Tony Harrison: Selected Poems ‘V’, ‘National Trust’, ‘Them and [uz]’,…

The idea

Harrison's selected poems dramatise protest through class, region and language. In ‘V’ a Leeds graveyard confrontation exposes division between the speaker's educated voice and the unemployed skinhead, using graffiti and four-letter words to indict Thatcherite neglect. ‘National Trust’ turns a country-house visit into a critique of inherited privilege and the erasure of labouring lives. ‘Them and [uz]’ attacks linguistic prejudice, insisting that regional accents and dialect belong in poetry, while ‘Divisions’ and ‘Working’ examine how education and work separate communities. ‘Marked with D’ mourns the poet's father, whose labouring body is marked by class and whose death exposes unequal remembrance. Across the selection, Harrison uses form, dialect, rhyme and direct address to make political and social protest personal, asking who is heard, who is remembered and who is silenced.

What earns the marks

• Analyse how Harrison's use of dialect, phonetic spelling and colloquial register in ‘Them and [uz]’ challenges the cultural authority of Standard English and Received Pronunciation.
• Examine the graveyard setting and the clash of voices in ‘V’, showing how the poem connects personal shame with wider social and economic division.
• Discuss how ‘National Trust’ uses the country-house estate and its guidebook language to expose the commodification of heritage and the invisibility of the working class.
• Explore how ‘Marked with D’ and ‘Working’ present labour, the body and death, considering how form and diction create elegy that is also social critique.
• Consider Harrison's use of classical and literary allusion alongside demotic speech, and evaluate how this mixture performs protest rather than merely describing it.
• Compare the poems' treatment of education, mobility and betrayal, assessing how the speaker's position complicates any simple political message.

Common mistakes and how to put them right

• Treating the poems as straightforward autobiography and ignoring how Harrison constructs speakers and personas.

  Put it right by analysing dramatic monologue, address and shifting perspective.

• Assuming that dialect and swearing are merely shocking and have no formal purpose.

  Put it right by showing how rhythm, rhyme and register carry the protest.

• Reducing the poems to a single political slogan about class.

  Put it right by tracing tensions, contradictions and the speaker's own implicated position.

Exam tips

• Plan by theme and method together, so each paragraph links a political or social idea to a specific poetic technique and quotation.
• Use precise terminology for form, voice and register, and always explain the effect of dialect or colloquial language rather than translating it.
• Integrate short quotations and analyse individual words or sounds, then connect the detail to the collection's wider protest concerns.