A couple of weeks ago Simon Armitage was announced as the next Poet Laureate, despite not having great diversity credentials as a 55-year-old white man, unless you’re broad-minded enough to cut him some slack for coming from the West Riding of Yorkshire. It’s a terrific appointment — good news for anyone who cares about poetry.
Contrariwise, it would have been a gross injustice not to have awarded it to him. Armitage has published more than 20 collections in the past 30 years and has been awarded almost every other distinction, including the Oxford professorship of poetry. His work is widely studied in schools and he has long been a tireless advocate for the art.
Unlike some such advocates he writes well too. His poetry takes on the line of Larkin without being hopelessly indebted to it. He moves both to laughter and to tears, as I can testify, having embarrassed myself reading this book in a queue of film critics this week.
Armitage modestly says the role of Poet Laureate is ambassadorial and ceremonial and he doesn’t know if he’s going to be able to produce anything at all for it, let alone for royal occasions. Don’t believe a word of it.
Here, by happy coincidence or deep plan, is a substantial collection of precisely occasional verse, poetry written to commission, for collaborations and joint projects, for residencies and events. Usually such stuff is forgettable, expired once the occasion is past. These poems, though, come alive off the page (although they do benefit from the explanatory end notes).
So here are poems written for TV programmes on post-traumatic stress disorder and commemorating the First World War; poems cut into stones in the Pennines; poems about Henry Moore sculptures; poems about Branwell Brontë written for Haworth Parsonage; a poem, In Praise of Air, temporarily printed on a catalytic plate, designed to absorb nitric oxide from the atmosphere; a poem about Brexit, describing a rail journey through Kent to the coast.
Hidden inside is a free-standing sequence of 40 poems, FLIT, produced during a writer-residency at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. In one, White Page, he riffs on the threat posed to a writer by the blank sheet of paper (“you’re not the angel people think you are”). But don’t worry. He’s got the words for it, our new Laureate.
Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic by Simon Armitage (Faber, £16.99)
