Stanza Stones

Authors: Simon Armitage with Pip Hall & Tom Lonsdale

Published: Enitharmon Press
Pub Date: October 1, 2013

The Stanza Stones Trail runs through forty-seven miles of the Pennine region, some of the most strikingly varied landscape in the world. The terrain bears the deep scars of industrial exploitation, as well as those less obvious: the signs left by a hundred local generations are carved into the region's abounding rocks.

Simon Armitage was born and raised here, in the village of Marsden, and in 2012 he was commissioned through the Ilkley Literature Festival to write site-specific poetry.

Armitage composed six new poems on his Pennine walks and, with the help of local expert Tom Lonsdale and letter-carver Pip Hall, found extraordinary, secluded sites and saw his words carved into stone. This book is a record of that journey and contains fascinating photographs and accounts by Hall and Lonsdale as the project unfolded.  

The Stanza Stones poems were collected in a specialist illustrated limited edition, In Memory of Water, published by Fine Press Poetry. They can also be found in Paper Aeroplane 1989-2014 (Faber).