"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)

"Seeing stars" by Simon Armitage (Faber and Faber, 2010)

It's not experimental poetry, it's mainstream Flash - about 40 pieces each laid out like prose (all left-aligned, though some with wider margins than others) and a page or two long. Had it been published as a prose book, no reader would have raised an eye-brow, and more appropriate reviewers might have been chosen. I liked "The Christening", "The Practical Way to Heaven", and "The Last Panda". I failed to like "An Accommodation", "Hop In, Dennis" and "Upon Opening the Chest Freezer", promising though the original ideas are. I didn't understand "Upon Unloading the Dishwasher", "Poodles", "A Nativity", or "The Delegates". "The Crunch" was either minor of I didn't understand it. Why does "Michael" have that title?

Endings can be a problem. "Beyond Huddersfield" had to have a good ending to justify the piece. It had a surprise ending instead. "Cheeses of Nazareth" didn't know how to end. Perhaps once the author came up with the title he couldn't let it go.

I noticed a tendency for him to use blends -

• "The Last Panda" overlays the story of the last panda with the story of Ringo being the last surviving Beatle, to good effect
• "Overtones" uses the standard meaning of the title, plus the use of it as a band name.
• "The sighting of the century" combines bird-watching with celeb-hunting

The collection manages to be inventive, and the author can always pull a sentence out of the bag that makes one want to continue reading a flagging piece - e.g. "The huge, overburdening coat with the stiff, turf-like cloth, and its triceratops collar, and its mineshaft pockets, and the drunken punches of its flailing sleeves" (p.31)

Other reviews

• Paul Batchelor (The most powerful piece here, "I'll Be There to Love and Comfort You" ... A hallmark of Armitage's writing is the way he adapts and extends overlooked aspects of Ted Hughes's writing. ... the best pieces in the collection twist and wriggle free from anything as obvious as a moral or even irony. Are they poems, or prose poems, or flash fiction? I'm not sure, but they're very more-ish; and there is more wit and adventure on display here than you'll find in many poets' careers.)
• Jeremy Noel-Tod (As an experiment with an established voice, and a strange dream of 21st-century Britain, Seeing Stars is a triumph)
• Tony Bailie (Each poem reaches a moment when the mood changes, a moment of epiphany that jolts the reader out of his comfort zone and the everyday shimmers slightly as perspectives shift. There is a dark humor here too, so dark that it can make you feel slightly uncomfortable. It is not a flawless collection and there are moments when you feel that Armitage is merely writing for the sake of writing, letting an image run away with itself to see where it takes him. The collection has a surreal, almost psychedelic feel, as if a stoned hippy felt an urge to write down all the images that came into his head because they seemed interesting but when read back are often just disconnected ramblings.)
• Paul Sutton (there are striking weaknesses in this collection. I would list the predictability of its language, the limitations in its material and, above all, a nagging sense of unoriginality ... a brilliant line from 'The Cuckoo' is far more interesting, with more potential for development, than the poem itself ... - and it actually gets worse at the end, with an idea taken from Philip K. Dick's 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' ... Similarly, the premise for 'An Accommodation' is taken from that classic sitcom episode of 'Steptoe and Son'. Another problem is how Armitage brings a cosy domesticity to these dramatic monologues. Or more generously, he uses his trademark voice - in many ways an attractive and engaging one, but ill-suited to this material. He isn't adept at the required identity sculpting ... Maybe Armitage's so-so collection will impress British audiences, who are simply unaware of the richness of material available elsewhere. )
• Alastair Beddow (Armitage’s ‘story-poems’ combine the narrative instinct of the short story (often employing the twist or inversion ending) and the sensibility and language of poetry ... The fluid or sometimes seemingly under-developed quality of many of Armitage’s story-poems arises from the demands of the form but also from the performative nature of the voice in the text, which makes the story-poems read like dramatic monologues or comic anecdotes. ... it remains to be seen whether Seeing Stars represents a significant new direction in his poetic trajectory, or just an experimental flirtation with a new poetic form.)
• Goodreads

"Paper Aeroplane" by Simon Armitage (Faber and Faber, 2014)

I haven't read much Armitage, so I thought I'd catch up by reading this, which is subtitled "Selected Poems 1989-2014". The poet made the selection, which is rather short - 102 poems/extracts from 25 years of work, with just 28 lines from "Xanadu". The sleeve has this quote from the Independent - "What is certain is [Armitage's] sure control of colloquial rhythm, one of two qualities which marked him out as long ago as 'Kid'. The other is his ability to wrest startling images out of thin air". This seems to me a fair observation. I mostly lack those 2 qualities. If I had them, I'd exploit them differently to the way Armitage does. I don't really get the reason for the verbosity of stanzas like the following, from "Gooseberry Season" -

Where does the hand become the wrist? Where does the neck become the shoulder? The watershed and then the weight, whatever turns up and tips us over that razor's edge between something and nothing, between one and the other

I prefer the beginning of "Not the Furniture Game" ("His hair was a crow fished out of a blocked chimney") and its last few lines - "She was a chair, tipped over backwards/ with his donkey jacket on her shoulders// They told him, and his face was a hole/ where the ice had not been thick enough to hold her.". The first poem I liked was "At Sea" from "Kid". I also liked the short albeit simple "The Shout", and "The Manhunt" from "The Not Dead". "Seeing Stars" provides 11 contributions. I'd call them Flash. I liked "The Christening".

From "Book of Matches" I don't get "I'm dreaming of that work" or "ankylosing spondylitis". "Killing Time" has one representative - "Meanwhile, somewhere in the state of Colorado" - which didn't belong in a poetry book. I don't get "You're Beautiful" from "Tyrannosaurus Rex ...". I disliked the extract from "Black Roses ...".

"A Glory" is in blank verse. Here's the start -

Right here you made an angel of yourself, free-falling backwards into last night's snow, indenting a straight, neat, crucified shape, then flapping your arms, one stroke, a great bird, to leave the impression of wings. It worked. Then you found your feet, sprang clear of the print and the angel remained

So many words when "you made a snow angel" might have done. "The Type" has a similarly slow start, though the image of 5 people steering a big tyre is tight - "There and then we were one connected thing,/ five of us, all hands steering a tall ship/ or one hand fingering a coin or ring". "For the Record" has this passage, which seems flabby to me - "You might think that with all the advances/ in medical science/ teeth like these could be taken out/ through the eats or the anus,/ to be shattered like kidney stones/ by lasers from a safe distance./ But it seems that the art/ hasn't staggered too far since the days// when a dentist might set up his stall/ at a country fair/ or travelling circus". "Chainsaw versus the Pampas Grass" included "This was the sledgehammer taken to crack the nut./ Probably all that was needed here was a good pull or shove/ or a pitchfork to lever it out at its base./ Overkill", which sounds flabby too, as does his translation of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" which includes "In that wilderness lives a wildman, the worst in the world,/ he is brooding and brutal and loves bludgeoning humans./ He's more powerful than any person alive on this planet" (the form isn't helping).

But at any moment an image might surprise. "The Back Man" has, out of the blue, "dowsing for Channel 4 with a coat hanger" (Channel 4 is a UK TV channel, and coat hangers were used as aerials for analog reception, but they required manual adjustment). The extracts from "In Memory of Water" have some attractive imagery - "Snow ... The moor in coma. Snow, like water asleep"; "mist is water in its ghost state, all inwardness"; "Puddle/ Rain-junk".

Other reviews

• Ben Wilkinson (Guardian) (sometimes in Kid, and all too often in its successor, Book of Matches (1993), playful suggestion and nous give way to easy cliche and laboured wit. ... this selected poems proves that he has written some of the very best, most memorable poems of recent decades. Dropping the makeweight from uneven collections such as The Dead Sea Poems (1995) and Cloudcuckooland (1997) has left a handful of gems.)
• Charlotte Runcie (Telegraph)
• Martin Stannard (Stride) (That 25 years and 232 pages of this spectacularly popular and successful poet can be so intellectually undemanding and poetically unadventurous and uninteresting speaks volumes for today's poetry world)

"Short and Sweet - 101 very short poems" by Simon Armitage (Faber and Faber, 1999)

Lots of big names. Few if any specialists - Pound's there, but his metro poem isn't. Indeed, there are no haiku or tanka, and very few non US/UK poets. In other words, there's little attempt to be representative of the "form" - it's as if he's trawled through books of the poets he wanted to include, rather than reading Still, American Tanka or other specialist publications. I think small press magazines have a surprising number of good short poems too.

The last part of the book (the shortest poems) is especially disappointing. I suspect that the final poem (no lines, but a long Zen title) would have been rejected by small-press and student-mag editors as clichéd.

Picking Armitage may have been a good commercial decision, but his style (conversational; few haiku-style voltas) doesn't lend itself well to writing (or, it seems, having a wide appreciation of) short pieces. If Carol Ann Duffy's "Mrs Darwin" can get in there, surely there's room for Kirkup or Dooley.