A Torrent of Filth or An Island of Strangers? Tony Harrison’s ‘v.’ 40 Years On

From its publication 40 years ago to the present day the popularity and critical response to ‘v.’ shows that to read or write dangerous poetry is to engage in a radical act: to believe that words can change the world. In 1985, ‘v.’ was considered dangerous because it refused to look away. Instead, the poem radically confronted readers and viewers in the 1980s with the violence of language, the visible pain of loss and lived experiences of the politics of exclusion across psychological and physical settings. In 2025, the UK in 2025 is wrangling a range of social and economic pressures from a cost-of-living crisis to housing shortages, and growing resentment over UK Government immigration policy. The alienation and anger, xenophobia and racial hatred in response to extraordinarily similar social, political and economic challenges resonance profoundly with Harrison’s poem which demonstrates how poetry can reclaim poetry as a space for agency and the possibility of change — a space where the voiceless can speak, and where the fractures of a nation can be named.