Top 6 and Poetry Please Review - Tony Harrison

Poetry isn't well-served by radio. Ian McMillan's tiggerish enthusiasm on The Verb would be best saved for the under-fives and Roger McGough's Poetry Please is a comfort zone that will from time to time throw up an item of interest and one is grateful for small mercies. However, the poems are mostly read by actorly types that make many of the poems sound the same.

Although not all poets are great readers of their own poems it is preferable to hear them try. So in the current series, it is most laudible of them to be featuring a poet or two doing just that. And Tony Harrison is one of the finest at it, his rich dark tones remaining with you whenever you read his poems afterwards.

Today's was a better than average Poetry Please, with Roger offering his biographical note on Thom Gunn after a reading of the surfing poem From the Wave and then Harrison introducing his powerful Newcastle is Peru.

But usually, the companion programme in Radio 4's poetry slot, Adventures in Poetry, is capable of doing more in half an hour by telling the story behind just one poem.

But, while we are at it, the venerable old leftist bard is overdue his turn on Top 6.

His most recent books have perhaps not been his best and the couplets and heavy rhymes that refer back to his classical background have threatened to descend into the doggerel they previously transcended. I was surprised to see his last book the subject of a paper at the British and Irish Contemporary Poetry academic conference at Oxford in 2006 because the earlier work is surely more worthy of attention.

A Kumquat for John Keats and Cypress and Cedar are somehow companion pieces thematically contrasting sweetness and bitterness in finely made meditations.

The Birds of America, about the profligate use of wildlife in Audaubon's artistic methods, and Loving Memory, where he walks the Malvern Hills in search of the grave of Jenny Lind, the Swedish nightingale, are both from a set called Art & Extinction. The latter is selected partly on account of his brooding reading of it and partly for its great opening line, The fosses where Caractacus fought Rome.

Whereas I'll take The Icing Hand for its last line, along with all its others, that makes fine music as well as punctuating itself so very conscientiously, and first, ebbing, salts, then, flowing, floods this line.

And it wouldn't be right to pick six Harrison poems without including v, the film-poem made unnecessarily controversial by tabloid newspapers, or one in particular, that found it shocking for its perfectly legitimate use of four-letter words when it really should have been celebrated for everything else about it.