When Huddersfield council proposed turning some local grazing land into a cemetery during the Covid lockdown, some nearby residents were unhappy. Not poet laureate Simon Armitage, who also lived close to the site. In the introductory essay to his poetry collection, New Cemetery, he notes how the dead would be ideal neighbours for a writer who enjoys quiet.
He also “figured that once the departed had taken up residence in the soil, they were unlikely to be evicted to make way for some other form of public amenity or private eyesore”. From his home, Armitage watched as the cemetery took shape, the pastures giving way to walkways, parking bays and neatly arranged burial plots. The verse is rooted in his ruminations around the cemetery’s creation, which coincided with the death of his father who had taught him how to win a fight and the best way to hold an axe (“You’re holding it all wrong / It’s not a pen”).
Each poem is named after a species of moth, among them Common Quaker, Dark Brocade, Pine Beauty and May Highflyer, and written in three-line stanzas. Armitage is the reader, his delivery instantly recognisable in its gentle lugubriousness. We find him observing the changing landscape or remembering scenes from his past such as his mother doing the washing in the sink and “manhandling shirts, / hauling drowning sailors / from sea to deck”, or his father playing the “pantomime grinch” on Christmas Eve.
Elsewhere, he wryly reflects on the absurdities of his working life, stationed in his shed, where he’ll dither a while / poem-less under / trepanned tiles, stalled // in the anglepoise / of heaven / and desk”. Leaving HomeMark Haddon, Vintage Digital, 5hr 8min The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’s author’s darkly funny and candid memoir details his difficult childhood in 1970s Northampton, his years at boarding school and his time looking after his elderly parents who had shown him little love while raising him. Talking Classics: The Shock of the OldMary Beard, Profile Audio, 5hr 38minDrawn from series of lectures delivered in Chicago in 2023, Talking Classics finds the acclaimed classicist and historian explaining why we should care what Greeks and Romans got up to 2000 years ago and the ways the past informs the present.
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