Simon Armitage’s new collection is by turns a voice and a chorus: a hyper-vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, parables and tall tales. Here comes everybody: Snoobie and Carla, Lippincott, Wittmann, Yoshioka, Bambuck, Dr Amsterdam, Preminger. The man whose wife drapes a border-curtain across the middle of the marital home; the English astronaut with a terrestrial outlook on life; an orgiastic cast of unreconstructed pie-worshipers at a Northern sculpture farm; the soap-opera supremacists at their zoo-wedding; the driver who picks up hitchhikers as he hurtles towards a head-on collision with Thatcherism; a Christian cheese-shop proprietor in the wrong part of town; the black bear with a dark secret, the woman who curates giant snowballs in the chest freezer. Celebrities and nobodies, all come to the ball. I am a sperm whale. I carry up to 2.5 tonnes of an oil-like balm in my huge, coffin shaped head. I have a brain the size of a basketball, and on that basis alone am entitled to my opinions. I am a sperm whale. When I breathe in, the fluid in my head cools to a dense wax and I nosedive into the depths. My song, available on audiocassette and compact disc is a comfort to divorcees, astrologists and those who have ‘pitched the quavering canvas tent of their thoughts on the rim of the dark crater’. – from ‘The Christening’ The storyteller who steps in and out of this human tapestry changes, trickster-style, from poem to poem, but retains some identifying traits: the melancholy of the less deceived, crossed with an undercover idealism. And he shares with many of his characters a star-gazing capacity for belief, or for being ‘genuine in his disbelief’. Language is on the loose in these poems, which cut and run across the parterre of poetic decorum with their cartoon-strip energies and air of misrule. Armitage creates world after world, peculiar yet always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected.
Seeing Stars
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Book Description
From the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, comes a striking new collection.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Simon Armitage’s new collection is by turns a voice and a chorus: a hyper-vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, parables and tall tales. Here comes everybody: Snoobie and Carla, Lippincott, Wittmann, Yoshioka, Bambuck, Dr Amsterdam, Preminger. The man whose wife drapes a border-curtain across the middle of the marital home; the English astronaut with a terrestrial outlook on life; an orgiastic cast of unreconstructed pie-worshipers at a Northern sculpture farm; the soap-opera supremacists at their zoo-wedding; the driver who picks up hitchhikers as he hurtles towards a head-on collision with Thatcherism; a Christian cheese-shop proprietor in the wrong part of town; the black bear with a dark secret, the woman who curates giant snowballs in the chest freezer. Celebrities and nobodies, all come to the ball. The storyteller who steps in and out of this human tapestry changes, trickster-style, from poem to poem, but retains some identifying traits: the melancholy of the less deceived, crossed with an undercover idealism. And he shares with many of his characters a star-gazing capacity for belief, or for being ‘genuine in his disbelief’. Language is on the loose in these poems, which cut and run across the parterre of poetic decorum with their cartoon-strip energies and air of misrule. Armitage creates world after world, peculiar yet always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
By S. Seel
Format:Hardcover
Being sent this by the Poetry Society, I had at first thought there was a mistake. This was not poetry but it was a delightful book full of poignant and beautiful words. Wonderfully written, each short piece is a gem but somehow I still felt cheated - where was the poetry?
The vignette of two people sharing the same room which had been divided by a net curtain strung across the middle which was gradually eaten by moths and yet still they stayed in their own halves filled me with a deep sorrow. Each short piece is so descriptive and worthy of another read at a later date.
The book reminds me of life - full of different events joined together but still not of one piece.
Dont worry whether its poetry or not - just enjoy it.
The vignette of two people sharing the same room which had been divided by a net curtain strung across the middle which was gradually eaten by moths and yet still they stayed in their own halves filled me with a deep sorrow. Each short piece is so descriptive and worthy of another read at a later date.
The book reminds me of life - full of different events joined together but still not of one piece.
Dont worry whether its poetry or not - just enjoy it.
16 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Oh I wish I was a writer ! (but I int). If I were a writer tho', I'd be jealous to death of this little book. I'd probably give up writing I'd be that peeved.
Seeing Stars is a collection of 39 delightful, round, shiny, perfectly formed "gemulets" of prose. It's an album full of hit singles like we used to get, back in the old days.
The concept is pure genius : Tiny, nonsensical tales involving the warmest of characters, filled to the brim with beautiful language we use every day but rarely see written down.
You may have to stop half way thro', do something solemn for a bit just to give the smiling muscles a rest.
When you get to the end (it is only 74 pages) you just flick back to the start and read it all over again.
Thanks Simon, it's a beautiful thing.
Seeing Stars is a collection of 39 delightful, round, shiny, perfectly formed "gemulets" of prose. It's an album full of hit singles like we used to get, back in the old days.
The concept is pure genius : Tiny, nonsensical tales involving the warmest of characters, filled to the brim with beautiful language we use every day but rarely see written down.
You may have to stop half way thro', do something solemn for a bit just to give the smiling muscles a rest.
When you get to the end (it is only 74 pages) you just flick back to the start and read it all over again.
Thanks Simon, it's a beautiful thing.
12 of 16 people found the following review helpful
By the examiner
Format:Hardcover
'Seeing Stars' marks something of a departure from Armitage's other poetry, in fact, from poetry itself, as the vast majority of the pieces here are flash fiction stories.
They are entertainingly bizarre and full of pop culture, sport and political figures - characters called James Cameron, an artist called Damien, Manic Street Preachers, Ricky Wilson, Richard Dawkins and his friend Terry (one for the literary brigade there), lots of famous Dennis's, and a poet called Simon Armitage all feature. Many of the pieces have darker socio-political undertones, which has always been a feature of SA's poetry.
The problem is that it all gets a bit repetitive. One of poetry's great strengths is its variety: that it can thunder along in rhymed couplets, then float about in free verse, be intensely claustrophobic in a haiku and so on, all within one collection. If he's making a point by flattening out poetry into prose, it comes at the expense of reading enjoyment. It's like buying a box of Quality Street only to find it full of the green triangles - nice enough, but not really what you want.
And for someone so heavily immersed in pop culture ('Travelling Songs' aside) it's always surprised me that he doesn't have more 'hit single' poems and employ greater use of form and metre; Don Paterson and others have proved this is still possible to do successfully in this form-phobic day and age.
Read SA's friend and fellow poet Glyn Maxwell's 'Hide Now' if you're after more in the way of poetic invention and versatility.
I look forward to Armitage's next novel - maybe there will be some poems in it.
They are entertainingly bizarre and full of pop culture, sport and political figures - characters called James Cameron, an artist called Damien, Manic Street Preachers, Ricky Wilson, Richard Dawkins and his friend Terry (one for the literary brigade there), lots of famous Dennis's, and a poet called Simon Armitage all feature. Many of the pieces have darker socio-political undertones, which has always been a feature of SA's poetry.
The problem is that it all gets a bit repetitive. One of poetry's great strengths is its variety: that it can thunder along in rhymed couplets, then float about in free verse, be intensely claustrophobic in a haiku and so on, all within one collection. If he's making a point by flattening out poetry into prose, it comes at the expense of reading enjoyment. It's like buying a box of Quality Street only to find it full of the green triangles - nice enough, but not really what you want.
And for someone so heavily immersed in pop culture ('Travelling Songs' aside) it's always surprised me that he doesn't have more 'hit single' poems and employ greater use of form and metre; Don Paterson and others have proved this is still possible to do successfully in this form-phobic day and age.
Read SA's friend and fellow poet Glyn Maxwell's 'Hide Now' if you're after more in the way of poetic invention and versatility.
I look forward to Armitage's next novel - maybe there will be some poems in it.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Resuscitating the Prose Poem
Whether you believe the prose poem is dead, should be dead, or is in fact alive and well, this offering from Armitage comes across as being little more than on life support. Read more
Published 24 months ago by Shaun
2.0 out of 5 stars
light reading: too twee
I don't know where I got the idea that Armitage was some ungodly hybrid of Benjamin Peret & David Shrigley, but he's more Nick Hornby does an Edward Monkton greetings card in... Read more
Published on 24 Nov 2010 by speaking pony
3.0 out of 5 stars
Adequate Appropriation
Perhaps what is most frustrating with Armitage's most recent offering, is its blatant appropriation of the American poet James Tate's surreal narrative style. Read more
Published on 15 Nov 2010 by Ms. Francesca P. Creed
3.0 out of 5 stars
Is it a bird? Is it a plane?
No, dear reader, it is flash fiction. Many reviewers have been bewildered by these pieces - are they prose poems, unsuccessful poems, extended epigrams? Read more
Published on 24 Aug 2010 by Waterbaby
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