‘My wife has a proper job,’ Simon Armitage explained to the rows of booklovers filling the auditorium in Derby Theatre at Derby Book Festival.
I have heard him say this before and I suppose it is part of his repertoire, a performer’s patter between songs. His wry, self-deprecating manner goes down well with the audience, some of whom are long term fans like me, others who are seeing him for the first time.
He does have, though, one of this country’s top jobs – Poet Laureate – appointed by the monarch to write poems for nationally significant occasions and to be the nation’s literary voice. He has joined the ranks of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Betjeman, Ted Hughes and Carol Ann Duffy. Not that he gets paid much for his trouble. The traditional salary is £5,750 and a barrel of sherry.
He opened with his hard-hitting poem about modern life – Thank You for Waiting – and followed with Zodiac T-shirt – a poem that BBC Teach warns contains ‘adult themes’. Between top-ten hits and latest singles, he described his life as a working poet…in his Pennine garden…with his eyes closed…lying down…in a hammock. This image of a poet reflecting in tranquillity had us laughing with him as he went on to describe the inciting incident of a yet unpublished poem – Mile High Club – a hot air balloon passing a few feet overhead with a couple of newlyweds inside.
Simon Armitage’s most recent collections – Blossomise (2024) and Dwell (2025) – suggest he has been working rather hard. The poems in the first were commissioned by the National Trust to raise awareness of the arrival of spring and the role of nature in our lives. Five of the poems became lyrics to be toured from south to north, following the advance of spring by his band LYR. The next, which focuses on the fragile dwellings of our fellow species, was the result of a residency at the Lost Gardens of Heligan. He will be returning for their ‘homecoming’ festival in June.
As I stood in the merch queue after the show, waiting to have my new copies signed, the guy in front told me he hadn’t realised that Simon Armitage was a nature poet. Amongst his thousands of collectable books at home, he has a first edition of the poetry of John Clare, he said. The woman behind was a fan like me.
‘Do you write poetry?’ she asked. I confessed that I did.
‘I don’t,’ she said, firmly ‘but my husband does.’
Hardly professionals, we shyly compared our progress so far.
Before setting off for the show I had made a list of my existing acquisitions. Ten books of poetry – four of them signed – and two travelogues suggest to me that I am probably a fan but not a collector. Simon Armitage’s list of published works reminds me of what I have missed.
If being a poet isn’t a ‘proper job’ then what is poetry for? And why do any of us bother to write? One of the excuses I give myself for writing my own poems is also the reason I learned to play the harp. I may not be terribly good at it, but now, when I listen to professionally produced music, I hear things I didn’t hear before.
In returning to the pastoral, Simon Armitage appears to have given his poetry a job that John Clare might have approved of.
‘Poetry must speak up for nature when it cannot speak for itself,’ he tells us in Blossomise and – contemplating homelessness and the fragility of wild habitats – we all need someplace to Dwell.
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