New Cemetery new poems by Simon Armitage

New Cemetery is the highly imaginative and wide-ranging new collection from the Poet Laureate.

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.

Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. His collections of poetry, which have received numerous prizes and awards, include Seeing Stars (2010), The Unaccompanied (2017), Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic (2019), Magnetic Field (2020) and his acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007). He writes extensively for television and radio, and is the author of two novels and the non-fiction bestsellers All Points North (1998), Walking Home (2012) and Walking Away (2015). His theatre works include The Last Days of Troy, performed at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2014. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, and, in 2018, he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Simon Armitage is Poet Laureate.

Title: New Cemetery
Author: Simon Armitage
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication date: 25 Sept. 2025
Edition: ‎Main
Language: English
Print length: ‎120 pages
ISBN-10: ‎0571357334
ISBN-13: 978-0571357338
Hardback
£14.99

‘There is no other poet writing in modern Britain who has his feeling for its words and things: the cashpoints, the power tools, the “mail-order driftwood”; the clichés, the jokes, the unspoken emotions . . . the most popular English poet since Larkin.’
Sunday Times

‘Armitage is that rare beast: a poet whose work is ambitious, accomplished and complex as well as popular.’
Sunday Telegraph

•fleursdumal.nl magazine

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