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“... the title and lease I once held as my own      he has handed on to Heorrender, poet      of a higher order. As that passed over      may this pass ...”

“... fusion of a superficial plurality and an all-encompassing uniformity that produces, for the poet as for others, a situation of unprecedented uncertainty 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a devotional character, also without titles, and probably, according to the experts, by the same poet. Of this group Pearl, an allegory about a man’s grief at the death of his two-year-old daughter, is the most brilliant and mysterious. Written around 1400, the manuscript is usually described as physically unattractive, not in the hand of the author and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which is now a suburb of Liverpool flanked by the rivers Dee and Mersey. The anonymous Gawain poet tells us that in this place, ‘Wonde þer bot lyte/þat auþer god oþer gome wyth goud hert louied’ (there lived but few who loved God or man with a good heart). Golf courses must be for the godless.Sometimes a poem gets under your skin, but for me it ...”

“... cargo 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 ...”

“... way as Marlowe’s revelations floor the decadent rich. The Monkey’s Mask, by the Australian poet Dorothy Porter, takes the transformation of the detective genre a stage further, by writing it in verse. Her detective heroine, Jill Fitzpatrick, is a gay, working-class former cop, who narrates in a hyperactive free-form skitter: Always this  I’ll ring ...”

“... a poem about mortality and the ebbing away of youthful vigour, is one of the best in the book. The poet, living near a river, sees ‘the blank-clay banks bared like senile gums’. His boiler has gone out, and when a man comes to fix it, he sees inside its ‘cave of asbestos a vivid elf’ – the dancing flame of life. At night, above the boiler, the ...”

“... from O’Hara is in his view of language. O’Hara’s manifesto ‘Personism’ insisted on the poet’s ability to speak directly to the reader, as though he were phoning him up. Or the poem would move between poet and reader like ‘lucky Pierre’ – the human cheese in the troilist sandwich. It would be as natural ...”

“... has it in ‘The Plain Sense of Things’. One must first be rich to be newly poor. Does any poet, really, have a healthy disrespect for language without also having a healthy respect? The introduction, which reads like a post-structuralist’s suicide-note, ends with a flourish. The ‘defining presences’ for many of these poets ...”

“... are craggy and brawny, whereas southern ones are more devious and deliquescent. The Northern Irish poet Tom Paulin, with his penchant for words which sound like the squelching of a leaky boot, raises this doctrine to the point of self-parody. In poetry like Heaney’s, you can hear the pluck and slop of brackish water as the signs button down snugly on their ...”

“... is surrounded by ironical defences: NB, the title says, it is the book talking here, not the poet. Still, the stridency of ‘A Talking Book’ is one indication of how seriously Paterson takes his imaginative materials. Landing Light is a committed volume: big, resourceful, mouthy, ambitious, a piling-in-there of the imagination. It is apt (if doubtless ...”