Poet Laureate Simon Armitage for New Cemetary

Poet Laureate Simon Armitage joins us for his major new collection New Cemetery.

Simon Armitage CBE was born in West Yorkshire and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. Armitage has received numerous awards for his poetry including the Sunday Times Young Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes, the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry, and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. In 1999 Armitage was named the Millennium Poet. His collections include Seeing Stars, The Unaccompanied, Magnetic Field, Blossomise and Dwell.

In his highly imaginative and wide-ranging collection New Cemetery, Simon Armitage makes peace with the dead. 

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The conversion of a local 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 phases of lockdown come and go and the cemetery fills up with his new ‘neighbours’, Armitage charts personal losses of his own, often retreating to his garden shed to navigate blank paper with pen and ink – and the results are as surprising as they are life-enhancing.