[In the following review, Imlah posits that Harrison's take on the horror of Hiroshima is somewhat strained, yet still “casts its dark imprint firmly on the mind.”]

From the vandalized gravestones in Leeds of V. (1986, through the many cemeteries visited in the four-part Loving Memory (1987), with its quatrains modelled on Gray's “Elegy”, to the “Bradford Tomb” in The Blasphemer's Banquet (1989), places of burial and markers of the dead have been at the centre of Tony Harrison's “film/poems” for television. Now Hiroshima offers him its awful variant (and a relative for the charred, upright corpse in his Gulf War poem, A Cold Coming): the “shadow” of a man, printed on the stone steps of a bank by the blast that vaporized him, and now cased in the Peace Memorial Museum. It is this unidentifiable “Shadow San”, released by the poet for “a day's parole”, who acts as his guide to the city as it prepares to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its destruction—though Harrison, who for the first time has directed a film as well a providing the commentary, uses footage shot on the forty-ninth.

As you would expect from Harrison, the dead condition of Shadow San is sharply conceived: he is speaking out now because, literally and ironically fading away from the stone, he might not “make” the full centenary; when the poet's shadow lengthens in the late afternoon, his own stays “just the same” until it retires, as darkness falls, on the eve of the anniversary, “to face once more the flash and fire”. The film's other chief symbols, the Dome and the doves, are more ambiguous, partaking of the contradiction between the ubiquitously proclaimed “Peace” and terrible memory. Writing in last week's New Yorker, Murray Sayle wonders whether any significant message is given out by the A-Bomb Dome, the one carefully preserved skeletal survival of the old city centre. Here it apears from dozens of different viewpoints, and as the obsessive subject of a local artist, as if it were a hellish mutation of Hokusai's Mount Fuji. The main business of the film, though, is the preparation by pigeon-fanciers of their birds—the so-called “Peace Doves”—for release in the Peace Memorial Park, a ceremony repeated each year at 8.23 on the morning of August 6. Harrison makes them harbingers of peril: they panic throughout, and, after their release, get lost or caught by hawks, fight amongst themselves, or （in one crisp detail） burn, claws up.

The metres of Harrison's commentaries are always taken from a telling model; in this, the grimly spoken tetrameter couplets are revealed halfway through to have their source in a Japanese version of “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”, sung by the pretty successors of perished school-children. Harrison has approved the publication of his film/poems in an edition introduced by his long-time collaborator, Peter Symes of the BBC; but the commentary on The Shadow of Hiroshima is not calculated—as, say, that of V. was—to work independently on the page. A passage like “Dead men's mouths make only M, / the M in Dome, the M in Bomb, / tuned to the hum that's coming from / the A-Bomb Dome that I hear hum / all round this baseball stadium” may not seem much in the reading, but Richard Blackford's musical effects, Harrison's grinding delivery, and shots of a ringing bowl of empty seats give it an electric force.

Indeed, Harrison takes as many pains with his visual materials as he does with the writing, and verse and image are inventively contrasted, taking turns to apply the greater pressure. When the verbal pictures hot up （of “those / whose skin slid off their flesh like clothes. / Like clothes, three sizes oversize / their flayed skin loosens from their thighs. / Burns and blisters, bloated blebs”）, the camera dwells reflectively on the surface of the river Motoyasu; later, these lines are echoed visually—two lovers slipping off their dressing-gowns—without remark from the narrative.

The aim of Harrison's toils for television, as declared on the back of the Faber volume, is no less than “to confront the major horrors of the twentieth century”. Hiroshima is one of the most complex of these, as the city's own confusion testifies—whether in the evasive inscription on the cenotaph （“Rest in peace, for the error will not be repeated”）, or in the presence there of a pinball arcade called Parlor Atom. Harrison's effort is not without its moments of strain—a late flash of context, of “Japan in her aggressive guise / taking Pearl Harbor by surprise” seems either unnecessary or inadequate—but the whole casts its dark imprint firmly on the mind.