Simon Armitage's Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic Reviewed at The Guardian

At The Guardian, David Wheatley looks at UK poet laureate Simon Armitage's "own bulging file of commissioned work," collected in Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic (Faber & Faber). "'The poem is the cry of its occasion,' wrote Wallace Stevens, and these poems are noticeably keen to talk us through the occasions, whether in the copious endnotes or within their own text."

...An Ian Hamilton Finlay commission for an inscribed poem might have resulted in a boulder with a single word on it, but Armitage’s “In Memory of Water” comes with a prose introduction explaining where the inscribed rocks are, a post-project essay, and a postscript recounting the destruction of one of the stones during a flood. The poems previously published in Walking Home and Walking Away contain some of the sharpest landscape writing here, with clear echoes of Hughes’s Remains of Elmet, but hemmed in again with travelogue prose, carefully orienting the reader even as the poet himself gets lost.

The final stretch of this book contains some of its strongest work. The sequence “Flit” is inspired by a fictional flight from Britain in 2017 and relocation in the equally fictional European state of Ysp, where the poet takes up residency in a former leprosy hospital and translates the work of the Yspian national bard “HK”. There is a long tradition of modern poets throwing their voices by way of fake translations – Christopher Reid’s Katerina Brac makes a cameo appearance here – but Armitage reinvigorates the genre with gusto...

Read on at The Guardian.