Kid
Kid is a poetry collection that moves through youth, pressure, and urban observation. Its restrained voice lets image and repetition build emotional pressure.
Work Information
A compact poetry collection shaped by youth and pressure.
Kid returns repeatedly to youth, pressure, and urban observation, building a collection from exact images and low-key tension. The result is controlled on the surface but lingering in its aftereffects.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Faber & Faber
- Published
- 2002-03-18
- Pages
- 96 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13 x 0.9 x 19.7 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780571166077
- ISBN-10
- 0571166075
- Price
- 2813 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction
Kid gives us one of the liveliest poetic voices to have emerged in the last ten years. Simon Armitage's inspired ear for the demotic and his ability to deal with subjects that many poets turn their backs on have marked him as a poet of originality and force.
Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. A recipient of numerous prizes and awards, his collections of poetry include Seeing Stars (2010), The Unaccompanied (2017), Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic (2019), Magnetic Field (2020) and his acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007). He writes extensively for television and radio, and is the author of two novels and the non-fiction bestsellers All Points North (1998), Walking Home (2012) and Walking Away (2015). His theatre works include The Last Days of Troy , performed at Shakespeare's Globe in 2014. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, and, in 2018, he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Simon Armitage is Poet Laureate.
Reviews
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If you studied Simon Armitage at GCSE or A-Level in the 90s/00s and still carry those poems in your heart and mind, this collection is for you. The tone is consistent throughout and really fleshes out those attitudes that Armitage was trying to express at the time.
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Each poem in this collection is like a world unto itself. Dark and funny poetry peopled with those whose voices are not often heard.
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‘Kid’ won the Best First Collection prize in the 1993 Forwards. It was a good collection to read in comparison with the winner of the Best Collection prize which was taken home by Thom Gunn’s ‘The Man with Night Sweats’. Whereas Gunn’s poetry was often more formally austere, though still colloquial and accessible, and was steeped in an elegiac tone as it pondered the fallout from the AIDS epidemic of the late eighties and nineties, a collection very much of its zeitgeist, Armitage’s collection seemed much more demotic in its tone and wide subject matter. Don’t get me wrong, there are superior formal qualities to Armitage’s work but as a whole the collections seems more lyrically dextrous than Gunn’s, with the voices of Armitage’s speakers often coming across as world-wise likely lads, or slightly sinister, shifty blokes you wouldn’t trust with the change from a tenner. The collection is also humorous, often darkly so, with strange people and scenarios cropping up throughout – all of which leaves you quietly unsure of your footing as a reader. ‘Gooseberry Season’ and ‘Brass Neck’ are good examples, with the poems exploring seedy, slightly unbelievable but at the same time entirely plausible worlds. What I like about the poems as a whole is that you get to look into the secret worlds of these characters, to understand the myriad of different things that must go on behind all the closed doors in our towns and cities, a kind of vignette of desire, want and action. The only poems that didn’t really do it for me were the ‘Robinson’ poems which detailed the life of an eponymous protagonist, telling of scrapes and incidents scattered throughout the collection. For me there was no connection with the character and he came across unsympathetic and a little bland. These poems seemed to lack to fizz and vitality of the others in the collection. This aside though, the collection is really good and very much worth reading if you can get hold of a copy.
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This is competent poetry, written in a competent style. Ideas driven, that makes it interesting on one level. But as an exploration of language and feeling, it did not excite me. The tone is too downbeat for one thing, and I did not find it a necessary read.