lift the lapis lazuli tablet and readof Gilgamesh - hisadventures and all he endured.King above kings, most formidable presence.Gilgamesh originated in Ancient Mesopotamia nearly 4,000 years ago, yet its themes of power, loyalty, love and loss resound with contemporary relevance. The eponymous demigod tyrannically rules the kingdom of Uruk. To establish peace, the gods create his counterpart, the wild man Enkidu, and the two embark on a series...

This gorgeously illustrated collection of poems illuminates and reimagines the ingenious, fragile dwellings of the living creatures around us.Poet Laureate Simon Armitage was inspired to write these poems by the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, an ambitious restoration project where history and mystery coexist. The reawakened landscape with its woods, meadows and 'jungle' offers a bustling, fertile realm for all sorts of creatures to inhabit. Armitage uses elem...

lift the lapis lazuli tablet and readof Gilgamesh - his adventures and all he endured.King above kings, most formidable presence.Gilgamesh originated in Ancient Mesopotamia nearly 4,000 years ago, yet its themes of power, loyalty, love and loss resound with contemporary relevance. The eponymous demigod tyrannically rules the kingdom of Uruk. To establish peace, the gods create his counterpart, the wild man Enkidu, and the two embark on a series of ex...

Edited by Sarah Crown, Martin Prendergast & Nicholas SerotaFeaturing: Carlos Acosta CBE, Naomi Alderman, Simon Armitage, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Ann Dinsdale , James Graham , David Harewood, Darren Henley CBE, Lubaina Himid CBE RA, Sarah Housley , Sam Jackson , Nigel Higgins , David Joseph CBE, Daljit Nagra , Dave Moutrey OBE, Jacqui O’Hanlon , Amanda Parker , Jess Prendergrast, Chris Riddell , Bobby Seagull, Nicholas Serota , Jack Stilgoe , Annabel Turpin & Jo Verrent

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. Here comes everybody: Snoobie and Carla, Lippincott, Wittmann, Yoshioka, Bambuck, Dr Amsterdam, Preminger. The man whose wife drapes a border-curtain across the middle of the marital home; the English astronaut with a terrestrial outlook on life; an orgiastic cast of unreconstructed pie-worshipers at a Northern sculpture farm; the soap-opera sup...

When the mysterious Green Knight arrives unbidden at the Round Table one Christmas, only Gawain is brave enough to take up his challenge . . .This story, first told in the 1400s, is one of the most enthralling, dramatic and beloved poems in the English tradition. Now, in Simon Armitage, the poem has found its perfect modern translator. Armitage's retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight captures all of the magic and wonderful storytelling of the original while also rev...

** A Top Ten Sunday Times Bestseller **Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate, brings new perspectives and energy to a timeless poetic subject.Blossomise celebrates the ecstatic arrival of spring blossom just as it acknowledges, too, its melancholy disappearance. Full of spirited leaps of imagination and language, the twenty-one poems hopscotch between intense momentary haikus that honour the Japanese traditions of the blossom fest...

The Alliterative Morte Arthure - the title given to a four-thousand line poem written sometime around 1400 - was part of a medieval Arthurian revival which produced such masterpieces as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory's prose Morte D'Arthur.Like Gawain, the Alliterative Morte Arthure is a unique manuscript (held in the library of Lincoln Cathedral) by an anonymous author, and written in alliterating lines w...

The conversion of a local beauty spot into a municipal graveyard is the starting point for New Cemetery. From regular walks around the boundary near his moorland home in West Yorkshire, Simon Armitage chronicles the extraordinary transformation of landscape both outer and inner. These luminous and wry poems - composed in short-lined tercets - reflect the changing world: one of unstable weather patterns and unpredictable news events, all observed across a few acres of Pennine uplan...

This book brings together three verse form pieces each of which was created to be part of a broader form. 'Out of the Blue' itself is a powerful, award-winning, poem-film created five years after the attacks which destroyed the twin towers in NewYork. With a title from a speech of Churchill, 'We May Allow Ourselves a Brief Period of Rejoicing' was a Channel 5 commission for a broadcast celebrating the 60th anniversary of VE Day. The third, 'Cambodia', comes from the radio drama The Violenc...

A STUNNING COLLECTION OF POEMS CURATED BY THE NEW POET LAUREATE AND THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF FOUR FIELDS___________________________'Some of the most ethereal verse ever written' Sunday Telegraph'A glorious collection of works old and new' Independent on Sunday'Truly inexhaustible . . . to be read again and again' Daily Mail

In summer 2010 Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way. The challenging 256-mile route is usually approached from south to north, from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm, the other side of the Scottish border. He resolved to tackle it the other way round: through beautiful and bleak terrain, across lonely fells and into the howling wind, he would be walking home, towards theYorkshire village where he was born.Travelling as a 'modern troubadour' without a penny in his...