Simon Armitage is one of the most influential contemporary poets writing in English, known for bringing everyday speech, modern settings, and sharp psychological insight into poetry. His poems often sound conversational, even casual, but beneath this surface lies careful craft and emotional depth. Armitage has a gift for turning ordinary situations—relationships, work, violence, guilt, love—into moments of moral tension and reflection.
A key feature of Armitage’s poetry is its use of dramatic monologue. Many poems are spoken by distinctive voices that may be unreliable, humorous, or disturbing, allowing readers to explore complex states of mind. Poems like “Hitcher” and “Kid” show how he reimagines familiar stories or situations with dark irony and emotional realism. His language is direct and accessible, often drawing on slang, regional speech, and popular culture, which makes his work feel contemporary and relatable.
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| Simon armitage |
Armitage also frequently engages with myth, history, and religion, reshaping traditional narratives to comment on modern life. His poems balance wit with seriousness, empathy with critique. Overall, Simon Armitage’s poetry is admired for its clarity, moral complexity, and ability to capture the anxieties and contradictions of modern experience in a voice that feels both personal and universal.
Zoom!
It begins as a house, an end terrace
in this case
but it will not stop there. Soon it is
an avenue
which cambers arrogantly past the Mechanics' Institute,
turns left
at the main road without even looking
and quickly it is
a town with all four major clearing banks,
a daily paper
and a football team pushing for promotion.
On it goes, oblivious of the Planning Acts,
the green belts,
and before we know it it is out of our hands:
city, nation,
hemisphere, universe, hammering out in all directions
until suddenly,
mercifully, it is drawn aside through the eye
of a black hole
and bulleted into a neighbouring galaxy, emerging
smaller and smoother
than a billiard ball but weighing more than Saturn.
People stop me in the street, badger me
in the check-out queue
and ask "What is this, this that is so small
and so very smooth
but whose mass is greater than the ringed planet?"
It's just words
I assure them. But they will not have it.
The Unaccompanied
Wandering slowly back after dark one night
above a river, toward a suspension bridge,
a sound concerns him that might be a tune
or might not: noise drifting in, trailing off.
Then concerns him again, now clearly a song
pulsing out from the opposite bank, being sung
by chorusing men, all pewter-haired or bald,
in the function suite of a shabby hotel.
Above their heads a conductor’s hand
draws and casts the notes with a white wand.
Songs about mills and mines and a great war,
about mermaid brides and solid gold hills,
songs from broken hymnbooks and cheesy films.
Then his father’s voice rising out of that choir,
and his father’s father’s voice, and voices
of fathers before, concerning him only,
arcing through charged air and spanning the gorge.
He steps over the cliff edge and walks across.
Homework
It’s evening again, late.
I go out into the lane
and doodle a beard and mustache
on the face of the moon
with a red pen.
Over the next hill
an old teacher of mine
takes off her glasses
and wipes the lenses with a soft cloth.
She can’t believe
what she’s just seen.
A Vision
The future was a beautiful place, once.
Remember the full-blown balsa-wood town
on public display in the Civic Hall.
The ring-bound sketches, artists’ impressions,
blueprints of smoked glass and tubular steel,
board-game suburbs, modes of transportation
like fairground rides or executive toys.
Cities like dreams, cantilevered by light.
And people like us at the bottle-bank
next to the cycle-path, or dog-walking
over tended strips of fuzzy-felt grass,
or model drivers, motoring home in
electric cars, or after the late show -
strolling the boulevard. They were the plans,
all underwritten in the neat left-hand
of architects – a true, legible script.
I pulled that future out of the north wind
at the landfill site, stamped with today’s date,
riding the air with other such futures,
all unlived in and now fully extinct.
The Hard
Here on the Hard, you're welcome to pull up and stay;
there's a flat fee of a quid for parking all day.
And wandering over the dunes, who wouldn't die
for the view: an endless estate of beach, the sea
kept out of the bay by the dam-wall of the sky.
Notice the sign, with details of last year's high tides.
Walk on, drawn to the shipwreck, a mirage of masts
a mile or so out, seemingly true and intact
but scuttled to serve as a target, and fixed on
by eyeballs staring from bird-hides lining the coast.
The vast, weather-washed, cornerless state of our mind
begins on the Hard; the Crown lays claim to the shore
between low tide and dry land, the country of sand,
but the moon is law. Take what you came here to find.
Stranger, the ticket you bought for a pound stays locked
in the car, like a butterfly trapped under glass;
stamped with the time, it tells us how taken you are,
how carried away by now, how deep and how far.
I Say I Say I Say
Anyone here had a go at themselves
for a laugh? Anyone opened their wrists
with a blade in the bath? Those in the dark
at the back, listen hard. Those at the front
in the know, those of us who have, hands up,
let's show that inch of lacerated skin
between the forearm and the fist. Let's tell it
like it is: strong drink, a crimson tidemark
round the tub, a yard of lint, white towels
washed a dozen times, still pink. Tough luck.
A passion then for watches, bangles, cuffs.
A likely story: you were lashed by brambles
picking berries from the woods. Come clean, come good,
repeat with me the punch line 'Just like blood'
when those at the back rush forward to say
how a little love goes a long long long way.
