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Carregando... Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid (2006)de Simon Armitage
   Books read in 2015 (186) Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.   ) Helenliz | Apr 4, 2018 | 
 The blurb on Simon Armitage's latest collection promises an engagement with "the matter of England, here and now ... here at the Empire's end". More accurately, it observes that the poems are "scored by oppositions and fault lines", antagonisms of class, nationality, generation and gender being to the fore. Armitage's strengths as a poet have always been his charm, style, humour and psychological observation; his personae deliver inventively idiomatic speeches, and he has a natty way with rhythm and rhyme. In this volume's attempt to offer a more political vision, however, the predominant atmospheres are those of paranoia, fatalism, anger and mid-life anxiety. […] The problem, interestingly, may be inherent in Armitage's deservedly popular style. His zesty use of idiom has always tacked riskily close to cliché and to a recognisable and secondhand language by which we categorise and generalise without needing to think. Armitage often mocks the stereotyping produced by such language, but does not always offer anything else; and it is not always clear in his work where caricature is ironised and where idly affirmed. (This is the problem with the overlong and only sometimes amusing "You're Beautiful", a long set of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" oppositions, which, beneath its sarcasm, evidently relishes some of the roles assigned.) This language cannot deal with complexity beyond suggesting that crude simplicity is not enough. Yet in a sequence like "Sympathy" (five pieces linking court cases to human dramas, touching variously on irony, guilt, pity, revenge, love and anger), Armitage is at his intriguing best, giving distinctive voices to diverse human experiences. He still writes as well as anyone, in his particular vein. But the limits of his language really are the limits of his world; and there are some worrying signs here that those limits have indeed begun to contract.  For all his fascination with Ancient & Modern, and eternal cycles, it is in the fleeting moment of the here and now, with the 'singular macaw of being', with its brilliant, exotic plumage, that Armitage finds most relish. Here and now, 'where the spirit of life was said to lurk', is the ultimate focus of the poet's attention. For me, that makes this a wise and human collection; one of great virtuosity and architectural design; and one that repays reading after reading.
From one of the most important British poets at work today comes a brilliant new collection that meditates on human battles past and present, on youth and age, on monsters and underdogs, on the life of nations and the individual heart. In "Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid," we meet a writer who speaks naturally, and with frankness and restraint, for his culture. Armitage witnesses the pathos of women at work in the mock-Tudor Merrie England coffeehouses and gives us a backstage take on the world of Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger. He makes a gift to the reader of the sympathy and misery and grit buried in his nation's collective consciousness: in the distant battle depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry and in the daily lives and petty crimes of ordinary people. In poems that are sometimes lyrical, sometimes brash and comic, and full of living voices, the extraordinary and the mythic grow out of the ordinary, and figures of diminishment and tragedy shine forth as mysterious, uncelebrated exemplars. Armitage tells us ruefully that "the future was a beautiful place, once," and with a steady eye out for the odd mystery or joyous scrap of experience, examines our complex present instead. AFTER THE HURRICANE Some storm that was, to shoulder-charge the wallin my old man's back yard and knock it flat.But the greenhouse is sound, the chapel of glasswe glazed one morning. We glazed "with "morning.And so is the hut. And so is the shed. We sit in the ruins and drink. He smokes. Back when, we would have built that wall again.But today it's enough to drink and smokeamongst mortar and bricks, here at the empire's end. "From the Hardcover edition." Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — Carregando...GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)821.914Literature English & Old English literatures English poetry 1900- 1900-1999 1945-1999Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (3.43)
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