Remove from your active Wish List Save for later

Blossomise and Dwell [electronic resource]

Armitage, Simon2025

eAudioBook

Summary

An age-old subject is given new perspectives in Blossomise, a collection with change at its heart. Blossomise celebrates the ecstatic arrival of spring blossom just as it acknowledges, too, its melancholic disappearance. Full of energetic leaps of imagination and language, the twenty-one poems hopscotch between intense momentary haikus that honour the Japanese traditions of the blossom festival and stand-alone lyrical pieces that take in the stylistic tones of ballads, hymns, songs, prayers and nursery rhymes. From a crashed Ford Capri wrapped around the immovable trunk of a cherry tree, to saplings flourishing among skyscrapers and urban sprawl, the fizz and froth of the annual blossom display is explored here both as an exuberant emblem of the natural world and a nervous marker of our vulnerable climate. Commissioned by the National Trust and published in collaboration as part of their annual Blossom programme and campaign.Simon Armitage was inspired to write the poems in Dwell by the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, an ambitious restoration project where history and mystery coexist. The reawakened landscape with its woods, meadows and 'jungle' offers a bustling, fertile realm for all sorts of creatures to inhabit. Armitage uses elements of riddle and folklore to animate a series of dwellings: the 'twig-and-leaf crow's-nest squat' of a squirrel's drey, a beaver lodge's 'spillikin stave church' and a hive's 'reactor core'. Distinctions between human and animal, natural and cultivated, are blurred, emphasising commonality and creating a vibrant account of 'non-stop stop-motion life'.