Search results for ""Author Simon Armitage""

The poems in this volume were written in response to three anniversaries relating to three separate conflicts. Told from the point of view of an English trader working in the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, the poem-film Out Of The Blue was commissioned by Channel 5 and broadcast five years after the 9.11 attacks on America. It won the 2006 Royal Television Society Documentary Award. 'We May Allow Ourselves A Brief Period Of Rejoicing' (a quote from one of Churchill's post-war speeches), was also commissioned by Channel 5, and broadcast on the sixtieth anniversary of VE Day. The radio-poem "Cambodia" was commissioned by the BBC for "The Violence of Silence", a radio drama set in today's Cambodia thirty years after the rise of the Khmer Rouge.

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In Simon Armitage's work, there has always been a territory he identifies as 'a twilight zone' where poetry and song lyric converge. He has explored it through numerous enterprises - most recently with the 'ambient post-rock' band Land Yacht Regatta. Many of the lyrics collected here were written for LYR. Others are drawn from Armitage's days with the DIY indie band The Scaremongers, various film and theatre productions including Songbirds and the BAFTA-winning Feltham Sings, and other miscellaneous ventures. The volume's 'Intro' charts these projects and the blurred origins of ritualised language, while its 'Outro' offers contextualising notes and anecdotal insights.Never Good with Horses further demonstrates the rich range of Armitage's repertoire and celebrates his ear for the music of language, harnessed here for the page.

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One summer, Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way - a challenging 256-mile route usually approached from south to north, with the sun, wind and rain at your back. However, he resolved to tackle it back to front, walking home towards the Yorkshire village where he was born, travelling as a 'modern troubadour', without a penny in his pockets and singing for his supper with poetry readings in village halls, churches, pubs and living rooms. Walking Home describes his extraordinary, yet ordinary, journey of human endeavour, unexpected kindnesses and terrible blisters.The companion volume, Walking Away, is published in June 2015.

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A STUNNING COLLECTION OF POEMS CURATED BY THE NEW POET LAUREATE AND THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF FOUR FIELDS___________________________'Some of the most ethereal verse ever written' Sunday Telegraph 'A glorious collection of works old and new' Independent on Sunday 'Truly inexhaustible . . . to be read again and again' Daily Mail 'A rich and sustaining larder, a marvellously realized sourcebook of flights of feathered fancy' Guardian 'A life-affirming celebration of the commonplace yet enduringly mysterious creatures we share this world with and the poetry they have inspired' Daily Telegraph

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A Rough Trade Book of the Year'No one has captured the look of alternative UK music over the past half a century more tellingly than Kevin Cummins.' - Simon Armitage'Kevin Cummins is a true master in being able to capture the essence of music, the soul of the band. Whatever he does however he does it is a mystery to me but it's pure genius.' - Rankin'Few photographers had such a close connection to The Fall as Manchester-based Kevin Cummins, and his new book, Telling Stories, is a rich visual history of one of the city's most beloved and enduring bands.' - Record Collector Magazine 'Kevin has the uncanny ability of capturing the inner mood of musicians. Be it the dynamics within a pensive Joy Division, or the sense surrounding the fledgeling Fall that something special was around the corner for us all. Kevin's book is nothing less than a remarkable document of a bewildering and defiant anti-fashion movement born in Prestwich, north Manchester in the grimy mid-70s.' - Marc Riley'Capturing forty years of the band's career via his archive, the legendary photographer (whose recent book, Juvenes, documented the story of Joy Division) gives his take on the phenomenon of The Fall and the late, great Mark E. Smith.' - Vive le Rock Contains never-before-seen images.Foreword by Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate. From chaotic early gigs to their final years, NME photographer Kevin Cummins provides a definitive, unique perspective on cult favourites The Fall. In this stunning visual history spanning four decades, discover how and why they emerged as one of the most innovative, boundary-breaking bands in modern music.With a foreword by Poet Laureate and Fall fan Simon Armitage and an interview with Eleni Poulou, as well as never-before-seen images from Cummins' archive, this is the ultimate visual companion to The Fall.

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The newly drawn Stanza Stones Trail runs through forty-seven miles of the Pennine region, some of the most strikingly varied landscape in the world. The terrain bears the deep scars of industrial exploitation, as well as those less obvious: the signs left by a hundred local generations are carved into the region's abounding rocks. Simon Armitage was born and raised here, in the village of Marsden, and in 2012 he was commissioned through the Ilkley Literature Festival to write site-specific poetry. Armitage composed six new poems on his Pennine walks and, with the help of local expert Tom Lonsdale and letter-carver Pip Hall, found extraordinary, secluded sites and saw his words carved into stone. This book is a record of that journey, containing the poems and the accounts of Lonsdale and Hall. The many layers of stone and sediment found beneath the surface of the rock reflect the drama of the landscape itself. Covered in decades of industrial soot and grime, the colours released by the carver's tools will likely never return to shades of black and grey, but become a small reminder of the changes that our natural environment undergoes, and the marks, small and large, of humankind.

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'The Forward Prizes have turned a spotlight on contemporary poetry which is both searching and glamorous'Carol Ann Duffy100 Prized Poems brings together the best of the poems published over a quarter century in twenty-five editions of the Forward books of poetry, a series highlighting the works commended annually for the prestigious Forward Prizes.The roll-call of poets included is a Who's Who of poetry excellence and includes both familiar names - Simon Armitage, Jackie Kay, Derek Walcott - and fresh voices - Kae Tempest, Kei Miller and Emily Berry. This anthology of anthologies is a great way of encountering the richness that new poetry has to offer.

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Simon Armitage turns Hansel & Gretel into a darkly glittering fairy tale for grown-ups. In vivid and trenchant language, he puts a contemporary spin on the tale we know from the Brothers Grimm. Here is a twenty-first century story, whose preoccupations are poverty and hunger, war and flight, a shifting dystopian landscape where nothing is quite as it seems.Text and illustration fuse beautifully to summon a nightmarish vision that nonetheless contains humour and humanity and the possibility of a more hopeful future to come.

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"The World Record" is an international anthology of work by poets from all the countries taking part in the 2012 London Olympics, featuring a poem from each of the 204 Olympic nations, from Armenia to Tuvalu, Azerbaijan to Turkmenistan. With this book you can discover the world through its keenest observers, political activists and most articulate wordsmiths. There's something for every taste: new voices as well as world greats, rappers and spoken word artists as well as poets and storytellers. "The World Record" marks the first time so many living poets from so many countries have been gathered together in one anthology - and 2012 is the first time so many poets have been gathered in one place. Up to 204 poets come together in London for Poetry Parnassus, a week-long celebratory gathering as part of the finale of the Cultural Olympiad, the Festival of the World and the London 2012 Festival. This visionary festival at London's Southbank Centre features poets from all participating Olympic nations giving readings, talks and performances. Poetry Parnassus is a monumental poetic happening worthy of the spirit and history of the Olympics. Introduced by the festival's curator, Simon Armitage, "The World Record" shows how poetry crosses all international boundaries to speak to readers everywhere.

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