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“... The Ram 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 Swordfish After the weapon had drawn blood for the first time it happened to change ...”

“... 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 later, he ran his friend through with a lance and tore out his heart with his bare hands and boiled the organ for his lady’s supper and served it with chives and garlic butter ...”

“... 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 note, like so, back-handed, then tipped me a wink ...”

“... 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 hobbled his hopes, fettering the feet      of the worthier fellow. As that passed over      may this pass also ...”

“... The Lost Letter of the Late Jud Fry 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 ...”

“... 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, swooping with menace over the sea’s wide span ...”

“... The Hard 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 mile or so out, seemingly true and intact but scuttled to serve as a target, and fixed on by eyeballs staring from bird-hides lining the coast ...”

“... 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’ than a Nobel Prize. He is at ease with youth culture (‘I didn’t have a classical education of any type, so I tend to use characters from popular culture’), yet, far from stoking rebellion, he writes tenderly of his parents and looks up to Ted Hughes and W ...”

“... poets. One of them, Bernard O’Donoghue, is a professional medievalist as well. The other, Simon Armitage, a Northerner, claims the advantage of familiarity with dialect forms that linger in his part of the country. The first decision the translator must take is whether or not to alliterate. We are accustomed by centuries of poetry to think the ...”

“... which has sustained numerous readings and spillages, while remaining in excellent condition. Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell visited Iceland in 1994, to retrace the steps of Auden and MacNeice. They made a recording of the trip for a five-part BBC radio series, Second Draft from Sagaland, first broadcast on Radio 3 in 1995, and Faber have now ...”

“... enough not to encourage laziness or dilettantism . . . say £150 to £300 a year’. And Simon Armitage, in 1998, seems to agree that now and then a bit of poverty can keep a writer on his toes. ‘At some points in my life it’s suited me to be skint,’ he says. ‘Poetry is connected with the root conditions of being alive, and one aspect of ...”

“... In a recent radio programme, Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell, two of the most prominent of the New Generation poets, retraced the journey undertaken by Auden and MacNeice in Letters From Iceland – a sign of the renewed interest which younger poets are showing in the poetry of the Thirties. Although Yeats and Eliot were publishing some of their greatest poems during the Thirties, it was Auden who created the style which most of his contemporaries sought to imitate, and it is Auden, more than Yeats or Eliot, who is influencing younger poets today ...”

“... start causing some serious trouble, he is politely asked to leave – and he does. The beauty of Simon Armitage’s new novel is that it’s prepared to face up to things. But then of course Armitage has the great advantage of coming from West Yorkshire. He is also a poet (Little Green Man is his first work of ...”

“... and opportunity. There is plurality in plenty, and not merely of a superficial sort, in Simon Armitage’s Kid. It is a varied, versatile collection, showing considerable facility in its rhythmic variations and in its generation of often surprising feminine and half-rhymes. Armitage maps a degraded ...”

“... and creating something more than a stepping-stone between us and several dozen Collected Poems. Armitage and Crawford entitle their introduction ‘The Democratic Voice’, binding the last fifty years of poetry into its wider social and cultural contexts – education acts, decolonisation, immigration – while Sean O’Brien, author of The Deregulated ...”