Former probation officer at festival
ARGUABLY the highlight of this year’s Rochdale Literature and Ideas Festival will be the festival finale, An Evening with Simon Armitage CBE.
Award-winning poet Simon, who was born in 1963 in the village of Marsden and now lives in West Yorkshire, will be delving into his most recent collections of poems, The Unaccompanied and Flit.
Simon is a graduate of Portsmouth University, where he studied geography. As a postgraduate student at Manchester University, his masters thesis concerned the effects of television violence on young offenders.
Until 1994 he worked as probation officer in Greater Manchester.
The Unaccompanied documents ‘a world on the brink, a world of unreliable seasons and unstable coordinates, where Odysseus stalks the aisles of cut-price supermarkets in search of direction, where the star of Bethlehem rises over industrial Yorkshire and where alarm bells for ailing communities go unheeded or unheard. Looking for certainty, the mind gravitates to recollections of upbringing and family, only to encounter more unrecoverable worlds.’
Shaped, as ever, through Simon’s gifts for clarity and detail, as well as his characteristic dead-pan wit, insightful, relevant and empathetic, these poems confirm The Unaccompanied as a bold new statement of intent by one of our most respected and recognised living poets.
The Flit is published by Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), where Simon was poet in residence throughout 2017.
The residency saw Simon, a regular visitor to YSP, choose to explore its landscape, sculptures and buildings in a new light.
Rather than writing a direct commentary on the park, he has redefined it as its own country, the little known YSP (pronounced eesp).
The resulting 40 poems tell the story of YSP through his eyes as an outsider getting to grips with life in an unfamiliar place during a period of self-imposed exile.
Simon said: “I wanted to think of myself as a visitor or immigrant to this place, investigating its customs, legends and traditions, wandering with a notebook and observing its latter-day comings and goings.”
Flit is illustrated with Simon’s photographs, taken throughout the year, which have been coloured and, in some cases, overlaid with collages of elements from historic engravings. The 40 poems vary greatly in form and length, from short fragments to extended free verse and even include translations from the oeuvre of YSP’s own renowned but mysterious fellow immigrant poet, known only as HK.
An Evening with Simon Armitage will be held on Monday, October 22, from 7pm to 8pm, at Rochdale Parish Church, St Chad’s. Tickets cost £12. Visit rochdaleliteraturefestival. co.uk.