Sometime in the late 1970s I discovered that a poet, a ‘real poet’, had attended Leeds Grammar School, the same school I was studying at, and had written real books. I took one of these, The Loiners, out of the public library at the first opportunity. I enjoyed, I think, at first, its clarity and certainty and I have been following this poet's work, off and on, ever since. Throughout, though, I have felt an uneasiness with the poetry's very eloquence, with its facility of speaking to me so clearly. For a start, although we were both LGS scholarship boys, Harrison's story was not my story. His was another time, for one thing, and the working-class homes of Beeston Hill were another scene from the grander homes of Gledhow that I grew up amongst. During certain sad, angry months of 1981 when people in this country turned to violence as a means of claiming something back, for their own, from a social structure that appeared to be shafting them, and rioting broke out in English inner cities, the Leeds version of all this stopped almost exactly at the bottom of our road. That seemed then to describe one of the unbreachable borders I was living on but could barely understand, and I still feel rather proud of this other Leeds boy who had crossed borders with impunity, and who managed to make it rhyme at the same time. This present piece is an attempt to engage at last, or for the first time, with my own parochial attachment to (my affection for) Harrison's work; but also with my own uncertainty (my fascination) with regard to that same clarity and impunity of Harrison's: that deliberation with which he throws himself into the breaches that have appeared against him. If I appear to be wanting it both ways here, I hope there is something in my position which chimes, humbly, with the tone of exemplary intellectual scepticism and rigorous self-questioning that runs throughout Harrison's own work.

In a book this short there are inevitably omissions. Rather than give a brief paragraph to every one of Harrison's writings, I have focused on certain works, but even then too briefly, at the expense of others. None of which is to imply in the slightest that the pieces not mentioned are not worth the reader's time.