Seeing Stars
by Simon Armitage
Faber and Faber; Hardback;
88 pages; Price £12.99
ISBN 9780571249909

Alastair Beddow

Simon Armitage must be feeling productive. In the last five years alone he has published three volumes of poetry, edited a collection of poetry about birds, written Gig, a non-fiction prose work about his musical influences, and produced acclaimed translations of Homer’s Odyssey and the Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Add to this his regular appearances on television and radio, an ongoing tour and a forthcoming ambitious project to walk and document the Pennine Way, and it’s not difficult to see why Armitage is regarded as one of Britain’s most popular contemporary poets. His broad Yorkshire accent – endearingly signifying his non-metropolitan, non-esoteric credentials – helps to sustain this perception. Yet despite his burgeoning schedule, Armitage has found time to write Seeing Stars, a work which is perhaps his most intriguing to date.

Seeing Stars revisits much familiar Armitage territory: ‘The War of the Roses’, for example, is a cheeky examination of the perils of crossing the Lancashire/Yorkshire border. Other pieces touch on many of the perennial subjects in Armitage’s work such as the continued legacy of Thatcherism in modern Britain or the complex relationship between parent and child. Armitage’s trademark humour – sometimes crude, and often tinged with latent violence – is present throughout Seeing Stars; the very first piece in the collection, ‘The Christening’, is narrated by a sperm whale who seems surprisingly aware of the ‘huge commercial value’ of his own bodily fluids, and ends with the line ‘Stuff comes blurting out’.

Despite its thematic and tonal familiarity, Seeing Stars marks a radical departure from Armitage’s earlier collections of poetry due to its formal experimentation. The assertion that ‘Stuff comes blurting out’ is not simply an indecorous pun, but can be read as an indication of the formal composition of both Seeing Stars as a whole and the individual pieces within the collection. Random fragments of images and ideas hang loosely together in a series of short vignettes, which the narrator of ‘Upon Opening the Chest Freezer’ handily refers to using the label ‘story-poem’. Perhaps deliberately eschewing the more rarefied term ‘prose-poem’, Armitage’s ‘story-poems’ combine the narrative instinct of the short story (often employing the twist or inversion ending) and the sensibility and language of poetry. Interestingly, the lineation of ‘15:30 by the Elephant House’, first published in poetic form in The Literateur last July, has been altered to accommodate the requirements of this hybrid form; whilst the reasons for this change are unclear, the effect is to shift the emphasis away from the linguistic to the narrative elements of the text.

The fluid or sometimes seemingly under-developed quality of many of Armitage’s story-poems arises from the demands of the form but also from the performative nature of the voice in the text, which makes the story-poems read like dramatic monologues or comic anecdotes. The blurb of Seeing Stars posits this storytelling technique as a modern reworking of the tradition of the trickster, a figure who can change shape and who rejects conventional morality and behaviour. However, these poetic narratives owe more to Surrealism than mythological archetypes; the stuff of Seeing Stars – a grave robbing Richard Dawkins in ‘The Experience’, or the hand of a dead child emerging out of a wall in ‘I’ll Be There to Love and Comfort You’ – derives more obviously from Armitage’s imagination than anywhere in his earlier writing.

Armitage’s work is often dismissed in academic circles as fodder for GCSE anthologies. Even a recent review by The Independent referred to Armitage as ‘one of our least “poetic” poets’, a comment as bizarre as it is misplaced. His broad Yorkshire accent belies subtle, learned points of reference that encompass science, classical literature and pop culture; the title of his latest volume, Seeing Stars, encapsulates these multiple discourses by connoting as it does a visual illusion, astronomy, and the cult of celebrity. Ultimately, Armitage is interested at the point where culture turns in on itself as demonstrated by one of his later story-poems, ‘Bringing It All Back Home’, where the poet recalls ‘Googling my own name’ and imagines participating in the Simon Armitage Trail, a guided-tour of the poet’s life where the turnout is ‘woundingly low’. It would be wrong to suggest that Armitage is sacrificing quality for sheer productivity, but it remains to be seen whether Seeing Stars represents a significant new direction in his poetic trajectory, or just an experimental flirtation with a new poetic form.