Simon Armitage - Kid
How do you evaluate a collection of poems? Perhaps rate each poem and then work out some sort of average, but what about the individual poems that really grab you, how do these effect your evaluation of the collection as a whole. Rating a collection of poems is similar to trying to come to some conclusion when considering a collection of short stories: there are usually some that you like more than others, but if you work with averages they are likely to lower your overall rating. You will probably never be able to rate a collection 5 out of 5. Simon Armitage's Kid is a collection of 47 poems and I found six of them that I rated at 5, but there were many that just bubbled under at 4, however when I read these again I found that I liked some of them as much as I liked those that I had rated as 5.

I do not read poems in the same way as I read novels or stories. I like to give them time, to sit with them for a little. I always read them at least three times each and usually no more than 3/4 at one sitting. In literature classes in school, poems can be analysed in great depth, I tend not to do this now, hoping that my experience in reading will be enough to appreciate the poem in some way or another. It is easier these days with google to hand, to look up references or the meaning of words and I usually take the time to do this. I have got out of the habit of reading collections of contemporary poetry and now realise the difficulty in writing about them.

Kid was published in 1992 and it was Armitage's second collection. His first collection Zoom had been a great success and since those early days he has succeeded in becoming the poet laureate. There is great variety in this collection, but some general themes do emerge. The poems are rooted in working class life in Northern England. Many of them tell individual stories of the quotidian of daily life, relationship problems, loutish behaviour, they can be amusing and witty, but they do not look up to the wealthy classes or down to the people in poverty. Many of them are right on target they seem to hit the right note. Another theme is that they can suddenly become quite strange, they can throw the reader a curve. Apart from the Robinson poems (more later) they are not difficult to understand, no obscure references, but this does not mean that they do not puzzle the reader or make him think as to where the poet has been heading. Many of the poems are in free verse, but there are some end and internal rhymes and they look and feel like poems, they are good to read aloud.

Armitage loves a metaphor and sometimes these feel more like clichés or platitudes. I am sure that the poet is having fun with these. The poem 'Judge Chutney's final summary' piles up one metaphor on top of another: the thread of a story, thrown the wheat out with the chaff, and then he mixes the metaphors; winnowed a baby from its bath, hauled in a line of enquiry, letting the tail fit the punishment. There is a poem titled 'Never mind the quality' and the first line reads feel the width. This poem is typical of many it tells of a woman scraping wallpaper in preparation for decorating a room. She luckily manages to grab an end and the whole lot comes off the wall in one piece ;

then took it in hand
and simply she used
her own weight, leant right out
like a wind-surfer rounding
the tip of Cape Horn
and it came
and kept coming, breathtaking,
like a seam of ore
through an unclaimed mountain -
from the skirting board
to the picture rail
from the door frame
to the bay window.

The woman becomes a celebratory in the town, stories are told, the wallpaper gets bigger, the menfolk have to take over the household chores while the women chat about the event.

The mysterious figure of Robinson appears in several poems. He is a ghost like observer, not quite real and is introduced in the poem 'Looking for Weldon Kees' This is where Google comes in handy as Weldon Kees was a cult figure in the world of poetry. A Californian poet who disappeared leaving his shoes on the Golden Gate Bridge. He wrote a series of poems featuring Robinson a displaced ghost of a person in modern society; a twilight figure, Armitage takes up this theme with his series featuring Robinson.

Armitage writes poems about a gang of thieves operating at a football match (Brassneck). A couple having to live with their in-laws (Wintering Out). A young girl who cannot remove an irritant in her eye (At Sea), Kid the title poem is the story of Robin dumping Batman because he wants to grow up. These poems are based in realism, but more often than not squirm away into something more mysterious. I love the poem simply entitled Song which has the theme of 'the way of things in the natural world.' Armitage can write beautifully about the natural world and man's place in it.

Lets forget about all those complications of working out ratings for this collection and give it 5 stars and finish with another great poem.

Speaking Terms

This is not the blanket of night,
It is a poor advert for it.

Through the action of the wind
The clouds appear slashed, longwise,
into rough black shapes, like the remnants
of a poster stripped from a window.

We must be driving west because
the furthest hilltop cuts a broken line
against the fading light. Picturesque,
a talking point, except

words being what they are
we wouldn't want to loose the only sense
we can share in: silence.
I could say the clouds

are the action of our day
stopped here to evidence
the last four hundred miles
like a mobile, hardly moving.

But I ask you the time
and you tell me, in one word, precisely. ( )

Simon Armitage’s poems are typically accessible, full of wit and charm. They use formal elements in their structure, including rhyme (at times), but rhythm is more to the fore. Many are narrative poems in which Armitage voices a character often in unusual (for a poem) circumstances. For example, “Brassneck,” whose narrator is a thief who works the football stadiums, or “Kid,” whose narrator is a resentful sidekick, now grown, but still sulking. There are seven poems that reference “Robinson,” the first of which, “Looking for Weldon Kees,” suggests that Armitage has borrowed his middleman Robinson character from the American poet who disappeared in the 1950s, a presumed suicide. Some of these poems have a dark and cynical edge. But Armitage is also capable of extremely light verse, including poems about cricket and golf, which are delightful.

This is such a solid collection (there are 31 poems included) that you may find yourself returning to it again and again over the years, no doubt finding that the poems you loved in your youth take on new meaning as you age.

Well worth reading again. And again. ( )

Some nights I dream of badgers walking backwards.

An early collection of poems by Simon Armitage. I didn't like every single poem, but I liked some of them a lot.

from Brassneck
This boastful tale of a pair of pickpockets working the crowds at football matches turns darker towards the end when they are present at the Hillsborough disaster.

We tend to kick off
by the hot dog vans
and we've lightened a good many fair-weather fans
who haven't a clue where to queue for tickets.
Anything goes, if it's
loose we lift it.

from You May Turn Over and Begin . . .
I am about the same age as Simon Armitage and also found the General Studies 'A' Level exam a doddle, as my other 'A' levels were in French, biology and chemistry, and I came from the kind of family that meant I knew the kind of general knowledge covered in the exam.

Which of these films was Dirk Bogarde
not In? One hundredweight of bauxite

makes how much aluminium?
how many tales in The Decameron?'

General Studies, the upper sixth, a doddle, a cinch
for anyone with an ounce of common sense

or a calculator
with a memory feature.

from The Metaphor Now Standing at Platform 8

This is not the allegorical boat train.
This is not the symbolic seaplane.
Madam, life is not a destination but a journey; sweet
that your friends should want to meet you there, but
stupid. ( )

Amongst the most successful and widely read of younger English poets, in this reissue of his 1992 book Kid demonstrates the easy appeal of Simon Armitage's verse: his ability to mimic the voices of "real life", his acts of social ventriloquism which imply a literary version of verbal democracy. As a result, Armitage often seems content to coolly observe, reserving a judgement that the poem's form is left to provide: the sonnet "Poem" (the very title implying neutrality), detailing a man's casual brutalities, ends with "Here's how they rated him when they looked back: / sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that." The forensic quality of texts such as these (see the list of a dead man's belongings in "About His Person") resemble news reports from the forgotten of Modern Britain, charting their particular mutant strains of violence, despair and illegality. Occasionally, poems move through such closely observed detail towards a sudden symbolic or metaphoric turn--a sudden crystallisation of insight. Armitage though seems wary of such structures: one or two poems play explicitly with the urge for poetic meaning and poke fun at the simple coalescences of metaphoric elision--"Eighteen Plays on Golfing as a Watchword" parodies Wallace Stevens in its jokey round of golfing metaphors ("The flag and the green / from this elevation; / a heron in its pool / of stagnant water.")--as if Armitage doesn't want anything to interrupt the directness of his more serious verse, as if the obviously poetic would only curdle his intent. Part of the "New Gen" of British poets and a major player in the British poetry scene, Armitage's is a voice of importance. --Burhan Tufail

This collection of poems includes the themes of domestic tension, law and order, submerged and exploding violence, and the anarchic strain in the human psyche. Simon Armitage is the author of "Zoom!".