The sonnets of Tony Harrison’s mini-sequence ‘Art & Extinction’ have remained vivid in my mind since I first heard him read them in Leeds in the early 1980s. The alignment they suggested between the fate of the natural world and that of literature was immediately compelling. In these poems, Harrison’s pointed sense of the apocalyptic nature of the historical process was brought into sharp focus by his engagement with other species. His residence in Micanopy, Florida in the late 1970s seems to have produced in him a heightened sense of the richness and prodigality of life to match his long-standing awareness of our human insignificance and our civilisation’s ultimate fall into nothingness.

In ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ (1981), for example, the fruitful prodigality of the citrus groves of rural Florida is set against his awareness of nuclear holocaust. Even in these often celebratory mid-life love poems a renewed zest for life is – typically – matched by the taste of death.

In particular, his poem on the famous American bird artist John James Audubon within the ‘Art & Extinction’ group of sonnets exhibits his love of all things paradoxical in the thrilling and disturbing violence of the painter’s aesthetic practice:

The struggle to preserve once spoken words
from already too well-stuffed taxonomies
is a bit like Audubon’s when painting birds,
whose method an admirer said was this:

Kill ’em, wire ’em, paint ’em, kill a fresh ’un!

The plumage even of the brightest faded.
The artist ...