Is Simon Armitage the greatest poet of his generation, the greatest English poet after Larkin? I don’t know, but I know a couple of critics of English poetry who would put their hands on their heads when they heard this. And despite everything, even despite the fact that Armitage is becoming more and more a character for himself, how can we forget the change he produced in English poetry in the 80s, how can we forget this voice that became smaller to adapt to the dimensions of his time, which gave the measure of our moral losses and portrayed our infinite absurdities, which pointed out to so many beings of an England increasingly adrift plagued by those contemporary syndromes of consumption and malaise. Armitage has always sung the peripheries with a language of the periphery, a periphery that is not only his native region of Yorkshire but also those of humor, irony and the orality of sad common life. POETRY ‘Paper airplane. Selected poems 1989-2014’ Author Simon Armitage Editorial Impedimenta Year 2024 Pages 416 Price 24.95 euros 4In his poems we find both the density of the colloquial, and that openness to the pop, to the urban, to a nature where birds and The trees, the landscapes are part of an industrial reality. It demystifies everything, but from a melancholy that becomes amazement, from a criticism that can be political as it fixes its gaze on the strange behaviors of beings in a society in ruins, in the ruins of a welfare state that becomes increasingly more unlikely. In his great poems, in those poems that we like to remember about him, Armitage turns life into a Martianada, that is, into a strangeness. They are poems so simple that they hurt, so complex at the same time that they show with total coldness that which collapses: illusions, dreams, outings to the pub on the corner, domestic misadventures, childhood, almost clandestine loves, travel. Armitage has always sung the peripheries with a language of the periphery. In them he places us before a tableau of men and women who have lost their minds and who show us the arrhythmia of their lonely hearts. The lyric in him is narrative, or vice versa, because in many aspects his poetry is related to what this art was, for example, for a medieval poet. It is not strange that he tries to seduce the public with his apparently very real stories, that he dramatizes his voice and puts that certain breath as an epic of everyday life, that he frequently resorts to the structure of the song to become closer and more intimate. , he who has put his word in relation to music bands like and who has formed his own musical groups, who was born with punk and has arrived at rap like someone who reaches a source of the melancholy of our time. Disturbator Talking about him a few years ago with one of those poetry critics, told me that we had to remember with interest the novelty of his first books and regret that later he had become an irregular poet. It was true, he told me, that he had tried to expand his poetry to new territories, but that he had not always managed to maintain the charm that so seduced his readers. I don’t want to imagine what he must have thought when reading the poem that he dedicated, as Poet Laureate, to Queen Elizabeth II after her death. Beyond this, I like to think of Simon Armitage as someone who has given us a long handful of memorable poems, who has spoken about the ghosts of this time without trying to justify, understand or interpret, only to show and do so disturbingly. This anthology that he has produced, with a very accurate translation by Jordi Doce, will not let me lie.
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