ONE OF THE BEST POETRY BOOKS OF THE YEAR FROM THE GUARDIAN AND THE OBSERVER • From the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, a poem sequence that considers our use of the land that surrounds him, and recounts the personal tales of beauty and loss that play out on itA few years ago, in the poet’s home county of West Yorkshire, the Local Authority began converting a series of cow fields near his home into a new cemetery. As the graveyard takes shape, its presence on t...

WINNER OF THE HOLYER AN GOF PUBLISHERS AWARD FOR POETRYThis 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 ...

Simon Armitage is the most widely and unreservedly praised poet of his generation. The Dead Sea Poems, his fourth collection, culminates in a long visionary poem, 'Five Eleven Ninety Nine'. Elsewhere, questions of belief and trust, of identity and knowledge, dealt with as they occur in everyday domestic life, contribute to a picture of our contemporary world that is at once realistic and touched with a unique imaginative intensity.

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...

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...

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...

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...

** 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...