At only 42, and with more than 15 books of poetry and prose under his belt, Simon Armitage is already one of England's most popular poets.  He is seen as holding the place formerly occupied by Phillip Larkin, as a kind of popular voice of England's collective inner life.  We have no such post here, and probably haven't since Frost.  Armitage has just made his first foray into the American poetry scene with The Shout, a fairly thin selection of poems from his British books to date.  With his self-deprecating, highly skeptical, yet humorous vision, and his command of versification, he updates Frost and Larkin and offers an accessible counterpoint to the poetry of his American contemporaries. 

       Like many of his fellow British poets—Glyn Maxwell, who is well represented in the States, foremost among them—Armitage has picked up where his influences left off.  Like Frost and Larkin, he is a formalist and mostly concerned with the dead-ends and metal traps to which desire and imagination can lead.  The center-piece of The Shout, and one of Armitage's foremost achievements, is the long poem "Five Eleven Ninety-Nine".  It is a meticulous account of the building and burning of an imagined bonfire, a kind of ritual in which all the residents of a fictional town ransack their homes for anything combustible until they burn their present and their past to cinders.  Into the blaze they toss:

a mantelpiece and a lazy susan,

a table-top, the butt of a shotgun,

a toilet seat, two thirds of a triptych,

a Moses basket with bobbins in it,

a pair of ladders, half a stable door,

a stump, one stilt, the best part of a boat,

a sight-screen stolen from the cricket field,

a hod, a garden bench, a wagon wheel.

As this gathering continues, the kindling grows increasingly gruesome, as even "seven children.../holed up inside the mound of bric-a-brac" are burned until "by one degree the brightness fades."  At this point, the townsfolk become more desperate to keep their fire going, lobbing in even more far-flung items such as "a sack of potatoes going to seed, a peacock feather, the skull of a sheep."  It gets grimmer still, but in almost twenty pages, we never know exactly why these people are compelled to light the blaze, only that they must, that they will stop at nothing to keep it stoked as long as they can.  This is typical of Armitage's surrealist mode; the poem enacts the kind of senseless self-destruction that people commit thoughtlessly all the time.  The conclusion is typical of Armitage as well:

We wait, listless, aimless now it's over,

ready for what follows, what comes after,

stood beneath an iron sky together,

awkwardly at first, until whenever.

This has the same kind of visionary power as Frost's "Directive," but instead of "[Drinking] and [being] whole again beyond confusion," which is a hopeful directive in spite of the fact that it is clearly intended as an impossible fantasy, Armitage's villagers are apathetic; having followed the compulsion to commit an incomprehensible ritual, they "stood...awkwardly," having learned nothing, having grown not at all, simply waiting passively, without direction "until whenever."  Armitage, like Larkin, does not dare to hope that humanity is moving toward a better rebirth; we repeat ourselves, as uncomprehending before as after.

            This grim vision is applied to more commonplace occurrences as well.  "Poem" is a sonnet written in a more everyday vein.  It is a highly characteristic poem and introduces a few of Armitage's virtues as well as a couple of his ticks:

And if it snowed and covered the drive

he took a spade and tossed it to one side.

And always tucked his daughter up at night

And slippered her the one time that she lied.

And every week he tipped up half his wage.

And what he didn't spend each week he saved.

And praised his wife for every meal she made.

And once, for laughing, punched her in the face.

And for his mum he hired a private nurse.

And every Sunday taxied her to church.

And he blubbed when she went from bad to worse.

And twice he lifted ten quid from her purse.

Here's how they rated him when they looked back:

sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.

Many contemporary British poets are still quite wedded to traditional renderings of traditional forms, which, to an American ear, may seem a bit stale at first.  But Armitage mocks the form as he employs it.  Locked up in this neat sonnet is a man who was, the poem at first seems to say, an average and rather orderly person who is also occasionally prone to gross acts of violence.  Finally, however, the two impulses by which he is characterized, order and violence, are put forth as equally typical of anyone: "sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that."  That last line sounds a familiar Armitage note—this man's life, his acts of caring as well as of violence, do not amount to anything exceptional.  Just like the unlikely and inexplicable bonfire of "Five Eleven Ninety Nine," this man's life is, at last, no big deal; it happened, it passed, and we are waiting around, somewhat bored, for the next thing.  By using the sonnet form—which was traditionally reserved for love, epiphanies, and concise arguments—to describe someone unremarkable, Armitage underlines one of his main tenets: we live in an age when it has become difficult to believe wholeheartedly in anything.  There are no big epiphanies in Armitage's poetry.  What is most exceptional here is the fact that, truthfully, violence in what would otherwise be thought of as an orderly family is no longer an exception. 
          In his introduction to a recent selection of Ted Hughes' poems, Armitage says that, "for some, like myself, [Hughes' poems] were a kind of Rosetta Stone—the means by which the surrounding world could suddenly be translated, understood, and experienced."  We can see the influence of Hughes, for whom nature was imbued with magical, often dark and mythic, forces, in the ways Armitage describes events in the natural world.  We can also see Armitage's desire to distance himself from kind of pastoral writing, in which nature is described with fidelity and evoked onomatopoeically, practiced by Seamus Heaney, another towering figure in contemporary British poetry.   Of course, Larkin's influence is ever-present in Armitage's desire to downplay the mythic possibilities of the natural world (or of anything), even in his choice of subjects, as in these lines from a poem about a tire:

 

Tractor-size, six or seven feet across,

it was sloughed, unconscious, warm to the touch,

it's gashed, rhinoceros, sea-lion skin

nursing a gallon of rain in its gut. 

Lashed to the planet with grasses and roots,

it had to be cut.  Stood up it was drunk

or slugged, wanted nothing more than to slump,

to spiral back to its circle of sleep,

dream another year in its nest of peat.

In this extensive description of a man-made object lost in nature, the tire is given cartoonish animal and human qualities, even given agency of its own ("...wanted nothing more than to slump"), but is also made to fade back into the dreary landscape and "its nest of peat."  The choice of an old, outsize, floppy tire as the subject for a poem is very characteristic of Armitage.  His England is no fairyland; as is the case everywhere else, it seems impossible to write about nature without a manmade object intruding, and just about anything is hard to get literally or figuratively off the ground, making a tire with "a gallon of rain in its gut" an apt figure.  But the tire does go on its own little mythic journey, though of course the journey doesn't amount to much more than a failed and gruesome fantasy.  After launching the giant tire down a hilly street,

We pictured an incident up ahead:

life carved open, gardens in half, parted,

a man on a motorbike taken down,

a phone-box upended, children erased

This whole account of childhood mischief has an inexorable downward pull.  Gravity wants the tire to stay where it is, and if it can't do that, a dark imagination ruled by the dark English landscape wants it to wreak havoc.  This is a kind of depressed myth in which even the act of imagining has a dreary end at best.  When the culprits go to inspect the results what they have done, they find that "...down in the village the tyre was gone, / and not just gone but unseen and unheard of."  The poem finally observes that, "Being more in tune with the feel of things / than science and facts, we know that the tyre / had.../.../...gone beyond itself / toward some other sphere, and disappeared."  The gun is never fired, and is spirited off stage before the climax of the show.  In fact, the climax comes when we learn that there is no climax at all.

            For Armitage, the poem is the stage on which all the things that never happen, which could have happened, can be observed.  His poems point away from life, toward what would have happened if other, perhaps better decisions were made.  They linger and ruminate.  And, finally, when the scenario is fully enacted, the disappointment fully felt, they yield the tragic beauty of dashed hopes lovingly reenacted.  "To His Lost Lover," mostly comprises a long list of undone deeds and unsaid words: "How he never raised his fingertips / to stop the segments of her lips //.../ or picked for himself the fruit of her heart, / or lifted his hand to where his own heart / was a small, dark, terrified bird / in her grip..."  Armitage walks the narrow line between originality and cliché ("How they never slept like buried cutlery—// two spoons or forks cupped perfectly together," "How he never.../ ...unraveled her hand, as if her hand // were a solid ball / of silver foil / and discovered a lifeline hiding inside it"), risking a fall in order to show how little the archetypal trappings of love really tell us about what love is.  For Armitage, it consists of regrets, missed opportunities, and, as in Hardy's poems to his deceased wife, emotions only felt in hindsight. 

           Despite all the irony at play, his poems, their sense of regret, and the melodramatic importance accorded to inner failing, are quite earnest.   The language is straightforward and accessible.  Armitage is experimental in a much more traditional manner, seeking out new ways of strictly interpreting old forms.  At times, he is too sentimental, as in "Poem," where the final effect is perhaps less surprising than he would have hoped.  But, in the current poetic climate still dominated by fragmentation and a mistrust of meaning, Armitage presents another, rather different way of approaching these problems.  The Shout offers a window into the work of a major poet at the peak of his powers.  I only hope that we are given greater access both his old and new books.