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POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION

The Poet Laureate makes peace with the dead in this highly imaginative and wide-ranging new collection.

The conversion of a local natural-beauty spot into a municipal graveyard is the starting point for New Cemetery. From regular walks around the boundary near his moorland home in West Yorkshire, Simon Armitage chronicles the extraordinary transformation of landscape both outer and inner. These luminous and wry poems – composed in short-lined tercets – reflect the changing world: one of unstable weather patterns and unpredictable news events, all observed across a few acres of Pennine upland.

As seasons come and go and the cemetery fills up with new ‘residents’, Armitage charts personal losses of his own, often retreating to his garden shed to navigate blank paper with pen and ink. Encompassing lyrical revelations and everyday vignettes alongside apocalyptic visions and imagined conversations with the deceased, these pages draw us into a parallel neighbourhood of remembrance and celebration.

‘An exceptionally skilled poet . . . This haunting volume demonstrates the magnetic pull of a mind that has kept us, across dozens of books published since 1989, mesmerised like moths to the flame.’ Jade Cuttle, Observer Poetry Book of the Month

‘With his signature Yorkshire vernacular, [Armitage] brings precise locality and light-heartedness to death and grief . . . the poems of New Cemetery tap into deeply personal material while drawing on the laureate’s public persona.’ Kit Fan, Guardian, The Best Recent Poetry