Simon Armitage’s poem ‘Deor’ is a translation from the Exeter Book. Walking Home: A Poet’s Journey will be published later this year.
Weland the goldsmith knew grief’s weight. That strong-minded man was no stranger to misery, his loyal soul-mates were sorrow and longing, a hurt like winter weathered his heart once Niðhad had hamstrung and...
translated from ‘The Alliterative Morte Arthure’
King Arthur was on his mighty boat with many men, enclosed in a cabin among copious equipment. And while resting on a richly arrayed bed he was soothed to sleep by the swaying of the sea. And he dreamed of a dragon dreadful to behold that came droning and driving from across the deep, arrowing directly from the regions of the West,...
Here on the Hard, you’re welcome to pull up and stay; there’s a flat fee of a quid for parking all day.
And wandering over the dunes, who wouldn’t die for the view: an endless estate of beach, the sea
kept out of the bay by the dam-wall of the sky. Notice the sign, with details of last year’s high tides.
Walk on, drawn to the shipwreck, a mirage of masts a...
Ever since the very brutal extraction of all four of my wisdom teeth, I’ve found myself talking with another man’s mouth, so to speak, and my tongue has become a mollusc such as an oyster or clam, broken and entered, licking its wounds in its shell.
I was tricked into sleep by a man with a smile, who slipped me the dose like a great-uncle slipping his favourite nephew a ten-pound...
Half-dead, hit by a car, the whole of its form a jiggle of nerves, like a fish on a lawn. To help finish it off, he asked me to stand on its throat, as a friend might ask a friend
to hold, with a finger, the twist of a knot. Then he lifted its head, wheeled it about by the ammonite, handlebar shells of its horns
The SwordfishAfter the weapon had drawn blood for the first time it...
Wake. And in my head walk barefoot naked from the bed towards the day, then wait.
Hold. The dawn will crack its egg into the morning’s bowl and him on horseback, gold.
Me, I’m in the shed, I’m working on it: a plus b plus c, it’s you, him, me. It’s three.
Hell, this hole, this shack. The sun makes light of me behind my back....
After Boccaccio
buddies through dozens of scrapes and hassles,
the first knight thought he was happily wed, the second man slept in a single bed.
One morning, at leisure, the married man was walking his dog by the parish dam
and spied his wife across the water, and waited a while, and caught her
in the arms of his friend – naked, consenting. To say the least this really upset him
so...
The survival of poetry, especially if written before the invention of print, has often been a matter of luck or accident. Consigned to caves in the deserts of the Middle East, it might be...
Tony Parsons is the talented journalist who used to play Leonard Bast to Tom Paulin’s rentier intellectual on Late Review, the BBC’s weekly parade of Schlegelisms. He was the mean...
Simon Armitage likes to have it both ways. He is the streetwise poet who is at home in a Radio 1 studio; but he is also the ambitious literary figure who aspires to ‘nothing less’...
Anthologies are powerful things: movements are launched, periods are parcelled up, writers are made and broken. They are, or want to be, the book world’s performative utterances: defining...
This is tricky. First the facts. In 1936 W.H. Auden persuaded Faber and Faber to commission a travel book about Iceland. He spent three months in the country, part of the time travelling with his...
‘Fin de siècle’: the term suggests a dilution and dispersal of the cultural, social and political energies of a century, an uneasy time of uncertainties as a new era waits to be...
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