Simon Armitage

A companion for life, this anthology is filled with unforgettable poems by, for and about parents. Poems about parents and parenthood have been written throughout history, exploring the relationships that remain eternally familiar yet endlessly unfathomable. Family Lines traces this rich tradition, presenting diverse perspectives on subjects including pregnancy and arrivals, loss and letting go, mothers and fathers, ageing and farewells. Simon Armitage and Rachel Bower's marvellous selection stretches from antiquity to the present day, bringing together adored classics and extraordinary contemporary poems. See how life is transformed following childbirth according to William Blake, Sylvia Plath and Liz Berry. Christina Rossetti, Philip Larkin, Mary Jean Chan and Selima Hill offer differing perspectives on mothers. There are powerful father-and-son encounters from Homer as well as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Li-Young Lee and Roger Robinson. Tony Harrison, Anne Carson and Fawzia Muradali Kane are among those wishing farewells. Whether measured in 'sweet-wild weeks' or 'obstinate, exhausted mornings', through 'sharpest pangs' or 'each minuscule miracle' - this anthology illuminates what connects us across generations.

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATIONThe 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.

This gorgeously illustrated collection of poems illuminates and reimagines the ingenious, fragile dwellings of the living creatures around us.Poet Laureate Simon Armitage was inspired to write these poems by the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, an ambitious restoration project where history and mystery coexist. The reawakened landscape with its woods, meadows and ‘jungle’ offers a bustling, fertile realm for all sorts of creatures to inhabit. Armitage uses elements of riddle and folklore to animate a series of dwellings: the ‘twig-and-leaf crow’s-nest squat’ of a squirrel’s drey, a beaver lodge’s ‘spillikin stave church’ and a hive’s ‘reactor core’. Distinctions between human and animal, natural and cultivated, are blurred, emphasising commonality and creating a vibrant account of ‘non-stop stop-motion life’.Dwell warns of the fragility of these spaces and their dwellers, exposed to relentless and sadly familiar environmental threats. Just as a garden provides refuge for wildlife, so do these intricate poems offer lasting homes to those who dwell within their lines.This edition is beautifully illustrated by Beth Munro.‘These are poems full of a winning, pleasurable charm.’ Guardian Best Recent Poetry

Simon Armitage turns Hansel & Gretel into a darkly glittering fairy tale for grown-ups. In vivid and trenchant language, he puts a contemporary spin on the tale we know from the Brothers Grimm. Here is a twenty-first century story, whose preoccupations are poverty and hunger, war and flight, a shifting dystopian landscape where nothing is quite as it seems. Text and illustration fuse beautifully to summon a nightmarish vision that nonetheless contains humour and humanity and the possibility of a more hopeful future to come.

When a mysterious green knight arrives unbidden at Camelot one Christmas, only the young and inexperienced Gawain is brave or foolhardy enough to take up his challenge . . . This story, first told in the late fourteenth century, is one of the most enthralling, enigmatic and beloved poems in the English language. Simon Armitage's version is meticulously responsive to the tact, sophistication and dramatic intensity of the original. It is as if, six hundred years apart, two poets set out on a journey through the same mesmeric landscape - physical, allegorical and acoustic - in the course of which the Gawain poet has finally found his true translator. The poem's key episodes have been visualised into a series of bold, richly textured screen-prints by British artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins. They are reproduced here, alongside Armitage's revised text, to create a special edition of this marvellous classic.