Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage's new collection is by turns a voice and a chorus: a hyper-vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, parables and tall tales. Armitage creates world after world, peculiar yet always particular, where the only thing certain is the unexpected.

'Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid' is Simon Armitage's wittiest, most alertly combative and impassioned collection to date.

Over the course of several years, Simon Armitage has written hundreds of poems for various projects, commissions, collaborations and events, which stand outside of his mainstream collections but now form a substantial body of work in their own right. Some have been published - such as the 'Walking Home' and 'Walking Away' poems - but the majority has not, and together they cover an eclectic array of subjects including sculpture, the environment, travel,...

This flesh-and-blood account of numerous personal journeys reads like a private encyclopaedia of emotion and health. The poems range from the rainforests of South America to the deserts of Western Australia, but are ultimately set against that most intimate of all landscapes, the human body.

From punk to mod to New Romantic, and eventually to acclaimed poet, Simon Armitage writes about a life where music and poetry have been core.

Praised for his powerfully inventive, influential verse, Simon Armitage has resided at the heart of British poetry for more than a quarter century. Throughout, his work has celebrated range and adaptability, most recently in the prose poems of 'Seeing Stars' (2010), the dramatisation of 'The Last Days of Troy' (2014) and the translation of medieval 'Pearl' (2016). But 'The Unaccompanied', his eleventh single volume, is a return to Armitage's trademark...

The poems in this volume were written in response to three anniversaries relating to three separate events - the September 11 attacks, VE Day, and the Cambodian genocide.

'Blossomise' celebrates the ecstatic arrival of spring blossom just as it acknowledges, too, its melancholy disappearance. Full of energetic leaps of imagination and language, the twenty-two poems hopscotch between intense momentary haikus that honour the Japanese traditions of the blossom festival and stand-alone lyrical pieces that take in the stylistic tones of ballads, hymns, songs, prayers and nursery rhymes. From a crashed Ford Capri wrapped...

Simon Armitage's humorous account of the North steers clear of the picturesque Lake District and the big cities of Manchester and Newcastle. Instead he focuses on the area of West Yorkshire, the land of Jarvis Cocker, Geoffrey Boycott and Bernard Ingham.

A combination of verse from Simon Armitage and prose from Jeff Young lends a voice to the chain of events depicted on the famous Bayeux Tapestry. This production chronicles the history surrounding the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the ascension of Duke William of Normandy to the English throne. Harold, Duke of Wessex, takes the English throne, despite Edward the Confessor's wish that William Duke of Normandy should be his heir. Seeking retribution,...