Seeing Stars.

Seeing Stars; Simon Armitage's new poetry collection, published by Faber& Faber, 2010.

As usual in Simon Armitage's work, tradition clashes against modernity, sometimes making day-glo borders. In this collection, persons and places, pieces of history are thrown together into latterday, sometimes horror-style fairy tales using a prose style. These are not exactly cautionary tales, though their author is no doubt familiar with the work of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Hilaire Belloc and Aesop. They are twisted, surreal tales, edgy fantasies.
There are resentments, revenges and crimes, some petty, some as serious as murder. There are one or two murders in Seeing Stars, just as there have been in earlier collections where, for example a hitch-hiker picked up in Leeds has been bludgeoned to death with a Krooklok by the narrator or a man living off a family is eventually drowned in their bath and dumped in the countryside ( Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, 2002).
There are failed relationships. In 'An Accomodation', there is the net curtain that the narrator's wife has draped between their rooms, their lives, because they had agreeed that 'something had to change.'
'There it remains to this day...this ravaged lace/ suspended between our lives, keeping us/ inseperable and betrothed.'
Actual people, alive or dead make their entrances. Well-known people whose Christian names were all Dennis pop up. Armitage has the Lord Mayor of Leeds in one poem and Richard Dawkins as a graverobber in another.
'Do you believe in God,' Dawkins asks the narrator. These are, perhaps, postmodern fables. 'Knowing what we know now' is the nearest we come to caution. A man approaching middle age, the age of uncertainty( 'the tipping point' as Armitage has it) is made a 'special offer' of being able to reverse his age by an elf. At first tempted, he then pulls himself up short. Such an act would surely be morally indefensible, to regain his youth whilst his wife Annie is propelled into old age and infirmity. Then the awful image pops up of his baby self suckling her as she ages. Thus he declines the Faustian deal. The elf, it is then revealed, has already granted Annie the reversal wish and has, we assume, made off with her!
In 'Michael' we start out by being told the (Armitage?) theory that 'the first thing we ever steal , when we're young is a symbol of what we become later/ in life. In the poem, the narrator talks about his young son catching a fish and 'stealing' it by 'slapping it dead on a / flat stone.' Later, as they prepare for bed, he asks his son 'So what d'you think you'll be, when you grow up?' His son answers 'I'm going to be an executioner.' His father's consternation is met with the rebuff 'Now go to sleep, dad.'
There is a feeling , reading each of the stories in this collection with their bizarre twists and turns that they could have gone on for longer, that their author had to bring each one of them, reluctantly, to a close. They fizz along with a youthful exuberance and a sometimes devilish laddishness. Slapstick and frankly absurd, unashamed elements are always creeping into the scripts. Stunts are always taking place.
'Damien likes to roll up a ginormous snowball then store it in the chest freezer in/ the pantry for one of his little stunts.' ( 'Upon opening the Chest-Freezer'). His wife disapproves and there is often marital disapproval in the unravelling of the prose-poems.
There are stories embedded within stories, like Russian Dolls. There are dizzying diversions at every turn. Just when you think you are being invited to share a joke, a situation, albeit an unreal one, the tale veers off somewhere else so that you might start off by reading an absurdist script rather like the beginning of an Armstrong and Miller sketch only to find it embedded in a larger absurdity in which a distinctly British and dark humour may be discerned.
'Last Words' is a theatrical example. The subject has been bitten by a tiny spider hiding in a packet of courgettes. As paralysis takes hold, she manages to reach the phone and calls (for help, she hopes) her brother, who is always unavailable (playing golf), then her mother, who's only interested in chiding her for failing to return petty household items such as a pastry brush. In desperation, she phones a random number and speaks to a man who, coincidentally, is also dying an absurd death.
'They chatted for a while, not caring a hoot about the cost of premium-rate international calls during peak periods' In a cartoon-like sequence, they chat each other up and are overtaken by death. The story then cuts to an audience 'watching' this action, we presume, on a stage.
' There was a horrible pause, as we sat there wondering whether to applaud.'
In the first half of 'The Accident', we have the comedic situation of a man whose district nurse, called to treat his burns injury, suspects him of having sustained the burns injury via an act of retaliation by a wife who he's been beating up.
In 'Collaborators' a barber has to pretend to 'shave' a man who, though under the illusion of having an abundance of hair, is completely bald, in order to humour him. The man pays the barber in pretend money.
'The Personal Touch.' has an exasperated girlfriend telling her her boyfriend ( 'cohabitee' as Armitage has him ) ''Paul, space is what I want and space is what I need. Do I have to SPELL it out?" The cohabitee buys the 'space' in a Halford's-type store after viewing a slection of types of 'space', drops it on her doorstep then zooms off in the unwanted Mercedes Roadster he had given her for Christmas. It's tempting to see something autobiographical in this scenario.
In the title piece, 'Seeing Stars', the narrator, here a pharmacist, embarrasses a young couple who want a pregnancy testing kit with his nudge-nudge remarks. He is upbraided by the husband of the couple and tries to smooth over his embarassment by offering something free from the pharmacy. When the couple demand speed and heroin "And you can throw in a syringe while you're at it", the hapless pharmacist overreaches himself "but think of the baby". For this indiscretion, he is knocked to the floor.
'When people have received a blow to the head they often talk about 'seeing stars', and as a man of science I have always been careful to avoid the casual use of metaphor and hyperbole.But I saw stars that day. Whole galaxies of stars, and planets orbiting around them, each one capable of sustaining life as we know it.'
This is Armitage at his familiar, well-loved craft.
His work is always threaded through with Northern touches. There are appearances by Councillor Bill Hyde, 'The Right Worshipful Mayor of the City of Leeds', the Pennines 'The Great Divide', Roundhay Park,and The Calls Hotel( the 'Knightsbridge of the North'). Leeds, population 715,403, the M621 and the Yorkshire Evening Post all make their appearance.
Armitage even memorialises himself, albeit with self-deprecation in 'Bringing it all back home'.
'But the event which really caught my eye was the Simon/ Armitage Trail, a guided tour which promised to take in 'every nook and cranny of the poet's youth.'
This 46 year-old poet is diffident. In 'Selected Poems' he has the narrator say 'No convictions-that's my one major fault. Nothing to tempt me to scream and shout, nothing/...a man like me could be a real handful...but no cause, no cause.'
He's been around for about twenty years and has published eleven volumes of poetry.
This is his first excursion into a prose style, though he insists that Seeing Stars is poetry,art rather than prose, protest art at that. "By definition" Armitage tells Alan Franks in an interview (The Times 24.04.2010.) in consideration of the function of poetry "The fact that you aren't willing to have a right-hand margin or even go to the bottom of a page is a protest in its own right. Whatever you are , you are not a prose writer. Stubbornly not. Even though they ( the poets) might go as far as they dare to engage or entertain or whatever, they are a dissenting voice because they aren't going to appeal to everybody. And if they do appeal to everybody, then they are not doing their job."
There's no sign of form or tradition. Armitage is adamant that "they are poems because I say they are."
He enjoys wordplay and tinkering around at the edges "'I've still some messing around to do."
Here is a writer who enjoys fantasy for its own sake. Who likes unrestrained experimentation. Who balks at the idea of poetry and writing as a 'day job' but likes to splash on a canvas randomly when he pleases.
As he himself says "it would be impossible, financially and in any other way to do it full-time."
The poet, this poet, likes to tinker with the creative engine as befits his curiosity. In the Alan Franks interview he talks about 'the dream which poets have of being able to do exactly what you want' and then adds ' if you start hitting obligations and obstacles, then the dream is not alive as it might be.' A dream then.
We gain an insight into where his train of thought often leads him in 'Beyond Huddersfield.'
'I thought a lot about that bear. With every recollection he became more wretched and/ undignified in my mind, and I couldn't suppress the/ escalation of inglorious imagery'.
There's a glimpse too into his own attitude towards writing, specifically poetry writing. In 'The Knack', a third person Boris is trying to write.
'Boris was sitting in a field of bullocks...trying to be a writer. There were many wild flowers waiting/ patiently to be described. But every time his pen/ made contact with the paper his hand skidded and/ jumped.
He succumbs to a loss of muscle control which prevents him from writing and rather likes it.
'and/ after a time he gave up fighting it and let the pen/ wander at will.. And although arbitrary, the peaks/ and troughs it produced had a confidence about/ them, something you couldn't argue with, like a / cross-section of the Alps' Eventually Boris/ found himself quite detached from his notepad... The flowers were still waiting.'

The flowers will have to wait.