the dark humor of survival. He teaches that class is not a costume but a bone-deep inheritance that shapes the very words in our mouths, and that poetry can cross divides without erasing them.
We live in a time of divisions: of politics, of speech, of memory itself. It is a good time for poetry in general, and for Tony Harrison in particular. His work reminds us that poems can be both blunt instruments and finely tuned laments; they can call out the violence of systems while preserving the tenderness of a father’s voice calling his wife “Florrie.”
At a moment when we risk speaking only in outrage or retreating into silence, Harrison shows another way: to busk in the public square, to say the unsayable, and to let poetry carry the weight that politics alone cannot.
Tony Harrison is gone, but the poems remain. They are, like the ring in Timer, what the fire could not consume. They are the busker’s song that outlasts the closing of the trap, the word that stubbornly, brilliantly, marks the “D” for all of us.
And here, I hear an echo of gurbani. Where Harrison exposes division, Guru Arjan reminds us of the oneness beneath it: “na ko bairi, nahi begana” — no one is my enemy, no one is a stranger. To hold both truths — fracture and unity — is perhaps the task of our time. Poetry, in Harrison’s busking cadences and in the hymns of the Gurus, carries us across that chasm, showing us the fire of division and the flame of oneness, both still burning in us today.
Some Poems of Tony Harrison
Turns
I thought it made me look more “working class”
(as if a bit of chequered cloth could bridge that gap!)
I did a turn in it before the glass.
My mother said: It suits you, your dad’s cap.
(She preferred me to wear suits and part my hair:
You’re every bit as good as that lot are!)
All the pension queue came out to stare.
Dad was sprawled beside the postbox (still VR),
his cap turned inside up beside his head,
smudged H A H in purple Indian ink
and Brylcreem slicks displayed so folk might think
he wanted charity for dropping dead.
He never begged. For nowt! Death’s reticence
crowns his life’s, and me, I’m opening my trap
to busk the class that broke him for the pence
that splash like brackish tears into our cap.
Long Distance II
Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.
You couldn’t just drop in. You had to phone.
He’d put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.
He couldn’t risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he’d hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she’d just popped out to get the tea.
I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven’t both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there’s your name
and the disconnected number I still call.
Marked with D
When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven
not unlike those he fuelled all his life,
I thought of his cataracts ablaze with Heaven
and radiant with the sight of his dead wife,
light streaming from his mouth to shape her name,
‘not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie.’
I thought how his cold tongue burst into flame
but only literally, which makes me sorry,
sorry for his sake there’s no Heaven to reach.
I get it all from Earth — my daily bread —
but he hungered for release from mortal speech
that kept him down, the tongue that weighed like lead.
The baker’s man that no one will see rise
and England made to feel like some dull oaf
is smoke, enough to sting one person’s eyes
and ash (not unlike flour) for one small loaf.
Changing at York
A directory that runs from B to V,
the Yellow Pages’ entries for HOTELS
and TAXIS torn out, and the smell of dossers’ pee,
saliva in the mouthpiece, whisky smells.
I remember, now I have to phone
squashing a Daily Mail half full of chips,
to tell the son I left at home alone
my train’s delayed, and get cut off by the pips,
how, phoning his mother, late, a little pissed,
changing at York, from some place where I’d read,
I used 2p to lie about the train I missed
and ten more to talk to some girl’s bed.
And, in this same kiosk with the stale, sour breath
of queuing callers, drunk, cajoling, lying,
consoling his grampa for his granny’s death,
how I heard him, for the first time ever, crying.
— Tony Harrison
Guava Libre
for Jane Fonda, Leningrad, 1975
Pickled Gold Coast clitoridectomies?
Labia minora in formaldehyde?
A rose-pink death mask of a screen-cult kiss,
Marilyn’s mouth or vulva mummified?
Lips cropped off a poet. That’s more like.
That’s almost the sort of poet I think I am.
The lips of Orpheus fished up by a dyke
singing “Women of Cuba Libre and Vietnam!”
The taste, though, taste! Ah, that could only be
(*Women! Women! O abajo men,
the thought of it’s enough to make you come!*)
= the honeyed yoni of Eurydice —
— Tony Harrison
Book Ends
Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead
we chew it slowly, that last apple pie.
Shocked into sleeplessness, you’re scared of bed.
We never could talk much, and now don’t try.
“You’re like book ends, the pair of you,” she’d say,
“Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare…”
The “scholar” me, you, worn out on poor pay,
only our silence made us seem a pair.
Not as good for staring in, blue gas,
too regular each bud, each yellow spike.
A night you need my company to pass
and she not here to tell us we’re alike!
Your life’s all shattered into smithereens.
Back in our silences and sullen looks,
for all the Scotch we drink, what what's still between's
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.
Singing oneness!
