[In the following review, Latanté complains that Harrison's work is not easily found in American bookstores, but that his collections Permanently Bard and The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film/Poems “are worth seeking out.”]

Imagine for a moment a country in which a learned poet—past president of the Classics guild, no less—commands an audience for serious verse not only in the print media, in which a vigorously oppositional long poem appears in a major daily during a popular war, but also on TV, where a series of innovative hybrids pioneer a new genre, stir controversy, and provoke debate. This country, however, is not America, though we do talk a good game of poetry renaissance: “From cyber-savvy Californians to the word-slamming iconoclasts of New York's Nuyorican Poets cafe, from rappers and rockers to college professors, cowboys and school children, an eclectic new breed of poet is loose in the land” （press release for the PBS series “The United States of Poetry”）. But the fact is that none of PBS's sideshow bards （not even Jimmy Carter） will have a public impact through the medium of verse. My imaginary land in comparison sounds like a poetic paradise. But it's not; it's in England, now.

While there are, as far as I can tell from haunting the poetry shelves of East Coast bookstores, a half a passel of Irish poets readily available, there appear to be only three living English poets at all widely distributed in America: the forty-year-resident of California, Thom Gunn; Mr. Sylvia Plath （Ted Hughes）; and—oddly enough—Geoffrey Hill. While Tony Harrison has been Nortonized in the USA, this doesn't mean that his poetry is easily available. The Penguin Selected didn't last long on the shelves, and Farrar's ‘V’ and other poems hit the $1 remainder rack with alacrity. Faber and Bloodaxe are not well distributed here, but Harrison's two new books are worth seeking out. Certainly anyone interested in the revival of formalist verse or in the possibilities of a “post-modern” use of meter and rhyme should own all the Tony Harrison available: his achievements over the past thirty years top what the polemics of others only project.

In Carol Rutter's Permanently Bard, Tony Harrison has been made “suitable for ‘A’ Level, college and university courses” in the United Kingdom. But does suitable mean safe? Harrison's work has a dangerous edge, and while the generously selected autobiographical “Sonnets from the School of Eloquence” frankly treat many matters of adolescent consequence relating to class, growing up, snobbery, estrangement from family, sex, etc., many of the other, longer, more specifically public works could （and have） created different problems. “A Cold Coming,” for instance, which takes its title and epigraph from T. S. Eliot's “Journey of the Magi” but represents the monologue of a “charred Iraqi” corpse on the highway of death reflecting on a news story about U.S. Marines:

I read the news of three wise men
who left their sperm in nitrogen,
three foes of ours, three wise Marines
with sample flasks and magazines,
three wise soldiers from Seattle
who banked their sperm before the battle.

Harrison's ninety-two couplets on the “cold spunk meticulously jarred” appeared in The Guardian in March of 1991, but still haven't been published in the USA, and are not included in this new selection. Few US protest poems keep quite so determinedly on the point, which is sharpened by the strop of the couplet. One thinks of Bly's “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last” which within one page reaches the pomposity of “This is Hamilton's triumph / This is the advantage of a centralized bank.”

The poems in Permanently Bard （sandwiched between an exhortative introduction and fifty pages of useful, though occasionally overly periphrastic, notes） are divided into five sections, more or less thematically, with the initial section opening with “Them & ＼uz］,” Harrison's declaration of war on received pronunciation: “All poetry （even Cockney Keats?） you see / 's been dubbed by ＼Λs］ into RP.” This poem makes infamous the snobbery of the initial English teacher against whom Harrison has claimed his poetry is slow revenge, and it is this plot that Rutter wishes to sell to the Sixth Formers and their teachers as the key to Harrison's work. But “The English Professor as Turkey” is a minor key after all, though one that will appeal to rebellious lads and lasses, as well as teachers who fear stuffiness over idiocy. For readers who have followed Harrison out of the anthology pieces （“Book Ends” seems to be the favorite） and into the complete “Sonnets” and other poems, Rutter's selection will be valuable chiefly for the rich setting of these poems in the specific biographical and cultural context. The book also provides some samples of Harrison's translations and poetic drama, such as the Agamemnon, Medea: a Sex-War Opera, and the satyr play The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus. The final section is dominated by the best of all the legions of contemporary poems that have made the reputation of Keats odoriferous. It's called “A Kumquat for John Keats”:

Today I found the right fruit for my prime,
not orange, not tangelo, and not lime,
nor moon-like globes of grapefruit that now hang
outside our bedroom, nor tart lemon's tang

—and so on for dozens of delicious and deferential couplets.

The Shadow of Hiroshima and other Film/Poems is the partial representation of a composite and collaborative art. Stripped of its film, the remaining portion lacks the density of the pure verbal icon; the images and sounds must be notated via a marginal gloss, making the film/poems look on the page a bit like the “Ancient Mariner.” Harrison was approached by Peter Symes of the BBC in 1986, at about the time that he was recording the controversial poem “V” for television （“FOUR-LETTER TV POEM FURY” read the Daily Mail headline）. Symes wanted him to work on a series about cemeteries called “Loving Memory.” By 1995, when “The Shadow of Hiroshima” was broadcast （and published in The Guardian）, Harrison had assumed full command of the medium, shifting from author to auteur who writes and directs. Symes in his introduction places Harrison in the context of poetic/filmic work going back to Auden's Night Mail collaboration with John Grierson in 1935-36, and continuing through the more effervescent activities of Betjamin as Laureate in the 1960s and 70s. He concludes that “it is no longer possible to say that poets cannot or should not work on film. Harrison's work has confounded that argument.”

That is, of course, if one supposes that the discussion has even occurred. How does one approach the union of poem and film? Harrison's opening is perhaps the Horation notion that a poem is a speaking picture. A number of his works go beyond the ekphrastic tradition （poets describing works of art, whether imaginary as in Achilles’ shield, or as real as a picture by Brueghel） and allow the image literally to speak, to articulate its desire. We are perhaps now just beginning to ask, “What do pictures want?” and Harrison is one of the best essayers of this question.

In The Shadow of Hiroshima the most uncanny of portraits speaks: “‘This voice comes from the shadow cast / by Hiroshima's A-bomb blast.’” Shadow San's monologue is accompanied by historic film clips and repeated views of the A-Bomb Dome that marks ground zero. “Shadow San” is a speaking image that is also the sole trace of the first man returned not to earth but to subatomic particles; it is a fading image that is perhaps coterminous with the post-atomic epoch.

A film/poem that is more successful on the page is “The Gaze of the Gorgon.” The statue of Heinrich Heine interrogates our century as it recounts its journeys from the Empress Elizabeth of Austria's villa on Corfu （1892） to its current resting place in a drug-plagued section of Frankfurt in the era that supposedly marked the “end of history”:

Your average Frankfurt-am-Mainer
doesn't give a shit for Heine
（nor, come to that, the young mainliner!）.
So elbowed to one side back here, surrounded by junked junkies gear,
I, Heinrich Heine, have to gaze on junkies winding tourniquets
made from the belt out of their jeans,
some scarcely older than their teens.
The Gorgon has them closely scanned
these new lost souls of ECU-land.

ECU-land is the Europe that presumes it has escaped the gaze of the Gorgon, but hasn‘t. This film/poem proceeds to contrast the Heine statue with Götz's muscular marble “Triumphant Achilles,” an icon of pre-1914 militarism, and to overlay Harrison's irreverent couplets—“Great German soul, most famed Frankfurter / on his plinth, the poet Goethe”—with the haunting lied of Schumann, “Ach, meine Liebe selber. …”

I mentioned earlier that Harrison's poetry has a dangerous edge, and I wasn't thinking of the usual metaphors—the poetic exploration of one's own psyche, for instance, as some extreme and perilous activity. Nor even of the notion that departing from a style or subject matter by which one has become known entails a risk （presumably of alienating the client and reducing either royalties or job prospects）. I had in mind the more nervy “risk-taking” of The Blasphemers’ Banquet, broadcast on the BBC 31 July 1989. This work is Harrison's immediate response to the fatwa against Salmon Rushdie and the burning of his The Satanic Verses in Bradford, a heavily Muslim town in post-industrial Yorkshire. While some in the literary world mewled and pewled about cultural sensitivity, albeit protesting the notion that the politically incorrect should be put to death, Harrison toasted the righteously offensive quality of Rushdie's work that they tried to downplay:

Where you're in hiding, tuned to the BBC,
I hope you get some joy in watching me
raise my glass to The Satanic Verses,
to its brilliance and, yes, its blasphemy.
Its blasphemy enabled man
to break free from the Bible and Koran
with their life-denying fundamentalists
and hell-fire such fanatics love to fan.

Newspaper, television, and even theatrical success make Harrison, perhaps, a suspicious import—and like the Havana cigar, he's out to make a stink. While metrical verse is no longer immediately dismissed, Harrison's poetry seems to be suffering from a bit of an embargo. Harrison is, however, a poet. As Sidney defends him, the poet is maker and prophet, looking to “the divine consideration of what may and should be”; the film images, music and verse all combine to the making of the poem （“verse,” Sidney goes on, “being but an ornament and no cause to poetry”）, and the poetry in Harrison's case aligns with his ability to find an audience, to wedge what he has to say—at least about what should not be—into the daily paper. When the headlines blacken the front with “Croats launch all-out war” （The Guardian International, 5 August 1996）, the last section has Harrison's description of the anniversary ceremonies in Hiroshima:

The peace-doves have been freed but why
won't this last shaking straggler fly?
Perhaps he's seen what's in the sky.
Where peace-doves are the birds of prey
are never very far away.

The editorial writer might—let's hope did—say much the same thing, in much the same words. But even stripped out of the film/poem, The Shadow of Hiroshima proves that there is still a raw power in saying it in verse.