Copyright 2020 Simon Armitage.

Seeing Stars

seeing-starsAuthor: Simon Armitage


Publisher: Faber and Faber
Pub Date: 6 May, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-571-24990-9

A Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize

Simon Armitage's 2010 collection is by turns a voice and a chorus: a hyper-vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, parables and tall tales.

Here comes everybody: Snoobie and Carla, Lippincott, Wittmann, Yoshioka, Bambuck, Dr Amsterdam, Preminger. The man whose wife drapes a border-curtain across the middle of the marital home; the English astronaut with a terrestrial outlook on life; an orgiastic cast of unreconstructed pie-worshipers at a Northern sculpture farm; the soap-opera supremacists at their zoo-wedding; the driver who picks up hitchhikers as he hurtles towards a head-on collision with Thatcherism; a Christian cheese-shop proprietor in the wrong part of town; the black bear with a dark secret, the woman who curates giant snowballs in the chest freezer. Celebrities and nobodies, all come to the ball.

The storyteller who steps in and out of this human tapestry changes, trickster-style, from poem to poem, but retains some identifying traits: the melancholy of the less deceived, crossed with an undercover idealism. And he shares with many of his characters a star-gazing capacity for belief, or for being 'genuine in his disbelief'.

Language is on the loose in these poems, which cut and run across the parterre of poetic decorum with their cartoon-strip energies and air of misrule. Armitage creates world after world, peculiar yet always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected.

Contact

Literary Agent
DGA (David Godwin Associates)
2nd floor, 40 Rosebery Avenue,
Clerkenwell,
London
EC1R 4RX
0207 240 9992
To enquire: philippa@davidgodwinassociates.co.uk

Media Enquiries
Kirsty McLachlan
kirsty@morgangreencreatives.com
Morgan Green Creatives Ltd

To Book a Poetry Reading
The Hawkridge Agency
Enquiries: hawkridgeagency@gmail.com

USA
Anya Backlund
Blue Flower Arts, LLC
PO Box 461,
Northampton,
MA 01061
845 - 677 - 8559
mobile 619-944-9247
fax 845-677-6446
http://www.blueflowerarts.com
Enquiries: anya@blueflowerarts.com

LYR
Enquiries: alex@atticusmgmt.com

Poet Laureate
Enquiries poetlaureatecontact@gmail.com

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