Out of the Blue

Author: Simon Armitage

The poems in this volume were written in response to three anniversaries relating to three separate conflicts.

Told from the point of view of an English trader working in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, the poem-film Out of the Blue was commissioned by Channel 5. It was broadcast five years after the 9-11 attacks on America. It won the 2006 Royal Television Society Documentary Award. 

We May Allow Ourselves a Brief Period of Rejoicing (a quote from one of Churchill's post-war speeches) was also commissioned by Channel 5, and broadcast on the sixtieth anniversary of VE Day.

The radio-poem Cambodia was commissioned by the BBC for The Violence of Silence, a radio drama set in today's Cambodia thirty years after the rise of the Khmer Rouge.