A Vertical Art: Oxford Lectures
‘Poetry is not one thing but many, and long may that be the case – but the illusive golden standard remains an intensified version of language that offers the best opportunity for reflection and scrutiny while being ingeniously clear, effortlessly fluent, powerfully communicative, successful in its intentions, aware of its causes and effects, wide in […]
Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems
Buy now Growing up in Marsden among the hills of West Yorkshire, Simon Armitage has always associated his early poetic experiences with the night-time view from his bedroom window, those ‘private, moonstruck observations’ and the clockwork comings and goings in the village providing rich subject matter for his first poems. Decades on, that window continues […]
Hansel and Gretel
Pre-order/buy from Design for Today Also available: Special Limited Edition. Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ work for Hansel & Gretel won the 2020 V&A Illustration Award for Book Illustration. See the animation by Clive Hicks-Jenkins Simon Armitage’s extended narrative poem uses the well-known framework of the Brothers Grimm tale but gives us a new contemporary interpretation and focus. This is a darker, glittering Hansel & Gretel […]
Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic
Buy from Faber Celebrated as ‘the most popular and prolific British poet of his generation’ (The Times) and ‘the first poet of serious artistic intent since Philip Larkin to have achieved popularity’ (Sean O’Brien), Simon Armitage has been involved in an astonishing assortment of projects, commissions, collaborations, residencies and events over the course of his […]
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Buy Armitage’s first highly acclaimed translation, 2009 Buy new revised illustrated edition, 2018 This story, first told in the late fourteenth century, is one of the most enthralling, enigmatic and beloved poems in the English language. Simon Armitage’s version is meticulously responsive to the tact, sophistication and dramatic intensity of the original. It is as if, six […]
Flit
Simon Armitage talks about Flit here (scroll down for video) Buy from YSP Flit is a newly commissioned and fully illustrated collection of 40 poems by Simon Armitage, poet in residence at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in its 40th anniversary year. In 2017, disillusioned by the domestic cultural scene and in search of a more depersonalised aesthetic, the poet […]
New Cemetery
Buy from Propolis A poet, at a desk, in a shed. A shed which is temple, bunker, study and look-out post all rolled into one. Not far away, in the surrounding West Yorkshire countryside, the local council have begun “peeling back turf” to turn a former cow-field into a new cemetery. In this 2018 collection […]
The Unaccompanied
Buy from Faber A 2017 Poetry Book Society Choice After more than a decade and following his celebrated adventures in drama, translation, travel writing and prose poetry, Simon Armitage’s eleventh collection of poems heralds a return to his trademark contemporary lyricism. The pieces in this multi-textured and moving volume are set against a backdrop of […]
Still
Buy from Enitharmon Finalist, 2017 British Book Design & Production Award Simon Armitage was commissioned by 14-18 NOW: WW1 Centenary Art Commissions, Norfolk & Norwich Festival and Writers Centre Norwich to write a sequence of poems in response to 26 panoramic photographs of battlefields associated with the Battle of the Somme chosen from archives at Imperial […]
Pearl
Buy from Faber Winner of the 2017 PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation Simon Armitage’s acclaimed version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight garnered front-page reviews across two continents and confirmed his reputation as a leading translator. This new work is an entrancing allegorical tale of grief and lost love, as the narrator is led […]