Tag: Blossomise

56. Simon Armitage, Dwell

After a long walk to the east end of the city to get the screen on my phone replaced (it wasn’t the screen—it was the screen protector! a Christmas miracle!), and before a well-deserved nap (with the tabby cuddled up against my shoulder), I read Simon Armitage’s Dwell. Like Blossomise, it’s a chapbook more than a book, a collection of a dozen or so poems about the nests animals make (dreys, dens, lodges) and other places they call home (ponds, nest boxes, hives), and like Blossomise, it’s illustrated–this time with prints by Beth Munro. Also like Blossomise, it’s a lovely object.

Armitage was invited to write these poems by The Lost Gardens of Heligan, Europe’s largest garden restoration project, which, along with hosting horticultural research projects, also provides habitat, deliberately and accidentally, for birds, fish, amphibians, and mammals. It sounds like a place to visit on a European junket. The poems (of course, since they’re written by Simon Armitage) sing, especially one that imagines how a variety of creatures might review an insect hotel, which made me laugh. But I hate to single one out for praise; they’re all wonderful.

One nice recognition: Armitage often writes in free verse tercets or quatrains, as I do. I’ve always seen that as a kind of timidity in my work, a structure that keeps the maelstrom of formlessness at bay, but because it works in Armitage’s poems so well, maybe it’s a valid choice and not a pair of metaphorical training wheels. I dunno. The idea makes me happy, and it’s Christmas Eve, so I’m going with it.

I’ve submitted a proposal to a conference in Leeds, where Armitage is a professor, and if I get in, maybe I can get my copies of Dwell and Blossomise signed. They’re small enough that they wouldn’t take up much space in my carry-on. Of course, I could just as easily be told to take my proposal and play on it somewhere else, as Humphrey Bogart says in The Big Sleep.

I hope you enjoy the holidays, no matter how or what you celebrate, or whether you do or not. They’re a deep breath before the long bleak cold that lasts, here in southern Saskatchewan, until Easter. First the wassailing, then the wailing. It’s not that bad, really, but it can seem endless.

45. Simon Armitage, Blossomise

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.