Bøker av Simon Armitage

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 'A rich and sustaining larder, a marvellously realized sourcebook of flights of feathered fancy' Guardian 'A life-affirming celebration of the commonplace yet enduringly mysterious creatures we share this world with and the poetry they have inspired' Daily Telegraph

'A joy. Celebrates the real world and revels in its mad glory' Sue Townsend, Sunday Times_____________________________________All Points North is part-memoir and part-excursion. Charting the rugged and uneven terrain of a writer's formative years - from tax problems to probation to American tours, football to family to running away to Iceland - Simon Armitage explores growing up and being Northern. It's about humour, language, writing, film, houses, homes, time wasters, one loose tyre, you, me and all points in-between._____________________________________'Laugh-out-loud funny' Independent'A delight' Jonathan Raban, Times Literary Supplement 'A perfect holiday dipper' Scotsman'An Alan Bennett-style diary' Daily Telegraph

A glorious collaboration between Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate and the illustrator Angela Harding, celebrating the transformations of SpringBlossomise celebrates the ecstatic arrival of spring blossom just as it acknowledges, too, its melancholy disappearance.

Simon Armitage turns Hansel & Gretel into a darkly glittering fairy tale for grown-ups.

The poems collected in Tribute: Three Commemorative Poems were composed by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage for three significant royal occasions.

This edition gathers the expansive and spirited public lectures delivered by Simon Armitage during his 'conscientious and often amusingly self-conscious tenure' (TLS) as Oxford University Professor of Poetry. Armitage tries to identify a 'common sense' approach to an artform that can lend itself to grand statements and vacuous gestures, questioning both the facile and obscure ends of the poetry spectrum, asserting certain fundamental qualities that separate the genre from near-neighbours such as prose and song lyrics, examining who poetry is written for and its values in contemporary society. Above all, these are personal essays that enquire into the volatile and disputed definitions of poetry from the point of view of a dedicated reader, a practising writer and a lifelong champion of its power and potential.

Growing up in Marsden among the hills of West Yorkshire, Simon Armitage has always associated his early poetic experiences with the night-time view from his bedroom window, those 'private, moonstruck observations' and the clockwork comings and goings in the village providing rich subject matter for his first poems.

Over the course of several years, Simon Armitage has written hundreds of poems for various projects, commissions, collaborations and events, which stand outside of his mainstream collections but now form a substantial body of work in their own right.

'A writer who has had a game-changing influence on his contemporaries.' Guardian'Armitage is that rare beast: a poet whose work is ambitious, accomplished and complex as well as popular.' Sunday Telegraph'The best poet of his generation.' Craig Raine, Observer

A new version of the Middle English poem Pearl, from the acclaimed poet and translator of Gawain and the Green Knight. Simon Armitage's version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight garnered front-page reviews across two continents and confirmed his reputation as a leading translator.

When Simon Armitage burst on to the poetry scene in 1989 with his spectacular debut Zoom!, readers were introduced to an exceptional new talent who would reshape the landscape of contemporary poetry in the years to come.

King Arthur comes to vivid life in this gripping poetic translation by the renowned poet and translator.

When the mysterious Green Knight arrives unbidden at the Round Table one Christmas, only Gawain is brave enough to take up his challenge.

A high-ranking government minister with a colourful past is sent on a diplomatic mission to Istanbul. When his trip ends up in a bar-room brawl, he becomes Europe's most wanted man overnight. Chased by the authorities, damned by religious leaders, pursued by those looking for vengeance and head-hunted by fanatics, his odyssey begins. Plunged into the ancient past, Odysseus must now contend with all the unworldly beings and unnatural phenomena that stand in his way. The Cyclops, the Sirens, witches, whirlpools and flesh-eating armies must all be overcome in the struggle for survival and the long voyage back home.Simon Armitage's The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead premiered at the Liverpool Everyman in September 2015 then toured the UK in a co-production with English Touring Theatre.

Abbie Fenton wants a baby. Her husband Felix, not unaware of the thunderous ticking of Abbie's biological clock, wants to oblige but their home has still to be blessed. Cue the usual round of doctors, tests, probes and scans - all to no avail. So Abbie - adopted at birth - decides that if she can't have a child then she must at least discover whose child she is. Soon, she and Felix are caught up in a make-or-break search for family, identity and meaning. And little do they know quite where the journey will take them ...The White Stuff announces Simon Armitage, one of our nation's leading and award-winning poets, as one of our greatest novelists.'Superb, very impressive, grimly funny ... I lay on the floor and howled with laughter' Independent 'With plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, touchy-feely bits and some choice observations about the things that men do, Armitage gives Hornby a run for his money' Daily Mirror

Simon Armitage is rightly celebrated as one of the country's most original and engaging poets; but he is also an adaptor and translator of some of our most important epics, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Death of King Arthur and Homer's Odyssey. The latter, originally a commission for BBC Radio, rendered the classical tale with all the flare, wit and engagement that we have come to expect from this most distinctive of contemporary authors, and in so doing brought Odysseus's return from the Trojan War memorably to life. The Last Days of Troy, a prequel of kinds, tells the tale of the Trojan War itself in a vivid new dramatic adaptation that is published to coincide with the Royal Exchange's stage performance in April 2014.

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 through Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, taking poetry into distant communities and tourist hot-spots, busking his way from start to finsh.From the surreal pleasuredome of Minehead Butlins to a smoke-filled roundhouse on the Penwith Peninsula then out to the Isles of Scilly and beyond, Armitage tackles this personal Odyssey with all the poetic reflection and personal wit we've come to expect of one of Britain's best loved and most popular writers.

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 pocket, he stopped along the way to give poetry readings in village halls, churches, pubs and living rooms. His audiences varied from the passionate to the indifferent, and his readings were accompanied by the clacking of pool balls, the drumming of rain and the bleating of sheep. WALKING HOME describes this extraordinary, yet ordinary, journey. It's a story about Britain's remote and overlooked interior - the wildness of its landscape and the generosity of the locals who sustained him on his journey. It's about facing emotional and physical challenges, and sometimes overcoming them. It's nature writing, but with people at its heart. Contemplative, moving and droll, it is a unique narrative from one of our most beloved writers.

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 which harked back to Anglo-Saxon poetic composition. Unlike Gawain, whose plot hinges around one moment of jaw-dropping magic, The Death of King Arthur deals in the cut-and-thrust of warfare and politics: the ever-topical matter of Britain's relationship with continental Europe, and of its military interests overseas. Simon Armitage is already the master of this alliterative music, as his earlier version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2006) so resourcefully and exuberantly showed. His new translation restores a neglected masterpiece of story-telling, by bringing vividly to life its entirely medieval mix of ruthlessness and restraint.

From his home in a West Yorkshire village proverbially associated with cuckoos, Simon Armitage has been probing the night sky with the aid of a powerful Russian telescope. The sequence of eighty-eight poems at the heart of CloudCuckooLand springs from this preoccupation, each poem receiving its title from one of the constellations, while turning out to be less concerned with pure astronomy than with moments in the life of the poet's mind.

As the title implies, Simon Armitage's flesh-and-blood account of numerous personal journeys reads like a private encyclopaedia of emotion and health. Vivid and engaged, the poems range from the rainforests of South America to the deserts of Western Australia, but are set against the ultimate and most intimate of all landscapes, the human body. Equally, the body politic comes into question, through subtle enquiries into Englishness and the idea of home.

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.

'A firework display of technique, versatility and passion.' Independent on Sunday'The crafted sincerity of this potent, lyrical collection, in which an absolutely contemporary voice concisely expresses common concerns, is everything that poetry should be.' Times Literary Supplement'The first poet of serious artistic intent since Philip Larkin to have achieved popularity . . . it is possible that he will attain the sort of proverbial status Larkin now occupies.' Sean O'Brien, The Deregulated Muse

Kid gives us one of the liveliest poetic voices to have emerged in the last ten years. Simon Armitage's inspired ear for the demotic and his ability to deal with subjects that many poets turn their backs on have marked him as a poet of originality and force.

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 supremacists at their zoo-wedding; the driver who picks up hitchhikers as he hurtles towards a head-on collision with Thatcherism; a Christian cheese-shop proprietor in the wrong part of town; the black bear with a dark secret, the woman who curates giant snowballs in the chest freezer. Celebrities and nobodies, all come to the ball.I am a sperm whale. I carry up to 2.5 tonnes of an oil-likebalm in my huge, coffin shaped head. I have a brain thesize of a basketball, and on that basis alone am entitled tomy opinions. I am a sperm whale. When I breathe in, the fluid in my head cools to a dense wax and I nosedive into the depths. My song, available on audiocassette and compact disc is a comfort to divorcees, astrologists and those who have 'pitched the quavering canvas tent of their thoughts on the rim of the dark crater'.- from 'The Christening'The storyteller who steps in and out of this human tapestry changes, trickster-style, from poem to poem, but retains some identifying traits: the melancholy of the less deceived, crossed with an undercover idealism. And he shares with many of his characters a star-gazing capacity for belief, or for being 'genuine in his disbelief'.Language is on the loose in these poems, which cut and run across the parterre of poetic decorum with their cartoon-strip energies and air of misrule. Armitage creates world after world, peculiar yet always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected.

A subject-specific guide for teachers to supplement professional development and provide resources for lesson planning.

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 translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl reanimates another beloved Medieval English masterpiece thought to be by the same anonymous author and housed in the same original fourteenth-century manuscript. Honoring the rhythms and alliterative music of the original, Armitage's virtuosic translation describes a man mourning the loss of his Pearl-something that has "slipped away." What follows is a tense, fascinating, and tender dialogue weaving through the throes of grief toward divine redemption. Intricate and endlessly connected, Armitage's lyrical translation is a circular and perfected whole, much like the pearl itself.