I don’t know a lot about Simon Armitage, but I loved his memoir, Walking Home: A Poet’s Journey, and I know he’s the UK’s poet laureate and a professor of poetry at the University of Leeds. A poem from this book was assigned reading in a writing workshop I’m participating in, led by Yvonne Blomer, whose poetry I’ve written about here, and I was intrigued enough to order a copy.
It’s a short book—almost a chapbook, really—of lyric poems and haiku, interspersed with illustrations—woodcuts or linocuts—by Angela Harding. As an object, it’s beautiful, and the poems, all of which consider trees blossoming in the spring, are lovely, rich in surprising metaphors and in music. In “Blossom: a CV,” for instance, the act of blossoming is equated with fruit farming, generating electricity with solar panels, dancing ballet, climbing mountains, and performing magic.
Why write a book about blossoming trees? The UK Is losing its orchards and fruit trees, with predictable ecological consequences but also less tangible ones for people, who need the “awakening of the spirit” blossoms provide after a long, dreary winter. “Blossom insists that we take notice, it demands our attention, but in its melancholy transience blossom also tells us something about the cycle of life, being a metaphor for our own finite existence and the idea that ‘nought may endure but Mutability,’ as Shelley put it,” Armitage writes in his author’s note. “We need to observe and experience more things like blossom, not less. We need to connect.” Yes, we do, and perhaps poems like these will encourage that sort of engagement. Or perhaps poetry can provide an alternative form of connection—to words instead of things, or perhaps words on their way to things. And yes, maybe quoting Shelley makes Armitage a Romantic—or maybe Shelley, like other poets, has something to tell us. Armitage does. Let’s listen.
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