This book is designed to introduce Simon Armitage to those studying him at school and university, and is built around detailed and accessible readings of his most important poems. It contains the most basic and important information about Armitage’s life and work, but is especially good at explaining the concepts which shape Armitage’s poetry, so that its readers will be able to differentiate their performance from that of other students.

Simon Armitage is one of the most compelling figures in contemporary literature, most conspicuously because of his charismatic style, but also because he has brought into poetry an irreverent, streetwise gusto and a kind of knowledge that often seems to come from outside poetry altogether. This book nonetheless shows that he is a considerable intellectual whose key concerns include space and place, and gender, and it demonstrates how those concerns work in action, line by line, image by image, in the detail of the poems.