Seeing Stars: 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. More
By Heart: Ted Hughes
What has happened to the lost art of memorising poetry? Why do we no longer feel that it is necessary to know the most enduring, beautiful poems in the English ... More
Looking for Trouble: Charles Simic
Serbian by birth, brought up under Nazi occupation and transplanted to the United States in his teens, Charles Simic has had the opportunity to distil a highly particular vision of ... More
Collected Poems of Edward Thomas: Edward Thomas
Since the publication of Walter de la Mare's first edition of his poems in 1920, Edward Thomas has gradually come to be recognised as one of the great English poets ... More
The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot: T. S. Eliot
Poet, dramatist, critic and editor, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of The Complete Poems and Plays, published for the first time ... More
First World War Poems: Andrew Motion
In this moving anthology, the Poet Laureate Andrew Motion guides us through the horror and the pity of the Great War, from the trenches of the Western Front to reflections ... More
The Road to Inver: Tom Paulin
The Road to Inver gathers the verse translations of Tom Paulin from four decades, and brings together distinguished versions of classical and European poets which have appeared in his previous ... More
Selected Poetry of John Clare: John Clare
This is the first selection of the great Romantic 'peasant poet' John Clare to make available the full range of his accomplishment - as the chronicler of nature and childhood, ... More
Selected Poems of Adam Zagajewski: Adam Zagajewski
Adam Zagajewski is one of the most important poets to have emerged from the European continent in decades. This selection, made by the author himself, draws from his English-language collections ... More
The Forward Book of Poetry 2005: Various
Why is the Sky?: John Agard
This anthology is a wonderful amalgam of the humourous, inventive, surprising and profound. When a child begins asking 'Why?', he or she has firmly announced their intention to engage with ... More
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