Renaissance man and (as I'm obliged to point out every time I write about him) bloke who lives just over the hill from me, Simon Armitage is a poet, novelist, radio star, lecturer, and songwriter of my favourite album of 2009. His latest collection bridges the gap between poetry and short story with aplomb.
(When I was a kid, I used to wonder what a plomb was. I even looked it up in the dictionary but got no joy. Was it a kind of plum? A bomb made by plumbers? A Mercedes driven by the Palestine Liberation Organisation? I never found out. But I've grown up to be the sort of cocky git who uses words without really knowing what they mean. Hence...)
Never more than three pages in length, these stoems or pories will appeal both to readers who enjoy short stories but never got into poetry and those who admire the wordplay and creativity in your average stanza but don't have the attention span for most tall tales. Which is a very longwinded way of saying: they're ace.
Sample opening line: "I hadn't meant to go grave-robbing with Richard Dawkins, but he can be very persuasive."
How could you not want to read on?
My favourite is 'The Cuckoo', which feeds into my recently-mentioned solipsist paranoia when a young man finds out that his parents and friends are all government employed actors - that their work is done now that he's turned 18, and that they're all moving on to other roles.
Special mention must also go to the wonderfully self-deprecating 'Bringing It All Back Home' in which the author finds himself being commemorated in his native village of Marsden with a "Simon Armitage Trail", a guided tour based on his spurious life story...
With Bob spouting his stuff at every lamppost, we walked to a dilapidated cowshed where I was gored by a bull when I was nine, supposedly, then to the escarpment where I'd seen my father bring down a fieldfare with a single stone. Then to Bunny Wood where I'd found Gossip John hanging by the neck, then to a meadow where I'd fallen asleep and woken up with a grass snake curled on my chest, then behind the undertaker's parlour, where, Bob confidently announced, I'd lost my virginity to a girl named Keith.
