Since the death of Seamus Heaney, there has seemed to be a vacancy for a great poet from the British Isles. Tony Harrison is 80 this year, we are grateful for Paul Muldoon, Sean O'Brien and Carol Ann Duffy amongst others but whether there is an equivalent Eliot, Auden, Larkin or Heaney is open to doubt as, in some quarters, would be the desirability of even acknowledging such a head prefect.It is not Simon Armitage's fault that he is a leading candidate from his generation, those now in their fifties, but as yet not universally thought to be entitled to the same billing. The Unaccompanied is an entirely convincing and well-made collection in tune with our times and will deserve to be remembered as reportage from the Poundland culture and loss of community but it isn't necssarily a Prufrock, Look, Stranger, or Whitsun Weddings. But perhaps that reflects more on the position poetry now occupies, sidelined in universities and small circulation magazines, than on the quality of the work. There is much to be admired in this substantial book that addresses much that is pertinent to the way we live now and Armitage has an accessible and imaginative method well-suited to telling it how it is.
Not least in the opening poem, Last Snowman, that follows what we can understand to be an iceberg drifting south from the melting ice-cap, disintegrating as it goes, most strikingly with,
a clay pipe
drooped from a mouth
that was pure stroke victim
It is the first of many poems with arresting images that capture stricken characters from Kitchen Window in which,
the dulled soft-focus cataracts of old glass,
are replaced by new panes or, describing the comic figure of the Derny pilot in The Keirin, (and it is admirable how quickly track cycling's upsurge in the popular consciousness has found it a place in contemporary poetry),
with the upright stance
of a circus poodle driving a toy train.
'After more than a decade', in which he has published acclaimed versions of medieval poems, Armitage has built up a deep portfolio of new poems, a number of them memories of childhood, like Privet and Prometheus, that give us glimpses of a father idiosyncratic in his devices whether supervising hedge-cutting or purloining car parts from a scrap yard.
We are allowed to understand the 'unaccompanied' are the thematic, isolated characters like the Nurse at a Bus Stop, the low quality of the High Street where the cheapjack store has a,
duty manager with a face like Doncaster,
or the town storyteller's account of how a door has washed up on the tide in The Unthinkable that brings to mind Armitage's inventive flights of fancy from the prose poems of Seeing Stars. But, arriving at the poem, The Unaccompanied, we find it is about a male voice choir and the poem takes us back through generations of those who took part in that communal activity.
Gymnasium builds litany of reasons why the soul-less pursuit of artificial exercise for its own sake represents some aspect of the contemporary world in which, 'the motorway service station [is] a destination in its own right'. Harmonium is about salvaging an old church instrument that is otherwise going to be scrapped and evokes the lost history of its central place in the church services and is complimented by Violins, full of similarly intimate insights into new instruments,
the luthier's name, a whiff
of glue pots in workshops in Prague or Milan.
I find myself unusually prim and proper faced with words that once were not approved of in polite company but have since become a part of everyday vocabulary. Larkin used them sparingly and perhaps by now for subsequent generations they don't have shock value but despite their long Anglo-Saxon heritage, for some of us they diminish a poem after the initial impact has been registered but perhaps that doesn't present a problem for everyone.
The Unaccompanied represents Simon Armitage's best work, for me, not knowing all of it, and gathers a wide range of genuine, memorable poetry into a remarkable book but it might not be quite enough to be heralded as ground-breaking, significant poetry or 'great' and the suspicion remains that the commodification of poetry, the creative writing industry in which so many of our leading poets are professors and the intensive study which has led it to know so much about itself is a bit like the way that everything that happens in football is know about, made into statistics and there is no place for a George Best, Duncan McKenzie or Rodney Marsh any more.
But we can't blame Simon Armitage for being Trevor Brooking. Most of us would be happy with that.
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