| Title | : | Selected Poems |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0571210767 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780571210763 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 165 |
| Publication | : | First published August 6, 2001 |
Selected Poems Reviews
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There are lots of reasons for liking a poet. If you have so many they cancel each other out the instant you try and get them down on paper, it's a good sign you've struck gold. That, at least, is how I feel about the poems of Simon Armitage.
Elsewhere Armitage says that he's interested in poems that can tell a story, and in poems that want to crack the chemical equation for language, the self, etc. He likes both, but, given the choice, he'd rather have the former. No member of the difficult crowd, this lad. That commitment has helped to give England one its most quotable poets since Larkin. The best of Armitage's lines weld themselves to the underside of memory:
'I said no, no, no, no, no, no, no. OK, come on then.'
'Here's how they rated him when they looked back.
Sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.'
'Because the worm won't know your make of bone from mine'
'its gashed, rhinoceros, sea-lion skin
nursing a gallon of rain in its gut'
'And left unsaid some things he should have spoken,
about the heart, where it hurt exactly, and how often'.
He commands range, narrative power; he has a sturdy, ironic sense of humour underlying his no-nonsense approach to life. He doesn't think that the stuff of ordinary life is somehow unfit for poetry. Sometimes his pre-emptive sense of irony - what Sean O'Brien has called his 'I speak your one-liner' mode - can drain the blood from otherwise fine poems - as in the last line of 'It Ain't What You Do It's What It Does to You'. Perhaps this is what some people mean when they call Armitage's poems unfeeling.
I don't agree. In his most moving poems (nearly always about love), Armitage silences his inner smart-aleck and trusts what springs from feeling. I wished some more poems in this vein had been included from his first collection, such as 'The Dykes', 'The Night Shift' and 'Somewhere Along the Line.' They would have been preferable to slighter pieces like 'And You Know What Thought Did', or all of 'The Whole of the Sky' pieces from Cloudcuckooland.
My favourites are listed below.
Poem
Kid
Great Sporting Moments: The Treble
The Two of Us
To Poverty
Lines Thought to Have Been Written on the Eve of the Execution of a Warrant for His Arrest
'I am very bothered when I think...'
I Say I Say I Say
Goalkeeper with a Cigarette
The Tyre
'Somewhere in the state of Colorado...'
To His Lost Lover (for many Armitage's best poem).
This is a superb, if ever-so-slightly uneven, selection from one of England's most enjoyable living poets. -
Driving home late from work a couple of weeks ago I caught a wonderful edition of Radio 3's The Verb in which Ian McMillan interviewed Simon Armitage. The poet was there to talk about his new updated selected poems (published as Paper Aeroplanes), and he read a number of his poems during the course of the programme. The interplay of the two rich Yorkshire voices and the the marvellous poems made for fantastic late night radio and prompted me to dig out my original Selected Poems, published in 2001. I love modern poetry and buy a fair bit of it, but I invariably tend to browse through the book as soon as I get it home, focusing in on poems that are already familiar or ones that jump out for attention - and then on subsequent readings to come back to the same favourites again and again. So I wondered what sort of different experience I would get from reading a book of poems from cover to cover. Most obviously, I discovered some gems that had been lurking in this book that had been on my bookshelf for 13 years and that I'd never read - poems like the excerpts from Killing Time, White Christmas and The Two of Us. But I also read some that I thought I knew inside out in a different context - framed by the poems that sit either side of them in the collection they took on different timbres and sometimes different meanings. I read some great poems that I had read before but had forgotten about (Five Eleven Ninety Nine, Simon Armitage's moving millennium poem for example), and was reminded again what a great poet Armitage is - colloquial, playful, but with serious intent and a wonderful way with words. I think I'll try this 'all the way through' approach with some of the other poetry books on my shelf.
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Snow Joke
This poem starts with the story of a contemporary men and his hidden life, he is late, he is driving his car, he feels safe, immune to be stopped by a patrol, but the nature plays an horrible joke.
Through a stanza we feel that we are dying with him, the snow slowly is reducing our breath and the death is like the "Wisky...warm and smooth"
We do not know if the man is dead or not but he is certainly unconscious, this is fundamental because is the bridge to the last stanza where we can choose three possibilities about the destiny of this man.
Personaly I chose the last one because the nature try to suffocate him, he reacts with all of his energies but the nature is invincible it is killing the man with his apparent innocence, it is a soft death like soft flakes falling silently on the asphalt.
The Bears In Yosemite Park
The most dramatic line is the first stanza: "The bears are busy in the trash cans, grubbling for toothpaste but the weather on Mam Tor...."
This phrase is worrying because a natural park must preserve the bears from the humans, they have been contaminated.
The denunciation of this poem is that the irresponsible tourism will pollute Mam Tor too.
Mam Tor is a 517 m (1,696 ft) hill near Castleton in the High Peak of Derbyshire, England. Its name means "mother hill",[1] so called because frequent landslips on its eastern face have resulted in a multitude of 'mini-hills' beneath it.[2] These landslips, which are caused by unstable lower layers of shale, also give the hill its alternative name of Shivering Mountain.[3] In 1979 the continual battle to maintain the A625 road (Sheffield to Chapel en le Frith) on the crumbling eastern side of the hill was lost when the road officially closed as a through-route.
At the base of the Tor and nearby are four show caves: Blue John Cavern, Speedwell Cavern, Peak Cavern and Treak Cliff Cavern where lead, Blue John, fluorspar and other minerals were once mined. Source: Wikipedia)
I appreciated the description of the cavern, which is realistic because he explain poetically how they have been shaped by the rain.
The news by the radio are not good, the humans are destroying these natural beauties, we must return to be "in boxer and the nature is too cruel. -
*3.5 stars
I love Simon Armitage's poetry, it's honest, well written, easy to read and really makes you think.
But I couldn't give this book any higher than 3/3.5 stars because I don't believe poetry is really made to be read back-to-back and is much better when analysed! But when I'm just reading for pleasure I don't want to spend too long doing deep analysis so just take the face value of the poem.
Still very enjoyable and I'm hoping to pick up 'Walking Home' by him soon! -
I really wanted to like this. I like Simon Armitage's TV presence, I like his prose, I like his dry wit, I like that he lives in and writes about places I know ... but I can't get into his poetry. So much of it just seemed to be random jottings that didn't line up on the right-hand margin, with no coherence to it. There were odd flashes of brilliance, but nothing like enough to keep me interested.
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Straight-talking, wise-cracking, story-telling, back-chatting poetry from the alleys and lanes of England. There's a punchy tone and a plain grace to Simon Armitage's poetry that is very compelling.
Some have the distinct shock and feel of the shortest, sharpest short stories or character studies – more than a little
James Kelman-esque. Like Brassneck or About His Person:
Five pounds fifty in change, exactly,
a library card on its date of expiry.
A postcard, stamped,
unwritten but franked,
a pocket-size diary slashed with pencil
from March twenty-fourth to the first of April.
...
No gold or silver,
but crowning one finger
A ring of white unweathered skin.
That was everything
Others are deeply engaging miniatures of emotion and connection, like To His Lost Lover or ankylosing spondylitis. My wife (who, along with Armitage, suffers from ankylosing spondylitis) burst into tears when I read aloud the poem of that name – a deeply felt plea for love and connection to help overcome the fear and constriction of physical decay and loss.ankylosing meaning bond or join,
and spondylitis meaning of the bone or spine.
That half explains the cracks and clicks, the clockwork of my joints and discs,
the ratchet of my hips. I'm fossilising –
every time I rest
I let the gristle knit, weave, mesh.
My dear, my skeleton will set like biscuit overnight,
like glass, like ice, and you can choose
to snap me back to life before first light,
or let me laze until
the shape I take become the shape I keep.
Don't leave me be. Don't let me sleep.
Armitage captures voices from the underside impeccably, with a kind of pugilistic aggression that drags you in: "I said no, no,no,no,no,no,no. OK, come on then." or "Because the worm won't know your make of bone from mine."
And his plain, no-frills style also provides the perfect platform for play – there's a lot of wicked humour and metafictional fun in this collection. A stand-out for me is the wonderful meeting point of tall tale and stretched metaphor, Song of the West Men:To the far of the far
which builds its tale up through these rough-hewn comparatives and superlatives to its bleakly compelling encapsulation of life in these isles.
off the isles of the isles,
near the rocks of the rocks
which the guillemots stripe
with the shite of their shite,
a trawler went down
in the weave of the waves,
and a fisherman swam
for the life of his life
through the swell of the sea
which was one degree C.
And the bones of his bones
were cooler than stone,
and the tide of his blood
was slower than slow.
...
As with any selection of poems there are those I love and those which didn't quite hit home. But it's a great collection over all. -
Ha, so the first line in my personal book journal on this collection is, "At least I can understand them". High praise indeed!
I've read a few poetry collections recently after near-randomly selecting some from the library shelf to try to figure out what poets and poetry I like. I knew some Simon Armitage poems before but not well. This book was thankfully much less heavy on imagery than some of the other poetry books I'd picked up, which I appreciated as I've been finding the heavy use of imagery of things I don't have experience a block to connecting with the poems. This book aided my understanding even more by having a similar context (is that the right word?) as my own life experiences. So even if I didn't relate or connect, I still understood the poems.
I liked a few of the poems - It Ain't What You Do, It's What It Does To You*, Goalkeeper with a Cigarette (especially good example of imagery helping not hindering), and Meanwhile in the State of Colarado - but found most just too...bleak? to really connect with. A couple made me feel low and one made me feel nauseous: good poetry maybe but not enjoyable poetry. I have zero idea of poetry genres but called this 'urban life' poetry in my book journal.
A previous borrower had underlined a selection of poems and on finishing my own read through I went back and read their selections: 8, 11, 40, 54, 58, 60, 69, 124. It was interesting to read these as a mini collection and made me appreciate the poems more now they were in close context to one another. I don't know if these were poems they had to study, poems they enjoyed the most, poems that shared a common something... it was interesting to wonder why and impossible not to see them as relating to each other.
I think that the anonymous's person's mini collection actually made a huge difference in my overall feelings about the book. I was feeling disappointed that I, yet again, wasn't enjoying most of the poems and a bit low from the despondency in a lot of them. Then I read the anonymous person's collection and it made me put my critical hat on as I would have in an English Lit class and allowed me to get more from them. It changed my mindset reading them from 'will I enjoy this?' to 'how can I analyse this?', which made me approach them more openly and with a frame of mind I think I'm more comfortable using. Probably from only ever reading poetry in a learning context in the past! Perhaps something to think about as I read poetry in the future.
*Apologies for the capitalisation of the poems, I can't remember how it was written and feel like breaking the standard capitalisation laws in favour of being clear it's a title. -
Lots of range, and many delights, but I would give Armitage 5 stars for his untitled Columbine inspired poem alone - so powerful
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I started reading this back in February and I've been dipping in and out of it since. However, I can't renew it again according to the Ealing Library Service website so I've finally finished it. Firstly, I don't think poetry should be binged. It should be savoured and considered. It should also - and here perhaps I'm being controversial - be read out loud.
The reason I'm waffling on is I find it hard to review poetry. I always feel like about analysing poetry like those people that say, 'I don't know much about art but I know what I like.' And I like a lot of this. Because good poetry does something to the brain in a different way to prose. It's language distilled. And Armitage knows how to deploy that language to great effect.
My favourites from the collection: Map Reference, To His Lost Lover, I Say I Say I Say, The Dead Sea Poems, Goalkeeper with a Cigarette, A Glory, The Tyre & the two chunks - the technical term that - from Killing Time. -
Admittedly perhaps I am a little biased being from just down the road from the author, but his poems resonated so closely that it was hard not to love them. I initially encountered poems such as 'Mother any distance', 'My Father thought it bloody queer', 'Kid' and 'Homecoming' while in high school. Reading back through them again, it was surreal to see how much I still remembered and how much I hadn't realised enjoyed them. The sheer simplicity of his poetry is supported by the fact they are often very contemporary and visceral. You almost get a sense while reading his poems that Armitage is there with you, telling you the original anecdote. The only drawback for this collection is that I feel some of the poems selected were a little incongruent, and it would have been much more worthwhile to include more standalone poems rather than parts of a sequence.
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I didn't really like Simon Armitage, when I first came across his poetry. I've mentioned this before. I'm ready to give him more of a chance now, since I love his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and rather liked his 'Book of Matches' collection.
My favourite poem from 'Book of Matches' isn't in here, which saddens me a little, because I want to have it. Just means I'll have to get a copy of that collection, I suppose!
I do love this. It's a good collection of his poetry. There are one or two poems that are quite similar, but the majority of them impress me in the way they put things just right. This one's a keeper. -
Simon Armitage is talented poet and if you're looking for a new poet to get into you should definitely consider Armitage and in particular this poetry book. It is a great introduction to what his poetry and writing style is like.
Armitage knows how to delve you into a situation and/or experience with his writing putting you in the position of the protagonist or experiencing it with them. His poetry is high quality and the elements of realism make it more enjoyable. -
armitage has a distinctly male british perspective, which is to say that i cannot always feel included in his worldview, but he writes beautifully and i appreciate the peek into a mindset that can't ever be mine. the poems in cloudcuckooland especially strike me & i may need to purchase that volume. a masterful modern voice with a flare for sound that stands out.
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An interesting mix, I really enjoyed (among others) "The Dead Sea Poems", "It Ain't What You Do It's What It Does To You" and "Meanwhile, somewhere in the state of Colorado". Some poems are rather grim and for me the cruelty and harshness of the language was a little disturbing.
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What can I say? I'm a big fan of Simon Armitage. So serious in subject; so light and succinct in delivery. Rich in imagery with great power in the unwritten, the unseen. Cleverly observed comic relief throughout...
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I came to this collection from the poem "Poem" in an anthology elsewhere. Mr. Armitage is gritty and direct; some of his poetry is very fine. He seems angry and many of these poems are violent and disturbing. I found some offensive - I suppose that is the point.
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neat tesco realist
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Do yourself a favor and read these poems.
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I am definitely not a Simon Armitage fan but have only been reading his works to help my son revise/study for his English Literature exams.
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A brilliant mind, witty and topical.
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Good, just didn't click with me.
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With a collection of Simon Armitage's poems you never know when the next punch in the gut-feels will hit you, and you find yourself holding your breath in anticipation of the moment. I have marked lots of pieces to come back to and be stunned again and again.
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i enjoyed some of the poems but didn’t really understand some of the others. i liked the vivid imagery and descriptions. i particularly enjoyed the shorter form poems, i thought they packed the most punch.
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The problem with Simon Armitage is the critics are so far up his ass. There are some great poems here, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of blustery hoopla too.
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I read the entire thing on a train ride from London to St. Albans and dogeared many of the pages.
