Our poem of the week is ‘Angoisse’ by Simon Armitage, from the Poet Laureate’s first-ever poetry pamphlet.

Human Geography was Poet Laureate Simon Armitage’s first-ever poetry pamphlet, published in 1986 when he was twenty-three years old. It was a time for him of experiment and potential – ‘when I felt like a nobody but could dream about being anybody’. That spirit of possibility, openness and youthful optimism is captured in the poems themselves.

Forty years on and with a new, retrospective introduction, this signed edition returns us to the starting point of Armitage’s extraordinary writing life.

Angoisse

I realised at that point you could either shoot or not shoot – MERSAULT, The Outsider

The sun bled into the corner of his eye
But the sweat did not. Every ten minutes he wiped
His forehead with the underside of his shirtsleeve
And settled back into the sand, and his sleep.

If the flies bothered him he never showed it.
Three tankers passed the point and he hardly noticed.
He was vaguely aware of another figure
But the slant of the heat-haze made him unsure.

Even asleep, the colour of the sun weighed
Like the tangent of an orange on his eyelids.
He watched it for an hour, though it flickered once
As a shadow passed quickly across his face.

At three o’clock he licked the salt from his lips
And stood up. He shook the sand from his shoes and socks
And looked for the leather case with his glasses in.
He was thirsty and his wallet was missing.

The best stones at the side of the road were blunt
And he ran the blade of his knife across his thumb.
What now, with the sun bursting from behind the head
Of the other man swaggering down the road?

Back home he quartered an orange with the knife
And the juice on the steel pearled into droplets like
The first beads of a cold sweat. He took a towel
And wiped it. It was done. He had killed no one.

Copyright © Simon Armitage, 1986. Used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

Read all our poems of the week.