New Cemetery
Publisher,Faber & Faber
Publication Date,
Format, Hardcover
Weight,
No. of Pages, 120
Shelf: FICTION / ADULT FICTION / POETRY
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POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION • The Poet Laureate makes peace with the dead in this highly imaginative and wide-ranging new collection.
The conversion of a local natural-beauty spot into a municipal graveyard is the starting point for New Cemetery. From regular walks around the boundary near his moorland home in West Yorkshire, Simon Armitage chronicles the extraordinary transformation of landscape both outer and inner. These luminous and wry poems - composed in short-lined tercets - reflect the changing world: one of unstable weather patterns and unpredictable news events, all observed across a few acres of Pennine upland.
As seasons come and go and the cemetery fills up with new 'residents', Armitage charts personal losses of his own, often retreating to his garden shed to navigate blank paper with pen and ink. Encompassing lyrical revelations and everyday vignettes alongside apocalyptic visions and imagined conversations with the deceased, these pages draw us into a parallel neighbourhood of remembrance and celebration.
About the Author
Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. His collections have received numerous prizes and awards. He writes extensively for television and radio, and is the author of two novels and the non-fiction bestsellers All Points North (1998), Walking Home (2012) and Walking Away (2015). His theatre works include The Last Days of Troy, performed at Shakespeare's Globe in 2014. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, and he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2018. Simon Armitage is Poet Laureate.
