The Unaccompanied: Poems

By Simon Armitage

Book Overview

From the prize-winning poet and former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom comes a powerful collection of poetry that gives voice to the people of Britain with a haunting grace.

We meet characters whose sense of isolation is both emotional and political, both real and metaphorical, from a son made to groom the garden hedge as punishment, to a nurse standing alone at a bus stop as the centuries pass by, to a latter-day Odysseus looking for enlightenment and hope in the shadowy underworld of a cut-price supermarket. We see the changing shape of England itself, viewed from a satellite "like a shipwreck's carcass raised on a sea-crane's hook, / nothing but keel, beams, spars, down to its bare bones." In this exquisite collection, Armitage X-rays the weary but ironic soul of his nation, with its "Songs about mills and mines and a great war, / lines about mermaids and solid gold hills, / songs from broken hymnbooks and cheesy films"--in poems that blend the lyrical and the vernacular, with his trademark eye for detail and biting wit.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1524732427
• ISBN13: 9781524732424
• Release Date: August 2017
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.8" x 8.2"