Download or read book Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid written by Simon Armitage and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-08-28 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the most important British poets at work today comes a brilliant new collection that meditates on human battles past and present, on youth and age, on monsters and underdogs, on the life of nations and the individual heart. In Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid, we meet a writer who speaks naturally, and with frankness and restraint, for his culture. Armitage witnesses the pathos of women at work in the mock-Tudor Merrie England coffeehouses and gives us a backstage take on the world of Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger. He makes a gift to the reader of the sympathy and misery and grit buried in his nation’s collective consciousness: in the distant battle depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry and in the daily lives and petty crimes of ordinary people. In poems that are sometimes lyrical, sometimes brash and comic, and full of living voices, the extraordinary and the mythic grow out of the ordinary, and figures of diminishment and tragedy shine forth as mysterious, uncelebrated exemplars. Armitage tells us ruefully that “the future was a beautiful place, once,” and with a steady eye out for the odd mystery or joyous scrap of experience, examines our complex present instead. AFTER THE HURRICANE Some storm that was, to shoulder-charge the wall in my old man’s back yard and knock it flat. But the greenhouse is sound, the chapel of glass we glazed one morning. We glazed with morning. And so is the hut. And so is the shed. We sit in the ruins and drink. He smokes. Back when, we would have built that wall again. But today it’s enough to drink and smoke amongst mortar and bricks, here at the empire’s end.
Download or read book Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid written by Simon Armitage and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Kid written by Simon Armitage and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kid gives us one of the liveliest poetic voices to have emerged in the last ten years. Simon Armitage's inspired ear for the demotic and his ability to deal with subjects that many poets turn their backs on have marked him as a poet of originality and force.
Download or read book Poems About Horses written by Carmela Ciuraru and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2009-04-28 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A captivating anthology that celebrates one of nature’s most majestic creatures and the age-old bond between humans and horses. All kinds of equine characters grace these pages, from magnificent warhorses to cowboys’ trusty steeds, from broken-down nags to playful colts, from wild horses to dream horses. We encounter the famous Trojan horse in Virgil’s Aeneid, and then see it from a wholly different perspective in Matthea Harvey’s whimsical “Inside the Good Idea.” Longfellow’s Paul Revere defies an empire on the back of a horse, while Shakespeare’s Richard III vainly offers his kingdom for one. Robert Burns’s “Auld Farmer” dotes affectionately on his aging mare, while the mares of the king of Corinth in Paul Muldoon’s “Glaucus” devour their owner. Robert Frost’s little horse stopping by the woods is gently puzzled by human behavior, and Ted Hughes is dazzled by a stunning vision of horses at dawn: “Grey silent fragments / Of a grey silent world.” Mythical and metaphorical horses cavort alongside vividly real animals in these poems, whether they be humble servants, noble companions, beloved friends, or emblems of the wild beauty of the world beyond our grasp.
Download or read book The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 6 The Twentieth Century and Beyond written by Joseph Black and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2006-07-31 with total page 1235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In all six of its volumes The Broadview Anthology of British Literature presents British literature in a truly distinctive light. Fully grounded in sound literary and historical scholarship, the anthology takes a fresh approach to many canonical authors, and includes a wide selection of work by lesser-known writers. The anthology also provides wide-ranging coverage of the worldwide connections of British literature, and it pays attention throughout to issues of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. It includes comprehensive introductions to each period, providing in each case an overview of the historical and cultural as well as the literary background. It features accessible and engaging headnotes for all authors, extensive explanatory annotations throughout, and an unparalleled number of illustrations and contextual materials, offering additional perspectives both on individual texts and on larger social and cultural developments. Innovative, authoritative, and comprehensive, The Broadview Anthology of British Literature embodies a consistently fresh approach to the study of literature and literary history. The full Broadview Anthology of British Literature comprises six bound volumes, together with an extensive website component; the latter has been edited, annotated, and designed according to the same high standards as the bound book component of the anthology, and is accessible through the broadviewpress.come website by using the passcode obtained with the purchase of one or more of the bound volumes. Highlights of Volume 6: The Twentieth Century and Beyond include: Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” “An Outpost of Progress,” an essay on the Titanic, and a substantial range of background materials, including documents on the exploitation of central Africa that set “An Outpost of Progress” in vivid context; and a large selection of late twentieth and early twenty-first century writers such as Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Zadie Smith. For the convenience of those whose focus does not extend to the full period covered in the Volume 6: The Twentieth Century and Beyond, that volume is now available either in its original one-volume format or in this alternative two-volume format, with Volume 6a (The Early Twentieth Century) extending to the end of WWII, and Volume 6b (The Late Twentieth Century and Beyond) covering from WWII into the present century. Please see the Volume 6 Table of Contents for the exact location of the split.
Download or read book Beyond the Lyric written by Fiona Sampson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British poetry is enjoying a period of exceptional richness and variety. This is exciting but it's also confusing, and throws up the need for an enthusiastic guide that can explain and celebrate the many parallel poetry projects now underway. Beyond the Lyric does just that. This is a book of enthusiasms: an intelligent and witty map of contemporary British poetry and a radical, accessible guide to living British poets, grouped for the first time according to the kind of poetry they write. In a series of groundbreaking new classifications, beginning with the bread-and-butter diction of the Plain Dealers and ending on the capacious generosity of the Exploded Lyric, it examines the broad range of contemporary tendencies – from the baroque swagger of the Dandies to the restrained elegance of the Oxford Elegists; from the layered, haunting verse of Mythopoesis to the inventive explorations of the New Formalists. By probing the cultural context from which these groups emerge and shifting the critical focus back to the work itself, Sampson’s astute analysis illuminates and demystifies each of these terms and asks the big questions about what makes a poem. The result is a celebration of poetry as a connected, responsive and above all communitarian form. Lively, engaging and inviting, this is the indispensible and authoritative guide for anyone who's ever wondered what's going on in British poetry today.
Download or read book The Shout written by Simon Armitage and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, the powerful selected work of Simon Armitage, the most distinctive poetic voice of contemporary Britain. Simon Armitage is arguably the leading British poet of the past twenty years. His knowledge of the English just as they are ("a gentleman farmer / living on reduced means, a cricketer's widow, / sowing a kitchen garden with sweet peas"), his colloquial Yorkshire wit and eye for situational ironies, his ability to steal up on us with the surreal while capturing the ordinary speech of everyday life: these qualities place him at the forefront of British poetry today. This slim volume is the perfect introduction to his work for newcomers, or the ideal selection for longtime readers to keep on the bedside table.
Download or read book Sir Gawain and the Green Knight A New Verse Translation written by Simon Armitage and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-11-17 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic story that inspired the film starring Dev Patel and Alicia Vikander “A medieval romance…but also an outlandish ghost story, a gripping morality tale and a weird thriller.… I couldn’t put down Simon Armitage’s compulsively readable...energetic, free-flowing, high-spirited version.” — Edward Hirsch, New York Times Book Review One of the founding stories of English literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight narrates the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse who rudely interrupts Camelot’s Round Table festivities one Yuletide, casting a pall of unease over the company and challenging one of their number to a wager. The virtuous Gawain accepts and decapitates the intruder with his own axe. Gushing blood, the knight reclaims his head, orders Gawain to seek him out a year hence, and departs. The following Yuletide, Gawain dutifully sets forth. His quest for the Green Knight involves a winter journey, a seduction scene in a dreamlike castle, a dire challenge answered—and a drama of enigmatic reward disguised as psychic undoing. Preserved on a single surviving manuscript dating from around 1400, composed by an anonymous master, this Arthurian epic was rediscovered only two hundred years ago and published for the first time in 1839. Following in the tradition of Ted Hughes, Marie Borroff, and J.R.R. Tolkien, Simon Armitage—one of England’s leading poets—has produced an inventive translation that resounds with both clarity and spirit. His work, presented here with facing original text and a note by Harvard scholar James Simpson, is meticulously responsible to the sophistication of the original but succeeds equally in its ambition to be read as a totally new poem. It is as if two poets, six hundred years apart, set out on a journey through the same mesmerizing landscapes—acoustic, physical, and metaphorical—to share in and double the pleasure of this enchanting classic.
Download or read book Sir Gawain and the Green Knight A New Verse Translation written by and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-11-17 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the earliest great stories of English literature after ?Beowulf?, ?Sir Gawain? is the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts King Arthur's Round Table festivities one Yuletide, challenging the knights to a wager. Simon Armitrage, one of Britain's leading poets, has produced an inventive and groundbreaking translation that " helps] liberate ?Gawain ?from academia" (?Sunday Telegraph?).
Download or read book The Owl and the Nightingale written by Simon Armitage and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the UK Poet Laureate and bestselling translator of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a complete verse translation of a spirited and humorous medieval English poem The Owl and the Nightingale, one of the earliest literary works in Middle English, is a lively, anonymous comic poem about two birds who embark on a war of words in a wood, with a nearby poet reporting their argument in rhyming couplets, line by line and blow by blow. In this engaging and energetic verse translation, Simon Armitage captures the verve and humor of this dramatic tale with all the cut and thrust of the original. In an agile iambic tetrameter that skillfully amplifies the prosody and rhythm of the original, Armitage’s translation moves entertainingly from the eloquent and philosophical to the ribald and ridiculous. Sounding at times like antagonists in a Twitter feud, the owl and the nightingale quarrel about a host of subjects that still resonate today—including love, marriage, identity, cultural background, class distinctions, and the right to be heard. Adding to the playful, raucous mood of the barb-trading birds is Armitage, who at one point inserts himself into the poem as a “magistrate . . . to adjudicate”—one who is “skilled with words & worldly wise / & frowns on every form of vice.” Featuring the Middle English text on facing pages and an introduction by Armitage, this volume will delight readers of all ages.
Download or read book The Universal Home Doctor written by Simon Armitage and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the title implies, Simon Armitage's flesh-and-blood account of numerous personal journeys reads like a private encyclopaedia of emotion and health. Vivid and engaged, the poems range from the rainforests of South America to the deserts of Western Australia, but are set against the ultimate and most intimate of all landscapes, the human body. Equally, the body politic comes into question, through subtle enquiries into Englishness and the idea of home.
Download or read book Seeing Stars written by Simon Armitage and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011-08-02 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thrilling new collection from the hugely acclaimed British poet Simon Armitage. With its vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, and tall tales, this absurdist, unreal exploration of modern society brings us a chorus of unique and unforgettable voices. All are welcome at this twilit, visionary carnival: the man whose wife drapes a border-curtain across the middle of the marital home; the black bear with a dark secret; the woman who oversees giant snowballs in the freezer. “My girlfriend won me in a sealed auction but wouldn’t / tell me how much she bid,” begins one speaker; “I hadn’t meant to go grave robbing with Richard Dawkins / but he can be very persuasive,” another tells us. The storyteller behind this human tapestry has about him a sly undercover idealism: he shares with many of his characters a stargazing capacity for belief, or for being, at the very least, entirely “genuine in his disbelief.” In these startling poems, with their unique cartoon-strip energy and air of misrule, Armitage creates world after world, peculiar and always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected.
Download or read book The Poetry of Simon Armitage written by Tony Childs and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simon Armitage is one of the leading poets of his generation. Since his first collection, Zoom, in 1989 he has published ten full-length collections of poetry, while also writing and presenting numerous works for radio, television and film. He is now one of the poets most widely studied at GCSE examination level. This study guide to Simon Armitage's poetry will be essential reading and preparation for GCSE students and their teachers, to whose needs it has been expertly tailored. The book examines Armitage's work in just the ways that students need to think about it - in respect of how the poems are crafted in language and form, and the kinds of themes, ideas and attitudes that they reflect. It also includes sections on studying individual poems for the examination, an illuminating biography with questions and answers and sample essays.
Download or read book A Dictionary of Writers and their Works written by Christopher Riches and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-29 with total page 1431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 3,200 entries An essential guide to authors and their works that focuses on the general canon of British literature from the fifteenth century to the present. There is also some coverage of non-fiction such as biographies, memoirs, and science, as well as inclusion of major American and Commonwealth writers. This online-exclusive new edition adds 60,000 new words, including over 50 new entries dealing with authors who have risen to prominence in the last five years, as well as fully updating the entries that currently exist. Each entry provides details of a writer's nationality and birth/death dates, followed by a listing of their titles arranged chronologically by date of publication.
Download or read book The Unaccompanied written by Simon Armitage and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Vertical Art written by Simon Armitage and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the UK Poet Laureate and bestselling translator, a spirited book that demystifies and celebrates the art of poetry today In A Vertical Art, acclaimed poet Simon Armitage takes a refreshingly common-sense approach to an art form that can easily lend itself to grand statements and hollow gestures. Questioning both the facile and obscure ends of the poetry spectrum, he offers sparkling new insights about poetry and an array of favorite poets. Based on Armitage’s public lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry, A Vertical Art illuminates poets as varied as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, A. R. Ammons, and Claudia Rankine. The chapters are often delightfully sassy in their treatment, as in “Like, Elizabeth Bishop,” in which Armitage dissects—and tallies—the poet’s predilection for similes. He discusses Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, poetic lists, poetry and the underworld, and the dilemmas of translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Armitage also pulls back the curtain on the unromantic realities of making a living as a contemporary poet, and ends the book with his own list of “Ninety-Five Theses” on the principles and practice of poetry. An appealingly personal book that explores the volatile and disputed definitions of poetry from the viewpoint of a practicing writer and dedicated reader, A Vertical Art makes an insightful and entertaining case for the power and potential of poetry today.
Download or read book Walking Home A Poet s Journey written by Simon Armitage and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-03-25 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Nonfiction Nineteen days, 256 miles, and one renowned poet walking the backbone of England. The wandering poet has always been a feature of our cultural imagination. Odysseus journeys home, his famous flair for storytelling seducing friend and foe. The Romantic poets tramped all over the Lake District searching for inspiration. Now Simon Armitage, with equal parts enthusiasm and trepidation, as well as a wry humor all his own, has taken on Britain’s version of our Appalachian Trail: the Pennine Way. Walking “the backbone of England” by day (accompanied by friends, family, strangers, dogs, the unpredictable English weather, and a backpack full of Mars Bars), each evening he gives a poetry reading in a different village in exchange for a bed. Armitage reflects on the inextricable link between freedom and fear as well as the poet’s place in our bustling world. In Armitage’s own words, “to embark on the walk is to surrender to its lore and submit to its logic, and to take up a challenge against the self.”
