Armitage, Simon

Simon Armitage is now one of the leading figures of the European contemporary poetry. He made his debut in 1989 with the collection "Zoom!" and since then he has always won the critics' approval. At the age of 38 he published the collection "Selected Poems", which has just been translated into Italian by Luca Guerrieri for the Mondadori publishing house. He published 9 volumes of poetry and he also writes for radio, television and cinema. He is a lecturer at the Manchester Metropolitan University and, together with Robert Crawford, he has recently published "The Penguin Anthology of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945". In 1993 he was given a prize at London's Royal Festival Hall. Armitage's poetry is very realistic: his poems are about ordinary things and situations, described using ordinary colloquial language. His style, often narrative, is characterized by a brilliant use of poetic rhythm and piling up effects towards comic climax or dramatic denouement. It all results in elegant and highly poetical solutions thanks to the writer's good mastery of the stylistic techniques. One of the greatest Armitage's merits, which makes him the leading poet of his generation, is that he is able to combine accessible humor and realistic style with critical seriousness and an accurate use of language and form. And he does so while telling us something about our history and the world we live in, sometimes with the acuity and the feelings of an observer, with disillusionment and sometimes even with violence.