Simon Armitage: New Cemetery (Faber & Faber, 2025)
Cover Image: Insecticide 24 (2008) by Matt Collishaw
'In this collection, if the poems concern themselves with one kind of mortality,
then the moths relate to another: death within nature.'
I.
Armitage opens his new collection with a preface entitled 'Moths': "Because moths / bring word / from the dead" [a]. A moth also features on the front cover of the book; a powerful image by contemporary British artist Matt Collishaw [click here to visit his website].
And so, we're off to a good start: for moths are one of the privileged creatures on Torpedo the Ark - click here - and unlike Armitage, I do not think they are drab and dull in comparison to butterflies [b].
Armitage explains that a new cemetery was recently built near to his moorland home in West Yorkshire and that rather than object to this development, he decided to make "peace with the dead" (xi) and accept them as his new neighbours. And I think he's right; better to look out over the dear departed than a car park, shopping centre, or a new housing estate (see the poem '[Dark Brocade]', pp.4-5).
And, as it turned out, the cemetery proved a source of poetic inspiration and Armitage produced a significant number of new verses; I've not counted, but there must be over fifty or sixty poems collected here, written "in short-lined tercets linked with/by intermittent rhymes and half-rhymes" (xii).
That's a size and structure I'm personally very fond of and I loved the fact that Armitage describes the process of writing the poems and assembling them into a book as like "threading daisy chains or stringing shells" (xii).
What I didn't love, however, was Armitage's confession that, in the end, he "fell back on a fairly conventional approach" and that he belongs to a school of thought "that believes the best way of enclosing the lifespan of a written sentence is with a capital letter and a full stop" and that finally admitting to this has provided him with "a kind of grammatical relief" (xiii).
That offends me not just as an admirer of E. E. Cummings [c], but as a Nietzschean, who regards grammar as the presence of God within language, i.e., its metaphysical component subscribed to by theologians as well as pedants, pedagogues and, apparently, our present Poet Laureate [d].
Enclosing language with capitalisation and periods is an impossibility in an intertextual universe; you can no more do that than you can permanently enframe being within technology. Any logical stabilisation or relief gained can only ever be temporary.
Still, I'm happy for now to overlook this compromise with grammar - which arguably mirrors his making peace with the dead - and move on to the poems themselves, which are intriguingly named (but not titled) after a species of moth,
In a lovely passage, Armitage explains his thinking:
"Any relationship between a specific moth and the specific subject of the poem is at best ambiguous, and at times accidental. Instead, their inclusion is a form of honouring and memorialising. They are the dedicatees of the poems, and if it is stretching a point to claim that each three-line stanza should be thought of as two wings and a body part, in my mind there is something intentionally fragile, diminutive and moth-like about their construction and design." (xiv)
II.
The collection opens in Armitage's shed, where it seems he likes to (if not exactly bury) then at least busy himself with his writing: a "stripped-back world / of a wooden chair, an old desk" (3).
One thinks of Heidegger's hut; but also of Van Gogh's bare little room in the Yellow House. And perhaps even of Jesse Pope, as played by Mark Williams in The Fast Show, coming out of his shed to announce that this season, he will be mostly writing poems about moths and the recently deceased.
It is followed by '[Dark Brocade]', mentioned above, which is one of my favourites in the book, dripping as it is with contempt for the living and preference for the company of the dead who "shore up the good earth" (5).
I rather like the idea that, in some ways, the deceased are more vital than obese consumers and weed-killing gardeners.
III.
Sometimes, the writer can sit so still at the desk, lost in contemplation, that they might almost be mistaken for one of the dead by an electronic device: "a sensor detects / no movement, /no signs of life, and turns out /the one light bulb" '[Blossom Underwing]' (7).
I think it was the American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein who said: 'Stillness is our most intense mode of action. In stillness, the human being becomes a poet or most resembles an angel' [e]. Or a moth.
IV.
In its modern sense, the word smug refers to someone who is self-satisfied and shows excessive pride in their achievements; not quite arrogant, but moving in that direction.
Poets are not immune - even Armitage with his cheeky-chappie grin and boyishly annoying haircut - might be found a little smug by some readers on occasion, including me (not least when he consents to having the title Poet Laureate printed under his name on the covers of his books) [f].
But the universe, despite being the totality of all space, time, matter and energy, is not smug and nor does it possess a face and to suggest otherwise - as the poem '[Speckled Yellow]' suggests - is profoundly annoying. I do wish Armitage would abandon his attempts at humour - can't someone at Faber take him aside and speak to him about this ...?
His bathos, vulgarity, and anthropomorphism may be very knowing, but it simply isn't funny.
V.
I like '[Vapourer]': for one can never tire of descriptions of mummification.
And I like '[Pine-Tree Lappet]' for its "undying loyalty / to simple things" (20); wristwatch, comb, leather belt, shaving brush, wallet, boots, and pen. We remember the dead best of all by the objects they handled [g].
And I really like '[Figure of Eight]' - it seems to me that Armitage really ups his game when it comes to writing about foxes (even dead vixens which he's obliged to bury); perhaps they're his totem animal, who knows? [h]
Some of the poems, however, I don't really understand, or see how they belong in the collection; '[Reddish Light Arches]', for example.
And it transpires that many of the poems did, in fact, appear elsewhere originally - including the latter, which was "commissioned by Aberdeen Performing Arts, for an exhibition of poetry and illustration for the reopening of Aberdeen's Music Hall (2018)" (vi) ... So what has it to do with the new cemetery on the outskirts of Huddersfield?
VI.
The annoying thing is, when he wants - and when he resists the urge to play the joker - Armitage is capable of writing some really lovely lines, full of powerful and evocative imagery. Lines like these from '[Lunar Thorn]':
But at night
the false moon
of the moth trap
bloomed and bloomed,
the unwordly glow
of the 'black light'
drugging the air,
the lawn and flower beds
under your window
steeped in an ultraviolet brew. (42)
I would like a little more of that.
But then perhaps I'm one of those readers that Armitage lampoons in the poem '[Brown-line Bright-eye]' (47); i.e., one who wants shrivelled chestnuts, rusty apples, and human gravediggers shovelling dirt; one who cannot accept plots being dug by heavy machinery and litter being strewn on graves.
Perhaps when it comes to death I remain Romantic ...
VII.
'[Reed Leopard]' is a meditation on a millipede that ends with a terrible thought: if humanity could be vanished with just one magic word leaving the world / to the world, would you / say it? Would you / sing it out loud?" (51)
Armitage doesn't answer: but we know how Rupert Birkin would respond and his reassuring fantasy of a posthuman future expressed in Women in Love is a vision that is shared by several groups on the radical fringes of deep ecology whose members believe, like Birkin, that mankind is an obstruction and a hindrance to the future unfolding of evolution and that only man's self-extinction will allow life to continue perfect and marvellous and non-human [i].
I have to admit, I'd also find the temptation to whisper the word almost irresistible.
VIII.
Is the narrator-poet of '[Heath Rivulet]' the same as the poet-author and did he really call an exterminator "in T-shirt and shorts / to pump white dust / under a roof tile" (52)?
That is to say, did he really arrange for the destruction and removal of a wasp's nest in his attic?
I find that more than a little disappointing: readers familiar with Torpedo the Ark will recall my battle with moths in the summer of '22 and how my reluctance to spray them ultimately won out over my bourgeois desire to protect a new carpet. See the post 'Insouciance Über Insecticide' (31 July 2022): click here.
Were the lines in the preface mourning the rapid and shocking decline of insect numbers over the last twenty or thirty years [j] just so many words?
IX.
Another verse I love: '[Maiden's Blush]' ... off-white moths and ghostly barefooted women - what's not to love?
One is almost tempted to credit Armitage with having established a zone of proximity [k]. Almost.
Another verse I hate: '[Burnished Brass]' ... here's an additional anagram we can (almost) make with the author's name: I am a monster ego [l].
What is the point of this lipogrammatic exercise; is he trying to say his name is legion and that the unified subject is a convenient fiction (that the 'I' contains a multiplicity of selves)? Or that the living are all the names in history as they embody the molecules and memories of the dead? [m]
Maybe.
But this seems an overly generous (and overly philosophical) reading in my view. And the one thing I have discovered reading this book is that Armitage loves to see himself reflected in his own verse and play with his own literary persona - he's worse than Lawrence (though perhaps not as narcissistic as I can be).
X.
Speaking of Lawrence, the fat brown trout "hammocked in amber water / next to St Oswald's church" (62), reminded me of the shadowy fish that "slide through the gloom of the mill-pond" at the beginning of his debut novel The White Peacock (1911) - even though these fish were neither fat nor brown, but "grey descendants of the silvery things that had darted away from the monks, in the young days when the valley was lusty" [n].
It's funny the connections that the mind makes. Not just between literary fish, but rainbows too; cf. Armitage's "Cheap rainbows everywhere" (69) with the vast rainbow that Ursula Brangwen observes and which fills her heart with anguished hope.
For she saw in the rainbow "the earth's new architecture [...] the world built up in a living fabric of Truth" - even as realises that "the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still" [o].
And when Armitage writes: "Think of / your hand or arm / brushing / actual skin" (73), who doesn't reacall Lawrence's idea of the democracy of touch and by which he refers to:
"The touch of the feet on the earth, the touch of the fingers on a tree, on a creature, the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love." [p]
Armitage has admitted to being an admirer of Lawrence and often turns to his work for inspiration. But I wonder if he ever wishes he could write like him - or would that be admitting too much for a professional writer and Poet Laureate?
XI.
The fact that Armitage's father died when he was about to finish New Cemetery certainly adds a level of poignancy:
"I had been ready to draw a line under the collection early in 2021, but my dad's sudden death that year provoked further poetic responses, less abstract this time, driven and informed by deep personal loss." (xiii)
One wonders if it always takes the loss of a loved one - a parent, a partner, a child - to really bring home the visceral reality of death. And if that's so, what does this tell us about the limits of art and philosophy?
(Having said that, I can't stand those people who value experience above everything else and boast that they are graduates of the University of Life.)
XII.
'[Straw Dot]' and '[Grey Chi]' are two further poems worth a mention and worth a read, although they require no further commentary, except to say that Armitage's direction and cinematography are at their best in the latter and his humour at its most charming in the former.
And the line in '[Coronet]' "Here he isn't again," (94) brilliantly captures the absent presence of someone recently departed. When you enter the home of your dead mother or father, you do expect to see them rise from their chair to greet you.
It's pointless saying one doesn't believe in ghosts when the dead so obviously leave a presence of some kind. Whether we best think of this in spiritual or tangible terms is really the only point of debate; is it an emotional trace or memory left behind, or is it something a bit more like the mucous trail left behind by slugs and snails?
Either way, I find it more comforting than disconcerting to experience this presence of a loved one. And whilst I clearly have certain issues with Armitage as a poet, I'm grateful to him for this collection in which he reminds us of the important truth that although the dead are "unable to love", they are "capable still /of being loved" (100).
Notes
[a] Simon Armitage, '[Scotch Annulet]', in New Cemetery (Faber and Faber, 2025), p. 78. Future page references to this book will be given directly in the post.
[b] To be fair, Armitage goes on to concede that, upon closer inspection, one sees within the somewhat sombre colouring of moths "arrangements of dazzling complexity and hypnotic intricacy" (xiv).
[c] The 20th century American poet E. E. Cummings is known for his modernist free-form verse and much of his work uses idiosyncratic syntax and lower-case spellings in order to strip "the film of familiarity" from language and from the world, as Norman Friedman notes.
[d] In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche famously writes: "I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar ..." I'm quoting from Hollingdale's translation (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 48. For those using other editions, see the section 'Reason in Philosophy' (5).
You can tell grammar is ultimately a matter of faith by the fact that Armitage says he believes in it - that his use of it is not simply a preference or a question of convenience.
[e] I'm paraphrasing from memory, so note that this might not be entirely accurate. I'm sure readers who wish to can track down the actual quotation.
[f] No doubt Armitage was persuaded by the marketing people at Faber that this would be a good idea, but one assumes he gave permission for this. He is, of course, fully entitled to use the title Poet Laureate, but, like Foucault, I would welcome a time in which books were published in complete anonymity so that they could be judged on the contents alone and not the author's name, reputation, or title.
See Michel Foucault, 'The Masked Philosopher', in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (Semiotext[e], 1989), pp. 302- 307.
[g] See the post 'Notes on the Material Remains of My Father' (6 June 2016): click here.
[h] Armitage wrote a poem with the title 'The Fox' which can be found in Ruth Padel's 52 Ways of Looking At a Poem (Vintage, 2004), p. 138. See also his fox poem 'Den', in the collection titled Dwell (Faber & Faber, 2025), pp. 12-13.
[i] See D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 127-129. See also my post on the movement for voluntary human extinction (12 Oct 2013) - click here - and my post 'Birkin and the Ichthyosaur' (7 Mar 2023): click here.
[j] Insects in the UK have experienced a severe (and ongoing) decline throughout the 21st century. Studies indicate a drop in numbers of over 60% between 2004 and 2023. See my post 'Insecticide and the Eco-Apocalypse' (21 Oct 2017): click here.
[k] A zone of proximity is a concept used by Deleuze and Guattari to describe a chaotic space wherein distinct forms, subjects, or species - such as human and insect - lose their boundaries and become indistinguishable (thus they sometimes refer to it as a zone of indiscernibility). It is such zones, in other words, that allow the process of becoming to unfold.
The reason that I hesitate before saying such is what Armitage establishes in his poem is because he shows little inclination to think in such terms and I don't want to simply map alien concepts and personal concerns on to his work. Needless to say, however, it would add a good deal of interest and philosophical depth to his poetry were he to do so.
[l] This only works if I am kindly given permission to swap an unwanted 'i' for an additional 'a' and 'e'.
[m] See the post 'Even the Dead Don't Rest in Peace' (2 July 2013) - click here - in which I argue that, thanks to the conservation of mass, the carbon atoms of the departed are forever recycled and reincarnated and in this way the souls of the dead might be said to re-enter and pervade the souls of the living. See also the related post: 'Atomic: the D. H. Lawrence Memorial Post' (1 Mar 2021): click here.
[n] See D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 1. The poem by Armitage I'm quoting from is '[Shining Marbled]'.
[o] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 458-459. The poem by Armitage I'm quoting from is '[Mother Shipton]'.
[p] D. H. Lawence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 323.
For my thoughts on another recent collection of poems by Armitage - Dwell (2025) - please click here.
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