Gilgamesh by Simon Armitage review – an ancient epic is brilliantly translated for our times

The poet laureate’s visceral take on the legendary Mesopotamian hero’s wild adventures is a tour de force

Philip Terry

20 October 2026

The poet laureate is paid a salary of £5,750 per annum plus a barrel of sherry. No specific duties are attached to the role, but there is an expectation that poets will write verse for public occasions and royal events, a duty that Simon Armitage has fulfilled by writing a poem on the death of Elizabeth II, Floral Tribute, and another to mark the coronation of Charles and Camilla in 2023. Though it’s an awkward time for the royals, no laureate is going to write about them behaving badly (it wasn’t John Dryden, the first laureate, who wrote about Charles II’s bedroom habits, but John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester). And yet with Gilgamesh, Armitage does deliver a poem about royalty’s misdeeds, at least in part.

From Red Doc by Anne Carson

From Red Doc

ANNE CARSON

GOODLOOKING BOY wasn’t he / yes/ blond /

yes / I do vaguely

/ you never liked

him / bit of a

rebel / so you

said / he’s the

one wore lizard

pants and

 

pearls to graduation / which at the time you admired /

they were good pearls /

you said he reminded you

of

 

your friend Mildred / Mildred taught me everything I

know she taught me how

to entertain / you must

miss

 

her / I miss her martinis [stubs cigarette] so what’s he

up to now / just got out of

the army / wounded /

 

messed up / are they giving him care / a guy shows

up with a padded envelope

of drugs every night I

guess

 

it’s care / he staying with you / for a while / behaving

himself / some days he sits

around reading Christina

 

Rossetti some days he comes out of the bathroom

covered in camouflage

paint / keep him away

from

 

your herd / did I tell you I finished Proust / oh yes /

seven years / can you

reach me

 

those matches behind you / reading it every day /

thanks / was like having

an extra unconscious /

well I’m

 

not fond of those multivolume things / there’s the

part where he’s comparing

his Tante Léonie to a

waterlily /

 

she’s a swimmer / no she’s a neurasthenic / I don’t get

it / well she’s old nervous

lives in a single room

trapped in her little

 

train of habits the pills the pains the spying out the

window / hmmm / a

waterlily caught in a

current he

 

says / could be too late for me to appreciate Proust on

the other hand I’m at a loss

I’ve read all the Len

 

Deightons in the library / hundreds of people visit his

home every year some just

burst into tears / Len

 

Deighton / no Proust / say remember that time we

were driving and crashed /

what time / I forget where

it was I

 

was driving no you were driving I was looking out

the window all of a

sudden I thought I saw a

deer racing

 

out a driveway so I start to just then my brain flashes

on it being a wooden lawn

ornament not a real one

 

WATCH OUT FOR THAT WOODEN DEER I

yelled so loud you drove

off the road into a guy’s

hedge and

 

burst into tears [she laughs he laughs] / speaking of

tears / listen [gets out a

cigarette] to that wind /

storm coming / or is it the

traffic / wind I think /

from the north sounds like

/ so your surgery is

scheduled

 

for when / the 25th / you want me to come with you /

no dear / well if you

change your mind / I

won’t

 

change my mind / I can easily / thanks though / well

/ [glances down at her

crossword] I’ll be fine /

well so / time for you to

go / I’ll call on the

weekend / take some of

those apples they’re the

kind you like

Apostle Town by Anne Carson

Apostle Town 

by Anne Carson

Anne Carson / Ciudad del apóstol

Anne Carson / Città dell’apostolo

After your death. 
It was windy every day. 
Every day. 
Opposed us like a wall. 
We went. 
Shouting sideways at one another. 
Along the road. 
It was useless. 
The spaces between us. 
Got hard. 
They are empty spaces. 
And yet they are solid. 
And black and grievous. 
As gaps between the teeth. 
Of an old woman. 
You knew years ago. 
When she was. 
Beautiful the nerves pouring around in her like palace fire.

I am very by Anne Carson

 

I AM VERY

by ANNE CARSON

I AM VERY he says tilting into the room and stops. Happy

Father’s old blue cardigan

 

Anne Carson

FATHER’S OLD BLUE CARDIGAN

By ANNE CARSON

Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair

where I always sit, as it did

on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.

I put it on whenever I come in,

as he did, stamping

the snow from his boots.

I put it on and sit in the dark.

He would not have done this.

Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky.

His laws were a secret.

But I remember the moment at which I knew

he was going mad inside his laws.

He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.

He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top.

Not only because it was a hot July afternoon

but the look on his face —

as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning

for a long trip

on cold trains and windy platforms

will sit very straight at the edge of his seat

while the shadows like long fingers

over the haystacks that sweep past

keep shocking him

because he is riding backwards.

The Anthropology of Water by Anne Carson

Anne Carson

The Anthropology of Water

by Anne Carson

I woke before dawn.
The light was a thin blade of nickel
lying on the edge of the world.

One owns nothing.
Not even this moment of passage,
where the river water becomes sea water,
where the salt begins to bite the sweetness.

Memory is a weariness of the eyes.
It seeks a shape where there is only motion.
It seeks a shore where there is only drift.

‘She does not subjugate or manipulate her words. She lets them be’ … Anne Carson. Photograph: TT News Agency

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Risk and vision … Anne Carson. Photograph: Peter Smith

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Margaret Atwood

Anne Carson’s work has long been admired among poets of many countries. For new readers, I would recommend The Beauty of the Husband – direct and visceral, funny and angry and sad – or Men in the Off Hours. Delights await!