From the prize-winning poet and former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom comes a powerful collection of poetry that gives voice to the people of Britain with a haunting grace.
We meet characters whose sense of isolation is both emotional and political, both real and metaphorical, from a son made to groom the garden hedge as punishment, to a nurse standing alone at a bus stop as the centuries pass by, to a latter-day Odysseus looking for enlightenment and hope in the shadowy underworld of a cut-price supermarket. We see the changing shape of England itself, viewed from a satellite "like a shipwreck's carcass raised on a sea-crane's hook, / nothing but keel, beams, spars, down to its bare bones." In this exquisite collection, Armitage X-rays the weary but ironic soul of his nation, with its "Songs about mills and mines and a great war, / lines about mermaids and solid gold hills, / songs from broken hymnbooks and cheesy films"—in poems that blend the lyrical and the vernacular, with his trademark eye for detail and biting wit.
- ISBN10 1524732427
- ISBN13 9781524732424
- Publish Date 1 August 2017 (first published 2 March 2017)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Alfred A. Knopf
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 96
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781524732424