"The Unaccompanied" by Simon Armitage (Faber, 2017)

Poems from Granta, LRB, New Yorker, PN Review, Poetry (Chigaco), Poetry Review, TLS, etc. - "his first full-length book of new poems in over a decade" Helen Mort points out. So he starts with "The Last Snowman" which is entertaining all the way until the end, which I didn't get. "Nurse at a bus stop" begins with "The slow traffic takes a good long look./ Jilted bride of public transport,/ alone in the shelter,/ the fireproof bin and shatter-proof glass/ scrawled with the cave art of cocks and hearts". Each line performs a function, and it's clear of pretension.

I like "Privet", whose first stanza is [over?] packed with religious allusions, whose middle stanza has shears with "rolling-pin handles on Viking swords", and whose final stanza includes a father offering his son to the sky/Gods.

"Prometheus", nearly in syllabics, could have been prose. A son goes with his father to a scrap-heap. The father finds a "priceless spark plug ... with CHAMPION branded across it in red, the threaded steel shaft, and below it a gap where the two electrodes didn't quite touch, like the finger of man and the finger of God. Within that divide, in the daylight there, the glint in his eye, the makings of fire.". Pleasant, but (and it's a question I asked myself increasingly as I went through the book) is it really enough? "October" surely isn't.

I think I'm missing the point of some of the pieces. They go down so easily that it can be hard to linger over them. Three examples -

• "The Keirin" - his father said don't follow it, but he does. It's the motorised pacer bike using in cyclodromes, ridden by someone "with the upright stance of a circus poodle driving a toy train". It/he peels off and disappears. "It was simply a race to the death after that". At the end there's a sudden switch of sports - he passes a lad "sprawled in the open grave of the long jump pit. And a pole-vaulter speared like a speared fish". Life is a game you have to continue after your father's gone?
• "Snipe" - while wandering by a pond he's nearly hit by a shot that kills a snipe. No sign of where it or the shot had come from. He looks it up in a bird book "to aim a ... snide comment. Single round, lone marksman, could have had my eye out". Snipe, snide, sniper?!
• "Old Boy" starts simply enough. The final stanza's beyond me though. Its final line is "A monkey with a jigsaw I compensate the day"

I can see the variety of formats. "Deor" is in an old english (anglo-saxon?) format. "To-Do List" is a bullet-marked list. "Solitary" is a villanelle. Several are de-facto prose. "Thank You for Waiting" is a comedy monologue whose line-breaks are out of place. The Present won the Keats-Shelley poetry prize.

Other reviews

• Kate Kellaway (Poundland is a particularly brilliant poem ... You cannot miss Armitage’s fascination with obsolete machinery)
• Steve Bamlett
• Helen Mort (There’s a sense of something kindling in many of the sharp list poems in the book – ‘Poundland’ nods towards Dante’s inferno, while ‘Thank You for Waiting’ is satire at its best)
• Josephine Balmer (This collection articulates a new anger that is more personal, a lament for individual mortality, the sadness of time moving on too far and too fast. )
• Andrew Roycroft (This is Larkin without the bitter edge, married to a Wordsworthian sense of man’s smallness in a changing world which dwarfs his own existence and concerns. There is lostness here, and nascent hope)