Tag: Simon Armitage

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.

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.

Walking Home along the Pennine Way

Several years ago, Christine went to a conference in Liverpool and I tagged along. The day she gave her paper, I took the train to Edale, a village in the Peak District National Park, and spent the day wandering around the moors and valleys. The weather was strange, a mix of sun and snow and rain, but it was March, after all, but I thoroughly enjoyed my ramble. I remember being particularly struck by the tangible evidence of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century enclosures I’d learned about in school–I saw stone houses that had been partially demolished to build dry-stone walls and sheep pens after the tenant farmers had been evicted–and by the eighth-century roadside cross I hiked to. Edale is also the starting point of the Pennine Way, a 431-kilometre walking path across the Pennine Hills, through Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Cumbria and Northumberland, ending in the Scottish border village of Kirk Yetholm. After my day in Edale, I vowed that some day I’d walk the Pennine Way.

English poet Simon Armitage grew up in the village of Marsden, located on the Pennine Way about 45 kilometres north of Edale, and he still lives nearby. Several years ago, he decided that he would walk the Pennine Way. However, since he’s a poet and therefore averse to doing things the way other people do, he walked in the opposite direction from almost everyone else who attempts the journey, from north to south–from Scotland to his home town, in other words, and against the prevailing winds that howl northwards through the Pennines. Armitage also decided that he wouldn’t take any money along with him; instead, he would survive on whatever he earned by reading his poems at prearranged events en route.

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The most successful books about walking journeys that I’ve read focus on the comedy created by the narrator’s mistakes–usually because he or she is woefully unprepared. Jack Hitt’s and Hape Kerkeling’s books about walking the Camino de Santiago are like that; Hitt gets lost trying to leave Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, and Kerkeling finds himself hitching a ride in a tiny van with a farmer and a goat when he can’t manage the climb up the Pyrenees. Armitage’s book, Walking Home: A Poet’s Journey, is filled with similar comic moments: he loses his way in the fog, struggles against the rain and the wind, and meets a variety of interesting local characters. The book’s gentle self-mockery sometimes resolves into lyrical descriptions of the landscape and of the process of walking itself:

Because for the first time on this journey I realise that I’ve developed something of a regular pace, and not a slow one, a pace and also a rhythm of motion that feels very natural in relation to the weight in the rucksack, the ground underfoot, the angle of incline, the fuel in my belly and several other variables related to the scientific principles of bipedalism. At a certain speed everything feels to be working smoothly, the motor purring, the escapement ticking, the cogs turning, everything at its operational best; to slow down isn’t painful but it’s certainly annoying, and I find myself sympathising with those lorry drivers on the motorway who get to within a couple of yards of the car in front, flashing their lights and honking their air horns, who would prefer to plough through the back of a family saloon rather than lose revs and momentum.

Within hours, though, Armitage has reached the top of a mountain and discovers himself lost in dense fog:

I know for certain that if Richard turns back now I will turn back with him, because I simply don’t have the bottle to go wandering into that mist on my own, and if I turn back, all the scheduled readings and offers of hospitality will collapse like dominoes, the whole project will unravel, and I will have failed. . . . Feeling the brunt of the wind, almost an updraught, I’m guessing we’re on some sort of escarpment or ridge, but no matter which direction we walk in we can get no higher or lower, just further into the rocky wilderness, deeper into the milky atmosphere. The melancholy comes over me again, the dismal misery of not knowing where I am, or perhaps losing any sense of who I am, as if the mist is bringing about an evaporation of identity, all the certainties of the self leaching away into the cloud. I don’t cry, but I could easily let it happen, if I wanted to, and I’m close to wanting to.

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Despite Armitage’s various moments of terror and confusion, the Pennine Way still sounds to me like a great adventure, although after reading his account of his journey I would approach it with a lot more respect, even trepidation, since my experience puttering around Edale clearly isn’t representative. That’s the great thing about reading books like this one: you get a sense of what the journey might be like and, if you’re lucky, you’re entertained by the personality and language of the narrator, your tour guide. And Armitage is definitely an entertaining character, worth spending some time getting to know, as well as a wonderful writer. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and can’t recommend it highly enough.