It's a series of dramatic monologues, speaking direct into your ear and conjuring up such pictures in your mind. As the blurb says 'Here comes everybody: The man whose wife drapes a border-curtain across the middle of the marital home... an orgiastic cast of pie-worshippers at a Northern scultpure farm ... a Christian cheese-shop proprietor in the wrong part of town."
As that may suggest, some pieces made me laugh out loud...
At the annual Conference of Advanced Criminal Psychology, Dr Amsterdam and myself skipped the afternoon seminar on Offending Behaviours Within Gated Communities and went into town to go nicking stuff...
(From The Delegates)
But others were more dreamy...
When you ask me what time it is, it's purple. And when the alarm goes off in a morning it's a sort of metallic, minty green, like the noisette triangle in a packet of Quality Street - a particular favourite of mine but hard on the teeth. And when you say you love me, and whisper your love for me, personally, into my inner ear, it's custard-yellow embossed with a bold red heart, lie a door I once saw in an otherwise dried-up town on the side of a hill near Salamanca.
(From The Overtones)
To be honest, I'm still not quite sure what Simon Armitage is writing here - poems, or prose poems, or even flash fiction. They are nicely eccentric though, and by about half way through I felt fiercely and strangely protective of them. I think this book is going to spawn a whole new generation of copy-cats but if that's so, I hope they manage to keep some of that perfect balance of extraordinary imagination and empathy.
Then slowly but slowly I opened my fist to the unknown. And out of the void, slowly but slowly, it came: the pulsing starfish of a child's hand, swimming and swimming and coming to settle on my upturned palm.
(From I'll be There to Love and Comfort You)
I couldn't find any clips of Simon Armitage reading any of his poems from Seeing Stars on Youtube - but I did find a video of him deconstructing The Smith's "This Charming Man'. I'm not putting it up here because it may just put you off him for ever, but if you're interested look here, but don't say I didn't warn you...
Better still, read this book instead.
