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...

**The classic story that inspired the film starring Dev Patel and Alicia Vikander."A medieval romance…but also an outlandish ghost story, a gripping morality tale and a weird thriller.…I couldn’t put down Simon Armitage’s compulsively readable...energetic, free-flowing, high-spirited version." —Edward Hirsch, New York Times Book Review**One of the founding stories of English literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight narrates the strange tale of a green k...

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...

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...

A companion for life, this anthology is filled with unforgettable poems by, for and about parents.Poems about parents and parenthood have been written throughout history, exploring the relationships that remain eternally familiar yet endlessly unfathomable. Family Lines traces this rich tradition, presenting diverse perspectives on subjects including pregnancy and arrivals, loss and letting go, mothers and fathers, ageing and farewells.Simon Armita...

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...

Not content with walking the Pennine Way as a modern day troubadour, an experience recounted in his bestseller and prize-wining Walking Home, the restless poet has followed up that journey with a walk of the same distance but through the very opposite terrain and direction far from home.In Walking Away Simon Armitage swaps the moorland uplands of the north for the coastal fringes of Britain's south west, once again giving readings every night, but this time throug...

A propulsive and lyrical version of ancient Mesopotamia’s greatest adventure–tale, by the bestselling translator of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.Originating nearly four thousand years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, the epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of a tyrannical king and his wild counterpart, Enkidu, spawned by the gods to rein in the king’s cruel tendencies. They face off in a violent wrestling match, but the clash forges a bond between the...

Winner • PEN Award for Poetry in TranslationFrom the acclaimed translator of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a spellbinding new translation of this classic allegory of grief and consolation.One of our most ingenious interpreters of Middle English, Oxford Professor of Poetry Simon Armitage is celebrated for his “compulsively readable” translations (New York Times Book Review). A perfect complement to his historic translati...

Award-winning poet Simon Armitage dramatizes the story of Troy, animating this classic epic for a new generation of readers.Following his highly acclaimed dramatization of the Odyssey, Simon Armitage here takes on the fate of Troy, bringing Homer’s Iliad to life with refreshing imaginative vision. In the final days of the Trojan War, the Trojans and the Greeks are caught in a bitter stalemate. Exhausted and desperate after ten years of warfare, gods and men battle ...