I'm Simon Armitage, I'm a poet, and I've been looking through the poetry shelves
here in Waterstones. You usually find me in the poetry corner, not just
looking for my own books, but looking for books that are particular favourites of
mine. I've picked three that sort of really span poetry's entirety in some
senses but also span my interest in poetry as a writer. So this is the
Odyssey. It's one of the foundation texts of Western literature. Two or
three or four thousand years old, we don't really know what its origins are;
even if there were an author called Homer or whether that's just kind of
some tradition. But I suppose what I admire about the Odyssey is that it's
incredibly authored. It starts in the middle of the story, it jumps back to the
beginning and then all the strands move towards this grand finale. This violent
and climactic ending to Odysseus's journey back home. But what people forget
about it I think when they're talking about it sometimes is it's a poem. Look,
it doesn't even reach the right-hand margin. It's a grand narrative but
it's a poem. And this edition I think he's particularly interesting
because despite the age of the poem this is the first ever translation, as far as
I understand, by a woman; by Emily Wilson. So it's incredibly readable, quite a sort
of modern, engaging translation of the text. And I didn't read this book until I
was, I didn't read The Odyssey until I was in my mid-twenties but it's a
kind of foundation text work for me as well. All of poetry sits partially on that book.
This is Ted Hughes's Poetry in the Making. It's a handbook of poetry, a kind
of how-to guide to writing poetry and to reading poetry
and I think I'm right in saying that it was originally written as a series of
radio broadcasts an aimed at teachers and pupils, probably secondary
school age. Just a guide to some of the fundamental ideas in poetry. But it still
makes absolute sense to me as a published writer, a writer of
some thirty years experience, and every now and again I feel as if I've forgotten
some of the fundamental principles and I go back to
this book. It tells you things like if you're writing about an object or a
landscape don't just see that as observation, try and think what it might
be like to actually be that landscape and be that object; just get inside
the subject matter. And I suppose going right from the very
beginning to something near where we are now. This is a book book of poems called
Everyone Knows I am a Haunting by Shivanee – I don't know whether it's
Ramlo-chan or Ramlo-kan – I've never heard her name pronounced. But you know in the
way sometimes you will go into to a record shop and you pick up an album, if there
were still albums as much as there used to be; and you look down the the list of
the song titles and you just know it's going to be a great record because
they're great titles. And that's true in the case of this book. These are
titles like: A Nursery Of Gods For My Half-White Child and The Abortionist's
Daughter Declares Her Love. She is a Trinidadian poet and writes about
Caribbean culture in relation to the modern world, what it's like to be a part
of that culture, what that culture expects of women and ways of behaving in
the contemporary world. It's very non-binary, it's very
transgressive and the poems are incredibly ritualistic.
The language is semi biblical on occasions but the poems all feel to me
like little ceremonies. I don't remember being as sort of excited and shocked
on occasions by a book of poems for quite a long time.