Summer Reads 2011: About Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage’s new collection is by turns a voice and a chorus: a hyper-vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, parables and tall tales. Here comes everybody: Snoobie and Carla, Lippincott, Wittmann, Yoshioka, Bambuck, Dr Amsterdam, Preminger. The man whose wife drapes a border-curtain across the middle of the marital home; the English astronaut with a terrestrial outlook on life; an orgiastic cast of unreconstructed pie-worshipers at a Northern sculpture farm; the soap-opera supremacists at their zoo-wedding; the driver who picks up hitchhikers as he hurtles towards a head-on collision with Thatcherism; a Christian cheese-shop proprietor in the wrong part of town; the black bear with a dark secret, the woman who curates giant snowballs in the chest freezer. Celebrities and nobodies, all come to the ball…

The storyteller who steps in and out of this human tapestry changes, trickster-style, from poem to poem, but retains some identifying traits: the melancholy of the less deceived, crossed with an undercover idealism. And he shares with many of his characters a star-gazing capacity for belief, or for being ‘genuine in his disbelief’. Language is on the loose in these poems, which cut and run across the parterre of poetic decorum with their cartoon-strip energies and air of misrule. Armitage creates world after world, peculiar yet always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected.

Selected Quotes

“The best poet of his generation.” Craig Raine, Observer

“Seeing Stars is a triumph, and one of my books of the year.” Jeremy Noel-Tod, Daily Telegraph

“Very more-ish; and there is more wit and adventure on display here than you’ll find in many poets’ careers.” Paul Batchelor, Guardian

“Immediately accessible and hauntingly oblique, a beguilingly funny peculiar and bewilderingly funny ha-ha assembly of voices…” Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

Author Biography

Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire in 1963. In 1992 he was a winner of one of the first Forward prizes, and a year later was the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. His collections of poetry include Kid, Book of Matches, The Dead Sea Poems, CloudCuckooLand, Killing Time, The Universal Home Doctor and Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid. His acclaimed verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was published in 2007, and he was awarded a CBE for services to poetry in 2010..

Author website www.simonarmitage.com/

Other books by Simon Armitage

Poetry Collections
•    Zoom! (1989)
•    Xanadu (1992)
•    Kid (1992)
•    Book of Matches (1993)
•    The Dead Sea Poems (1995)
•    CloudCuckooLand (1997)
•    Killing Time. (1999)
•    Selected Poems (2001)
•    Universal Home Doctor (2002)
•    Travelling Songs (2002)
•    The Shout: Selected Poems (2005)
•    Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid (2006)
•    The Not Dead (2008)
•    Out of the Blue (2008)
•    Seeing Stars (2010)

Translations
•    Homer's Odyssey (2006)
•    Sir Gawain and The Green Knight (2007)

Novels
•    Little Green Man (2001)
•    The White Stuff (2004)