Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Armitage’s high turn out over recent years sadly seems to have adversely affected the qualities in his writing that shot him to fame in the early 90s - his original use of imagery, his wit and fearlessness in the face if big themes and the freshness of a voice steeped in the colourful idiom and rhythms of West Yorkshire.

     Killing Time is a 1,000 line countdown to a thousand years of history that reaches its climax with 1999s events “spooling past like newsreel”. It was broadcast alongside a visual narrative on New Year’s Day 2000 and worked successfully on the screen where the filmic images wove through the auditory text to create a rich, textured impression. Reading the text nearly a whole year later, without the film to provide the crossweave, I have to say, I found it a little threadbare. Over-reliance on putting a spin on media-talk; a laxity in tone to the point sometimes of bathos and an emotional sameness hampered it. There are moments of brilliance - for example, the passage in which two boys “armed to the teeth with thousands of flowers” give “floral tributes to fellow students and members of staff”, an imaginative twist on the Colorado School massacre news story. “A daffodil was tucked behind the ear/ of a boy in a baseball hat, and marigolds and peonies/ threaded through the hair/ of those caught on the stairs or spotted along corridors/ until every pupil/ who looked up from behind a desk could be met/ with at least a petal/ or a dusting of pollen.”

     But too often Killing Time assumes a shared perception of such events, as do many pieces of writing that refer to mass media news stories, and that seems to me to be imaginatively lazy - an easy kind of playing to a known audience. Mister Heracles, commissioned by the West Yorkshire Playhouse, was I think a bad choice. Unlike Hughes’ translation of Seneca’s Oedipus Rex, there is no sense of time-scale within the plot in which the protagonist can develop. Heracles scarcely puts his foot on the stage than he has gone mad, killed his wife and kids, regretted it and is led off stage to recover under the friendly auspices of his cousin, Theseus, and remarkably unshaken father. The same sense of transience pervades here as pervades your averagely brutal murder headline. There’s no time to develop any sense of inevitability, no tragic flaws to name, nor yet a sense of free will. It’s hard to think what moral or philosophical ideas Euripedes was intending to explore here. I confess I haven’t read the original, so maybe I’m missing something important, but I couldn’t help wondering whether Armitage’s choice wasn’t an unconscious indictment of his high-pressured writing career.