Meanwhile, Harrison is still producing work. His writing through to the mid l990s, especially for the theatre and television, has continued to develop those same themes and strategies – of remembrance and translation, of facing up to worst things, of speaking on behalf of the silenced – that had been established in the earlier works considered already in this book. Furthermore, these themes have been re-rehearsed without any sort of easily pacifying conclusions or closures having been established. Rather, Harrison is still insistent upon drawing paradox and even pessimism out of his materials, while at the same time offering the material of poetry itself – its ability to persist in the face of difficulty and terror – as a counterweight to that same pessimism. However, it would seem to be a mistake to read his work simplistically in terms of themes and rhetoric. The work now almost insists that it be considered in its public context. Unlike the self-proclaimed Airedale poet John Nicholson, the hero of the 1993 theatre piece Poetry or Bust (written and performed exclusively for a production at Bradford's Salt Mill), Harrison is not now ‘permanently barred’.1 In fact his work, as far as poetry goes (and he has taken it to places that it has seldom gone before) is widely disseminated, his films are televised, his theatre receives prominent large-scale production, while sustaining – along with those qualities of tricksy playfulness and erudition which Harrison has never abandoned – a certain accessibility: a fidelity to the everyday, to the vernaculars of ordinary speech and experience, to the clarity of symbols, and to political and cultural issues of widespread import. That is to say, the significance of his work is as much involved in the ways that it makes sense – for example to audiences who might not otherwise turn to verse for their pleasure and instruction – as it is in the particular sense it might make, as it were, in itself. Issues of accessibility, involving access to the artwork, its means of production, and the means by which it might be decoded and understood, are vital aspects of Harrison's achievement as a public poet.