All Points North is part-memoir and part-excursion. Charting the rugged and uneven terrain of a writer's formative years - from tax problems to probation to American tours, football to family to running away to Iceland - Simon Armitage explores growing up and being Northern. It's about humour, language, writing, film, houses, homes, time wasters, one loose tyre, you, me and all points in-between.

All Points North

Armitage, SImon

Biographies & Memoirs

Penguin Uk

Penguin Press 70s King Arthur In The East Riding

Poetry Of Birds

Community & Culture

VIKING

Simon Armitage is one of Britain's most respected poets. He is considered Philip Larkin's successor in both the easy brilliance of his verse and the national acclaim he has received. His subjects have ranged from yardwork to politics, from the fidelity of dogs to the negotiations of lovers. A selection of poetry that is wry, unpretentious, and constantly inventive, The Shout collects Armitage's best work from the past three decades and includes many of his most recent poems. Man with a Golf Ball Heart They set about him with a knife and fork, I heard, and spooned it out. Dunlop, dimpled, perfectly hard. It bounced on stone but not on softer ground-they made a note of that. They slit the skin-a leathery, rubbery, eyelid thing-and further in, three miles of gut or string, elastic. Inside that, a pouch or sac of pearl-white balm or gloss, like Copydex. It weighed in at the low end of the litmus test but wouldn't burn, and tasted bitter, bad, resin perhaps from a tree or plant. And it gave off gas that caused them all to weep when they inspected it. That heart had been an apple once, they reckoned. Green. They had a scheme to plant an apple there again beginning with a pip, but he rejected it.

The Shout: Selected Poems

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

From one of the most important British poets at work today comes a brilliant new collection that meditates on human battles past and present, on youth and age, on monsters and underdogs, on the life of nations and the individual heart. In Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid, we meet a writer who speaks naturally, and with frankness and restraint, for his culture. Armitage witnesses the pathos of women at work in the mock-Tudor Merrie England coffeehouses and gives us a backstage take on the world of Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger. He makes a gift to the reader of the sympathy and misery and grit buried in his nation’s collective consciousness: in the distant battle depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry and in the daily lives and petty crimes of ordinary people. In poems that are sometimes lyrical, sometimes brash and comic, and full of living voices, the extraordinary and the mythic grow out of the ordinary, and figures of diminishment and tragedy shine forth as mysterious, uncelebrated exemplars. Armitage tells us ruefully that “the future was a beautiful place, once,” and with a steady eye out for the odd mystery or joyous scrap of experience, examines our complex present instead. AFTER THE HURRICANE Some storm that was, to shoulder-charge the wall in my old man’s back yard and knock it flat. But the greenhouse is sound, the chapel of glass we glazed one morning. We glazed with morning. And so is the hut. And so is the shed. We sit in the ruins and drink. He smokes. Back when, we would have built that wall again. But today it’s enough to drink and smoke amongst mortar and bricks, here at the empire’s end.

Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid

KNOPF

A thrilling new collection from the hugely acclaimed British poet Simon Armitage. With its vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, and tall tales, this absurdist, unreal exploration of modern society brings us a chorus of unique and unforgettable voices. All are welcome at this twilit, visionary carnival: the man whose wife drapes a border-curtain across the middle of the marital home; the black bear with a dark secret; the woman who oversees giant snowballs in the freezer. “My girlfriend won me in a sealed auction but wouldn’t / tell me how much she bid,” begins one speaker; “I hadn’t meant to go grave robbing with Richard Dawkins / but he can be very persuasive,” another tells us. The storyteller behind this human tapestry has about him a sly undercover idealism: he shares with many of his characters a stargazing capacity for belief, or for being, at the very least, entirely “genuine in his disbelief.” In these startling poems, with their unique cartoon-strip energy and air of misrule, Armitage creates world after world, peculiar and always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected.

Seeing Stars: Poems

Genre Fiction

Now in paperback, the powerful selected work of Simon Armitage, the most distinctive poetic voice of contemporary Britain. Simon Armitage is arguably the leading British poet of the past twenty years. His knowledge of the English just as they are ("a gentleman farmer / living on reduced means, a cricketer's widow, / sowing a kitchen garden with sweet peas"), his colloquial Yorkshire wit and eye for situational ironies, his ability to steal up on us with the surreal while capturing the ordinary speech of everyday life: these qualities place him at the forefront of British poetry today. This slim volume is the perfect introduction to his work for newcomers, or the ideal selection for longtime readers to keep on the bedside table.

"Armitage has given an ageless story new vigor, and has done it with style, wit and elegance."―Literary Review In this new verse adaptation, originally commissioned for BBC radio, Simon Armitage has recast Homer's epic as a series of bristling dramatic dialogues: between gods and men; between no-nonsense Captain Odysseus and his unruly, lotus-eating, homesick companions; and between subtle Odysseus (wiliest hero of antiquity) and a range of shape-shifting adversaries―Calypso, Circe, the Sirens, the Cyclops―as he and his men are "pinballed between islands" of adversity. One of the most individual voices of his generation, Armitage revitalizes our sense of the Odyssey as oral poetry, as indeed one of the greatest of tall tales.

The Odyssey: A Dramatic Retelling of Homer's Epic

W.W.Norton&Company

"Compulsively readable. ... Simon Armitage has given us an energetic, free-flowing, high-spirited version."―Edward Hirsch, New York Times Book Review One of the earliest great stories of English literature after ?Beowulf?, ?Sir Gawain? is the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts King Arthur's Round Table festivities one Yuletide, challenging the knights to a wager. Simon Armitrage, one of Britain's leading poets, has produced an inventive and groundbreaking translation that "[helps] liberate ?Gawain ?from academia" (?Sunday Telegraph?). 2 illustrations

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

History & Criticism

Faber and Faber 1999 paperback, fine In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

Kid (Faber Pocket Poetry)

Faber and Faber

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Armitage, SImon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Armitage, SImon

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Armitage, SImon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

All Points North

Penguin Press 70s King Arthur In The East Riding

Poetry Of Birds

The Shout: Selected Poems

Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid

Seeing Stars: Poems

The Shout: Selected Poems

The Odyssey: A Dramatic Retelling of Homer's Epic

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Kid (Faber Pocket Poetry)