Magnetic Field

The Marsden Poems

Simon Armitage

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571361465
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The large village of Marsden, West Yorkshire not only was home to Simon Armitage's beginnings as writer, but has continued as a vital presence throughout his works: from his very first pamphlet, Human Geography (1988), to his forthcoming new collection New Cemetery (scheduled for 2022). This edition gathers all the Marsden poems together to create a 'poetry of place' edition, which will offer a new way of appraising Simon's body of work, as well as celebrating this overlooked region that has meant so much to him personally. Simon will be announcing a decade-long tour of libraries in the UK as a central strand of his laureateship: every spring he'll be reading in a handful of libraries across the country, and would like to feature this collection as part of it, donating a copy to each library.

Even in Marsden the extraordinary could happen, apparently. Staring out of that window every night I developed a new sense of the world, one that went beyond the factual and the informational. A sense of what it was like, and how it felt. That was the beginning of my life as a writer, even though I still didn't know how to capture experiences in words.

- Simon Armitage in the Guardian, on growing up in Marsden.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Miniatures
• Camera Obscura
• ‘the kitchen window’
• Orion
• The Chisel
• The Shout
• Privet
• Capricornus
• Twist
• Kitchen Window
• A New Career in a New Town
• The Tyre
• Greenhouse
• Without Photographs
• The Serpent-Holder
• True North
• Somewhere Along the Line
• Don’t Blink
• The Catch
• Wintering Out
• Two at the End of Winter
• Snow Joke
• It Ain’t What You Do It’s What It Does to You
• Ice
• Zoom!
• ‘Mother, any distance greater than a single span’
• The Ram
• A Few Don’ts about Decoration
• To Poverty
• Indus
• The Water Snake
• The Centaur
• The Phoenix
• The Mariner’s Compass
• White Christmas
• The Two of Us
• After the Hurricane
• Leaves on the Line
• Ara
• On Marsden Moor
• Evening
• The Spelling
• Fisherwood
• Bringing It All Back Home
• Harmonium
• Emergency
• October
• Snow
• ‘can a berth be reserved’
• ‘in the dream again’
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Copyright