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“... Give me a good bottle of wine/a woman with wit and spark.’ The overall impression is of Simon Armitage with turrets or William Carlos Williams with a cracking hangover. The Monkey’s Mask cannot decide if it desires or despises us, but Porter is determined that we won’t be lulled or lightly entertained. This is a work which declares open war ...”

“... It is a bit brown and the scribal hand is functional, unremarkable, almost ugly. For Simon Armitage the scribe’s letter forms are ‘like crusading chess pieces’, which is a disservice to chessmen. Sometime after it was written, it was illustrated by an artist endowed with exuberance rather than skill. The figures which appear in the ...”

“... this context, and in their use of it Ford’s poems have affinities with those of Glyn Maxwell and Simon Armitage. The habit all three poets have of paraphrasing rather than quoting the speech of their characters tends to upset stable perspectives by mingling the voices of author and character and so raising the question of whose point of view is ...”

“... the more deeply felt his writing becomes. His examination of Northern poets such as David Morley, Simon Armitage and Sean O’Brien is marvellously sensitive to their regionalism and to the bitter undertow of history and class politics in some of their work. I have a grouse about both these books: neither has an index. Also, when reading Davidson I ...”

“... an enormous talent, though he needs to discipline it. He needs to avoid the blokeish bluntness of Simon Armitage, who peers through some of the diction (Paterson’s natural diction is sheepish and sleepy). Above all, he needs to develop his notion of what is permissible within the poem. At present, his poems are too enigmatic, foreshortened; they are a ...”

“... boats from nostalgic black and white photographs. It was an unoptioned metaphor with its own poet, Simon Armitage, hired to knock up a thousand-line tribute. Time drifted. The 12 minutes of the virtual reality journey in the brochures was actually the time between trains, the time spent enjoying the strange termini in which potential travellers are ...”

“... Hattersley). And it is true that a fighting politics seethes in poets like Sean O’Brien and Simon Armitage. One feels, however, that the best and most interesting poets in this large anthology are not the writers that fit inside the editorial fist. For instance, the introduction makes much of the ballad-writers like Paul Durcan and Geoff ...”

“... own from the outset. It is hard to know quite how Beowulf is the origin of Arthur Hugh Clough or Simon Armitage, but in any case Heaney has dug down with his pen to ‘the first stratum of the language’ and appropriated his birthright. As Harold Bloom might less decorously put it, the belated bastard offspring has now installed himself as the founding ...”

“... do, and then the twist into half rhyme happens with the turning of the page (that cadence is very Simon Armitage and I would guess that he is the immediate goad here). Both the humour and the melancholy of Paterson’s poem is that, for all its verve, it can’t attempt the simple thing of making word and object merge: the best it can do is be a poem ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... have enjoyed the idea of a poet as someone who was worth the price of the clothes he stood in (Simon Armitage, £ 1055; Andrew Motion, £ 953; Glynn Maxwell, £520 – all totals excluding underwear). Villon, CHASCUN LE SCET, would have been unable to resist a flutter on the fate of his soul by offering to model everything, then nothing, in a ...”

“... had William Blake: The Collected Poems at number six (in company with Seamus Heaney, Jackie Kay, Simon Armitage and Margaret Atwood). The book was puffed as ‘the background to Peter Ackroyd’s best-selling biography’. The hike to Felpham, a dormitory of the living dead, was unremarkable. I understood why the journey took Blake 18 hours. There were ...”

“... a kind of courage of which I would have been incapable.19 May. I’m reading The Unaccompanied, Simon Armitage’s latest collection of poems. They always ring bells, though, like Larkin, he’ll often take off at the end of a poem when I don’t always follow. There’s a lovely funny poem in this collection, ‘Poundland’, which is enviably ...”