Tony Harrison’s state-of-the-nation poem V is to be performed in the Leeds cemetery that directly inspired the Yorkshire writer, who died last week.
The seeds of V, first printed in the London Review of Books (LRB) in 1985, were sown when Harrison visited his parents’ graves at Holbeck cemetery in Beeston and found the graveyard to be vandalised and daubed with racist graffiti. In the poem Harrison used this location of “the family plot”, where he envisions his own epitaph, to represent a divided and dejected society, juxtaposing the inscriptions on tombstones with spray-painted expletives.
