Poem of the week: read a new poem by Simon Armitage
Simon Armitage is close to death, geographically speaking. A few years ago, a new graveyard opened just up the road from the poet laureate’s home in Huddersfield. It inspired 20 poems, published in his 2017 pamphlet New Cemetery, “but that was just the seed-bed”, Armitage tells me. During this year’s lockdown, he has found himself writing more and more. “There are about 100 now, and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.” This week’s poem comes from that new, unpublished sequence.
Has it involved a lot of first-hand research? “Yeah, I’m like some sort of ghoul, mooching around there every morning,” he jokes. “I probably drive past it twice a day, but it’s also on a footpath – the local footpaths have become very well-worn this summer, not least by my family.
“I’ve seen the seasons coming and going through the cemetery, and also the restrictions – I’ve written about glimpsing services that take place there in very limited conditions, and people digging graves dressed in Hazmat suits. So it’s become a reference point for things that were going on elsewhere.”
His New Cemetery poems all share the same form: three-line stanzas, “unhitched from the left-hand margin and drifting out across the page”, in short, simple lines that mark a departure from his more freewheeling early style. “The short lines are an attempt to work with a more natural breathing rhythm,” he says. “I’m 57 now – I don’t have the lung capacity I had as a young man!”
It’s a poem haunted by other voices. The line “old lamps for new” is borrowed from the Arabian Nights (and also inspired a poem by Kipling). For Armitage, it represents “the change from one thing to another, in a particularly changeable time”. The closing lines, meanwhile, come from a favourite hymn, Glad That I Live Am I, “a piece that finds renewal and consolation in the turning of the seasons”.
At 5pm on Thursday, Armitage will give an online reading from the home of another poet laureate – Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage – as part of the celebrations for National Poetry Day.
From New Cemetery
The horizon
smarting
from hit-and-run squalls;
shadows of clouds
like stingrays
patrolling the valley floor.
New lamps for old,
the cemetery studded
with washed stones,
shimmering causeways
puddled
with poured gold.
After the sun
the rain, after the rain
the sun,
this is the way of life
till the work
be done.
For more information about National Poetry Day, visit nationalpoetryday.co.uk
