Seeing Stars

Simon Armitage's new collection is by turns a voice and a chorus: a hyper-vivid array of dramatic monologues allegories parables and tall tales. Here comes everybody: Snoobie and Carla Lippincott Wittmann Yoshioka Bambuck Dr Amsterdam Preminger. The man whose wife drapes a border-curtain across the middle of the marital home; the English astronaut with a terrestrial outlook on life; an orgiastic cast of unreconstructed pie-worshipers at a Northern sculpture farm; the soap-opera supremacists at their zoo-wedding; the driver who picks up hitchhikers as he hurtles towards a head-on collision with Thatcherism; a Christian cheese-shop proprietor in the wrong part of town; the black bear with a dark secret the woman who curates giant snowballs in the chest freezer. Celebrities and nobodies all come to the ball.<br><br>The storyteller who steps in and out of this human tapestry changes trickster-style from poem to poem but retains some identifying traits: the melancholy of the less deceived crossed with an undercover idealism. And he shares with many of his characters a star-gazing capacity for belief or for being 'genuine in his disbelief'.<br><br>Language is on the loose in these poems which cut and run across the parterre of poetic decorum with their cartoon-strip energies and air of misrule. Armitage creates world after world peculiar yet always particular where the only certainty is the unexpected.