Simon Armitage: New Cemetery, Gebunden

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From the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, a poem sequence that considers our use of the land that surrounds him, and recounts the personal tales of beauty and loss that play out on it

In the poet's home county of West Yorkshire a few years ago, the Local Authority began converting a series of cow fields at the top of the road into a new cemetery. These poems, in regular, cascading tercets, sparked into being as Simon daily walked the site, with moorlands rising beyond it and the wind turbines of Brontë country to the north, watching the land tamed: eventually the muddy construction scene gives way to fresh headstones and mown lawns, and, during the Covid-19 lockdown, the spectacle of grave-diggers in Hazmat suits and socially distanced funeral services.

These terse, sharply observed lyrics--each fancifully named for a species of moth, a creature whose numbers the poet sees dwindling across a lifetime of night walks--remind us to turn a cool eye on the doings of man, and yet to embrace all we love while we still can, as "Time, what else," stands "propped in a corner / like a cricket bat."