Simon Armitage - Seeing Stars

Simon Armitage, Seeing Stars (Faber)

A few years ago I arrived at a definition of ‘poem’ by refining one offered by Terry Eagleton (who really should know) in his book How to Read a Poem. I removed all the parts of his definition that looked to me extraneous or misleading, for example that a poem is a ‘moral statement’, and was left with the fact that a poem is ‘a piece of writing in which the author and not the typesetter decides where the line-endings come’.
That looks right to me in the face of all the erroneous definitions offered by poets and thinkers over the years, and it is important to know or else we literally don’t know what we are talking about.
But now Simon Armitage has delivered this book of poems, in nearly all of which the lines go to the right hand edge of the page and end on words that arbitrarily happen to be the next word in the narrative. So either these poems have set back the cause of defining poetry to square one or they are that strange and unsatisfactory hybrid, the prose poem, poems written in prose rather than ‘poetry’.
For the most part these are unlikely tales set in quite ordinary circumstances, and Armitage is at his best as raconteur with his understated, deadpan style and telling detailed phrases. He stretches the surreal and the ordinary sides of his stories, the breadth of depth of his imagination really quite remarkable.
Entertaining and resourceful as they undoubtedly are, though, these might not be his best poems. It is a self-contained collection of pieces that belong, like this, in a book to themselves but whether they add to his reputation as one of the finest and somehow representative poets of our times, I wouldn’t want to say. I wonder if another book might be along sooner rather than later featuring a more traditional and orthodox poetry that threatens the security of my well-nurtured definition not quite so much.