31. Simon Armitage, New Cemetery

There’s a reason Simon Armitage is the UK’s poet laureate: he is, as a Brit might say, bloody marvellous. Exhibit A: New Cemetery. So much is going on in these 100 pages. I’m not quite sure where to start.

Okay, I’ll pick a place: Armitage’s introduction, in which he explains that a field up the hill from his house in a Yorkshire village became a cemetery, and his neighbours objected. Armitage did not. What if the land was sold anyway and became something truly obnoxious, like an industrial park or an Amazon warehouse? Or, from the perspective of 2026, a data centre? There are worse neighbours, he thought. Then came Covid, and then his father’s sudden death, which clearly gutted him. All of this is explored in this book’s poems.

At the same time, Armitage’s other commitments—translations, commissioned books, and general poet laureating—were making it difficult to write other things. The solution was to write these short poems, all of which use the same form: three-line stanzas (tercets is the technical term), with each line indented below the one before. That gives the book an unusual consistency. So does the way each poem is dedicated to a different species of moth. Armitage notes how insect populations are plummeting, taking the starving birds with them—another loss, another kind of death worth mourning. Those common names aren’t titles—the idea always was to leave these poems untitled—but sometimes there’s an odd resonance between the eccentric nomenclature and the poetry.

Along with cemetery, his father, his ecological anxiety, Armitage is sometimes charmingly self-effacing (a national poet laureate could easily go in a more egoistic direction) about his difficulties writing, and sometimes even self-lacerating. He’s also funny and his words often made me stop and reread what I’d just finished reading out of sheer joy and surprise. And, sometimes, I learned something about Armitage. The poem “[Reddish Light Arches],” for instance, laments the death of “[t]he Fall guy.” I’m Armitage’s age (well, six months younger than), and I knew the Manchester band he was referring to, but couldn’t remember the lead singer’s name or when he died. Wikipedia reminds me: Mark E. Smith, the lead singer, songwriter, and only consistent member of the Fall, died of cancer in 2018. But Wikipedia tells me more: Armitage is a lifelong music fan, particularly of the Fall, and the only UK poet laureate who is also a deejay. So the poem, despite its apparently offhand reference to Smith, is about a band Armitage loves, and its final imagining, in the last three stanzas, of Smith’s resurrection goes beyond elegy:

Here’s Smith’s infamous irascibility, his voice like a cawing crow, his lung cancer, his aggression, his music, and Armitage’s deep love for all of it. But also present are the books various dead: those interred in the cemetery up the road, but also Armitage’s father, whose death overshadows the second half of New Cemetery.

I want to give a sense of how Armitage writes about the landscape, particularly the cemetery, but it’s hard to pick just one poem. Here’s “[Orange Footman],” chosen more or less at random, since singling one poem out of all these bangers feels wrong:

Here’s a photo, one of my copy’s title page, inscribed by the author, who was the keynote speaker at the conference in Leeds I’m flying home from:

He seems to have misspelled my name, a detail which inspired this poem. It tries to imitate Armitage’s form, and his reliance on half-rhymes and alliteration, and while it might not be very good (I hesitate to include it here), it exists, which means that I can keep working on it:

The Famous Poet Signed his Book

but he seems
             to have misspelled
                       my name,

perhaps because 
             he misheard 
                       it (I’m told

I mumble) or maybe
            he’s fed up with 
                       the poetry dog 

and pony show, the claims 
             on his time, big and small,
                        the lectures and commissions,

tours and interviews, 
              and the grinning, nervous 
                        fans who line up waving

hardcovers and paperbacks 
              and babbling garbled praise, 
                        when he’d prefer 

wrestling rhymes beneath the skylight
              in his attic room, his pen, the village
                        quiet, and a cooling cup of tea.