Volume 29, Number 12 · July 15, 1982
Changeling
By Stephen Spender
Continuous: 50 Sonnets from "The School of Eloquence"
by Tony Harrison
Rex Collings (London), 64 pp., £3.95 (paper)
A young English critic, Blake Morrison, has written recently that Tony Harrison may well be 'the first genuine working-class poet England has produced.'[*] There are poems in Continuous to support such a claim. In nearly all the Meredithian sixteen-line sonnets which make up this volume, the poet looks back to his working-class childhood and youth in Leeds, where he was born in 1937. Reading them, one has the impression, underlying all else, of a deepsworn vow, a passionate commitment to a family of which his father and mother, neighbors and former school-follows, are members bound by a love whose very substance consists of their being working class.
Review, 2168 words
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