[In the following review, Kaiser asserts that class and language are the predominant themes in the poems of Harrison's Permanently Bard.]

With its detailed introduction and extensive notes, Permanently Bard, a selection of Tony Harrison's poetry designed for Britain's A-level students, provides an accessible overview of Harrison's poetry for any reader unfamiliar with his work. Comprising fourteen volumes of verse, twelve plays and libretti, and three television plays, Harrison's output is prodigious, but his work is much better known in Britain than elsewhere. This is perhaps because Harrison is a distinctly British poet, one whose central poetic concern is with a distinctly British problem.

Harrison's poetry, whether autobiographical or dramatic, circles around the issue of class and language. He explores how accent, slang, and jargon define class status and mark out the territory of power in Britain. Many of Harrison's shorter poems deal with his progress from working-class Yorkshire beginnings to the elitist world of the classics scholar, along the way gaining the languages of the literate but losing his ability to speak to his parents in their own vocabulary. In “Wordlists” Harrison concludes, after cataloguing the languages he learned in school as a “good parrot,” that in the process he lost “the tongue that once I used to know / but can't bone up on now, and that's mi mam's.”

Even in Harrison's translations and adaptations of Greek and Roman drama, this theme of class and language surfaces. In The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, Harrison's version of a satyr play, he recounts the tale of Marsyas, the satyr flayed as punishment for playing the flute of Athena. For Harrison, this legend is an allegory of the lower-class artist, punished for appropriating the language of the elite: “the Apollonian goes for his gun, / when it suddenly dawns on him the swine / the pearl is cast before by one divine / knows it's a pearl, and not some novel food / and aspires beyond dumb swinetude. / When he enters the Culture it represents / they reach for their skin-removing instruments.” As Britain's leading adapter of Greek and Roman drama into contemporary theatrical modes, Harrison himself has taken his Yorkshire working-class consciousness “into the Culture” and has made his own class history into a metaphor of the whole problem of class and privilege in British society.

In his plays Harrison gives dramatic verse a contemporary vigor by using colloquial language and gives the classics a brutal immediacy by using the harsh rhythms of Anglo-Saxon prosody. Harrison's pacificism and feminism appear often in his drama: his version of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata is set at Greenham Common, the site of the famous women's protest against nuclear weapons. Throughout his adaptation, Harrison links contemporary debates about war and feminism with those in the ancient Greek play, and the parallels are striking. Harrison's use of simple, direct language allows the words of the Inspector, for example, to apply equally well to 411 B.C. or 1992 A.D.: “Men give the advice and women take it. / Men enforce the law when women break it. / I'm a man. I say. You do. I wear the clothes / that give me authority and you wear those.”

Square Rounds, performed at the National Theatre in 1992, is an original play about the inventor of mustard gas during World War I, but it has the fundamental tragic outlines of Oedipus Rex. Fritz Haber, the inventor, gradually comes to a realization of his own delusions that chemical weapons would put an end to the war quickly and would kill with less suffering than conventional weapons, but this recognition comes just at the point when his wife Clara commits suicide in despair at the horrors her husband has unleashed. Finally, though, Harrison's political themes resolve themselves back into his predominant fascination with social and class conflict, because throughout his work the dynamic of an overlooked minority resisting an elite and powerful majority plays itself out, whether the context is ancient Greece or Rome, the postwar Leeds of his childhood, or contemporary London.