Blossomise

Simon Armitage, Angela Harding

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571394326
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

** A Top Ten Sunday Times Bestseller **

Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate, brings new perspectives and energy to a timeless poetic subject.

Blossomise celebrates the ecstatic arrival of spring blossom just as it acknowledges, too, its melancholy disappearance. Full of spirited 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.

Angela Harding responds to the poems in wonderful accompanying illustrations.

Published in collaboration with the National Trust as part of their annual Blossom programme and campaign.

Simon Armitage's book Blossomise was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 23-03-2024

Table of contents

• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Author’s note
• ‘The streets are learning’
• The Spectators
• ‘The bees buy and sell’
• Blossom: a CV
• ‘Wind plays through the boughs’
• Birthday
• ‘Cherry in full bloom’
• Folk Song
• ‘Ignite the beacons’
• Plum Tree Among the Skyscrapers
• ‘Pink cherry blossom’
• Fluffy Dice
• ‘Speck of white blossom’
• Profusion
• ‘The wild cherry tree’
• The Plymouth Pear
• ‘Old Jaguar parked’
• The Seasons
• ‘Charged by evening sun’
• Skeleton Tree
• ‘Constellations bloom’
• About the Author
• About the illustrator
• By the Same Author
• Copyright