Edith Hall
“ A hanging newspaper clothes pegs keep open/on the kiosk across from the shut, smashed hotel/has a whole half-page picture of a poet I know well.”
So, in his acclaimed elegy “Polygons,” published in 2015, does Tony Harrison launch his memorial to his friend Seamus Heaney. News of Heaney’s death came to Harrison when he was convalescing on the rocky precipices around Delphi, making his “coeval heart” judder “with lurches of scree fall.” Later in the poem he remembers Ted Hughes as well. Harrison is the only survivor out of these three post-war titans of poetry associated with regional dialects, and he shows no sign of moderating his radical politics, despite publishing prize-winning yet sometimes scandalously controversial poetry for more than half a century.