Simon Armitsge

Review

The best recent poetry – review roundup

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The Owl and the Nightingale, translated by Simon Armitage; Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück; Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles; Five Books by Ana Blandiana; The sea is spread and cleaved and furled by Ahren Warner

Fiona Sampson

Fri 1 Oct 2021 12.00 BST

The Owl and the Nightingale translated by Simon Armitage (Faber, £14.99)
This new work follows Simon Armitage’s earlier versions of Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in making the creative case for the readability of long Middle English poems. The Owl and the Nightingale is a comic disputation in 900 rhyming couplets: the joke – that the different orders of bird lack mutual respect, just like humans from different communities – has plenty of time to wear thin, especially as this translation has to work with the poem’s rural setting, which could appear to contemporary perspectives to lack edge. That we want to keep reading is thanks largely to Armitage’s way with language. Plain-speaking and laconic, it retains the metre and rhyme scheme of the original, while making it sound easy: it is not. This thoroughly poetic feat, rather than Faber’s somewhat twee illustrations or the arch self-references, ensures this graceful, elegant translation is a success.

Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück (Carcanet, £12.99)
A slim volume of just 15 pieces, but like all the Nobel laureate’s work, it punches above its apparent weight. Glück has always been a fastidiously exact truth-teller; her lucid poems pretend to a plainness that’s really the simplicity of something more fully worked out than the rest of us can manage. It is a hallmark of late, great writing, as is the courage to go into the dark: “Downward and downward and downward and downward / is where the wind is taking us.” This new collection once again examines close relationships without the sweetener of correct sentiment, recording the universal stages of human life through a woman’s experience. We’re back in the stylised, half-dreamed Glück landscapes that are rural equivalents of an Edward Hopper painting, and back with her astonishing poetry, as “the world goes by, / All the worlds, each more beautiful than the last”.

Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles (Picador, £10.99)
Deep Wheel Orcadia is a book of astonishments. The first is that this is a verse novel: a kind of storytelling that mainstream poetry for adults often resists. What such resistances overlook is just how much the form can contain, given poetry’s capacity to say many things at once. It threads together questions of identity and belonging, alongside examinations of deep space and Orkney, in a single concisely yet scintillatingly told tale. Giles also makes language shift like the stormy Orcadian seas. Every page of this bilingual book contains both conventional stanzaic verse in “a poetic register of the Orkney tongue”, and a prose-poem version where the same material is retold in an idiomatic English that packs in, and unpacks, the many meanings of the Orcadian. When, for example, “stoor” becomes “stormstrifestrainspeeddust”, or “Øyvind birls a pod in his lang / fingers an waatches the ship link” is rendered as “Øyvind whirlrushdancespins a pod in his long fingers and watches the ship glidetorestconnect”, English itself is returned to the reader as “something strange and rich”.

Five Books by Ana Blandiana, translated by Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea (Bloodaxe, £14.99)
The Romanian Ana Blandiana is one of Europe’s greatest living poets, and she’s well served by this substantial volume containing five previously untranslated collections. Ranging across her writing life, they create a layered portrait of a complex yet consistent poetic identity. The collection opens with poems of resistance to the Ceausescu regime’s tyranny, which in 1984 electrified Romanian society and became its first samizdat literature. There are also two collections written under Ceausescu, in which women’s embodied experiences become overlaid with and symbolise national experience. The Architecture of Waves, published in 1990 when Blandiana was 48, was her first book to appear uncensored. Also included here are two collections from the past five years, one a book-length exequy for her husband. Its title, Variations on a Given Theme, economically encapsulates the repetitive nature of mourning: and economy and focus are the hallmarks of this unflinching work of witness, to realities both intimate and international.

The sea is spread and cleaved and furled by Ahren Warner (Prototype, £12)
The brilliant writer and artist Ahren Warner makes a welcome return with this verse sequence with photographs. Warner’s fiercely intelligent earlier collections were often “furled” tight indeed, as if clenched against the forces of idiocy or blandness. Now, as he reports on a wild odyssey through the club scene of southeast Europe and beyond, his writing expands with conversation and self-talk, incident and image. Decadent but full of self-disclosure, it’s at once sexy, intellectual and self-aware. “She’s not here, i say. i know, i say, but the tears streaking my face are real, i say //and so is the way my neurons are shaking with something i have, in the past, called, love.” This story of an affair is a messy, disturbing triumph in the traditions of Arthur Rimbaud and John Berryman: how Le bateau ivre or The Dream Songs would read if they’d been written today. It too could be the anthem of a generation.

THE GUARDIAN

Poem of the week / Nest Box by Simon Armitage

 

Poem of the week: Nest Box by Simon Armitage

A drunk old man’s report of sighting an angel opens on to much broader mysteries

Carol Rumens

Mon 30 Jun 2025 10.00 

Nest Box

When the drunken old fool
saw the barn owl,

he swore blind it was an angel.
‘Half-human, half-eagle,’

he told someone in the town square.
‘White flames in mid-

a ghost with wings,’ he crowed
to the gathering crowd.

‘A weird presence
that materialised out of the heavens,’

he said to the scrum of reporters
before he keeled over.

They searched the meadow and heath
but found only pellets of small bones and teeth

and skulls and part-digested fur
and knotted hair.

Which was strange, because when the young girl
saw the angel she swore blind it was a barn owl,

but when birdwatchers went to the copse
and looked in the nest box

they found tinselly silver threads
and luminous turds

and a warm meteorite
and a few feathers made only of light.

***

Nest Box is from Simon Armitage’s Dwell, a slim hardback collection illustrated by the talented Cornish artist and printmaker, Beth Munro.

The briefly titled poems, such as Drey, Den, Hibernaculum and Insect Hotel, focus on the safe places, natural or devised, inhabited by the wildlife of the restored Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall. Eventually, we’re told, the poems will be “manifested physically at site-specific locations and in different guises” – as installations, treasure-trails, sculptures and so on. Dwell, therefore, is an illustrated print preview, an informal, engaging, often humorous short collection that will appeal to younger readers, and occasional readers, and sharpen every reader’s ecological conscience.

The Lost Gardens project, today and in its future planned restorations, has supreme ecological significance, as Dwell makes clear. It’s a story with major historical-political dimensions, too, concerning class, regionalism, and the first world war. I’m already speculating, and hoping, that a full-length collection might emerge later from the poet laureate’s heartfelt engagement with the “Willow Garden” (as its Cornish name translates). It is rich material.

While the poems in Dwell are simultaneously grounded and freely imaginative, Nest Box addresses more fundamental questions about what we define as real. It reminded me, on a first reading, of similar questions raised by one of my favourite children’s books, Skellig, by David Almond. There, the eponymous protagonist might almost be any homeless man, but, as he eventually admits to the children who have helped rescue him, he’s really “something combining aspects of human, owl and angel”. Almond acknowledges the influence of a short story by Gabriel García Márquez, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, usually classified as magic realism.

Armitage’s poem is more oblique: not contained easily in any genre box, it’s essentially concerned with questioning the human response to natural phenomena, and asking how we can provide “evidence” to challenge our possible illusions. There is an ecological force to the inquiry: humans need some enchantment to draw them into a less than self-centred concern with the environment, but we need to know what we see when we see “nature”, to best be able to preserve it. It’s a big question for ecopoets, too.

Nest Box begins when the “drunken old fool” (or supposed one) swears “blind” that he saw an angel in the sky. He burbles a riff of conflicting images: “half-human, half eagle”, “white flames in mid-air // a ghost with wings”. The reporters investigating the story, after the man has “keeled over”, search for evidence, but find only the remains of an owl’s last meal.

Armitage’s narrative, casual but determinedly objective, pursues the qualifications of rhetorical argument, the “strange” and the “but then”… A second observer, a young girl, swears her own sighting to have been a barn owl. But are the two visions incompatible? The evidence for the sighting of the angel consists of the remains of small mammals (“pellets of small bones and teeth, // and skulls, and part-digested fur / and knotted hair”). The evidence for the barn owl is pursued by birdwatchers, a breed of narrator we’d expect to be less unreliable than reporters. They check the nest box and find a mysterious, mixed assemblage: “tinselly silver threads / and luminous turds // and a warm meteorite / and a few feathers made only of light.” Are the angel and the owl sharing the nest box by any chance?

There are lively if not unpredictable “turns” as Armitage’s fast-moving, rhymed and half-rhymed couplets unroll, blending journalese and lyric tones. No adjudication is imposed: ultimately, the evidence for the nest box angel may be as unreliable as the old drunk’s sighting of the creature itself. The young and not-so-young reader’s imaginative intelligence is well-nourished. What evidence, we wonder, would show that an angel had used a nest-box meant for an owl? What is an angel? What is this one like? It’s clearly not a grumpy old man with wings, and not as grand and strange as what was seen by the “drunken old fool”, either. It’s an angel the size of a barn-owl, or smaller. Should we think of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica? Perhaps it’s not any traditional kind of angel, but, in view of the “warm meteorite”, not essentially supernatural. The muscles of ratiocination and imagination need to be continually exercised by us earth-dwellers, not least because life-forms on planets other than ours are almost certain to be discovered one day soon.

Armitage’s “Welcome Note” to Dwell is relevant to Nest Box. He describes how his grandparents fought to guard the eaves of their proudly well-maintained council house against messy nesting house martins. “This kind of inhospitality,” Armitage writes, “has increased in direct proportion to soaring human populations, and the consequence of homelessness for most living things is extinction. House martins are now a red-listed bird.” It’s something to bear in mind as we enjoy the magic and humour of the angel-owl but ponder the last traces of its residency in the well-meant nest box.

 Dwell by Simon Armitage, illustrated by Beth Munro, is published by Faber & Faber, priced £10.

THE GUARDIAN