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Walking Away
POET LAUREATE
The acclaimed sequel to Armitage’s top ten bestselling travel book Walking Home.
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Not content with walking the Pennine Way as a modern day troubadour, an experience recounted in his bestseller and prize-wining Walking Home, the restless poet has followed up that journey with a walk of the same distance but through the very opposite terrain and direction far from home.
In Walking Away Simon Armitage swaps the moorland uplands of the north for the coastal fringes of Britain’s south west, once again giving readings every night, but this time through Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, taking poetry into distant communities and tourist hot-spots, busking his way from start to finsh.
From the surreal pleasuredome of Minehead Butlins to a smoke-filled roundhouse on the Penwith Peninsula then out to the Isles of Scilly and beyond, Armitage tackles this personal Odyssey with all the poetic reflection and personal wit we’ve come to expect of one of Britain’s best loved and most popular writers.
Walking Away is very funny, very enjoyable and fuelled by Armitage's own down-to-earth poetic genius.
Very entertaining ... The self-deprecation with which Armitage recounts these events is a big part of the book's charm.
Fans of Armitage will enjoy slotting back into the fleecy role of walking companion ... [he is] great at spotting the habits and habitats that are peculiarly British.
What an excellent read Walking Away has been, an astute and intuitive look at the landscape with the quirks of the English understood, spotted and mixed in but in the best possible way, by someone who clearly sees himself as belonging...as one of them ... [Armitage] has an invaluable and very special eye.
Whether he's describing the characters, the land, the sea or his mood and physical condition, it's hard not to engage with a writer who wears his heart on his sleeve and who isn't afraid to puncture the overall mellow vibe with the occasional dark thought and reveal doubts about the validity of the entire enterprise.
Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. A recipient of numerous prizes and awards, his collections of poetry include Seeing Stars (2010), The Unaccompanied (2017), Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic (2019), Magnetic Field (2020) and his acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007). He writes extensively for television…
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