New Cemetery

The conversion of a local beauty spot into a municipal graveyard is the starting point for ‘New Cemetery’. From regular walks around the boundary near his moorland home in West Yorkshire, Simon Armitage chronicles the extraordinary transformation of landscape both outer and inner. These luminous and wry poems – composed in short-lined tercets – reflect the changing world: one of unstable weather patterns and unpredictable news events, all observed across a few acres of Pennine upland. As phases of lockdown come and go and the cemetery fills up with his new ‘neighbours’, Armitage charts personal losses of his own, often retreating to his garden shed to navigate blank paper with pen and ink – and the results are as surprising as they are life-enhancing.