31. Simon Armitage, New Cemetery

There’s a reason Simon Armitage is the UK’s poet laureate: he is, as a Brit might say, bloody marvellous. Exhibit A: New Cemetery. So much is going on in these 100 pages. I’m not quite sure where to start.

Okay, I’ll pick a place: Armitage’s introduction, in which he explains that a field up the hill from his house in a Yorkshire village became a cemetery, and his neighbours objected. Armitage did not. What if the land was sold anyway and became something truly obnoxious, like an industrial park or an Amazon warehouse? Or, from the perspective of 2026, a data centre? There are worse neighbours, he thought. Then came Covid, and then his father’s sudden death, which clearly gutted him. All of this is explored in this book’s poems.

At the same time, Armitage’s other commitments—translations, commissioned books, and general poet laureating—were making it difficult to write other things. The solution was to write these short poems, all of which use the same form: three-line stanzas (tercets is the technical term), with each line indented below the one before. That gives the book an unusual consistency. So does the way each poem is dedicated to a different species of moth. Armitage notes how insect populations are plummeting, taking the starving birds with them—another loss, another kind of death worth mourning. Those common names aren’t titles—the idea always was to leave these poems untitled—but sometimes there’s an odd resonance between the eccentric nomenclature and the poetry.

Along with cemetery, his father, his ecological anxiety, Armitage is sometimes charmingly self-effacing (a national poet laureate could easily go in a more egoistic direction) about his difficulties writing, and sometimes even self-lacerating. He’s also funny and his words often made me stop and reread what I’d just finished reading out of sheer joy and surprise. And, sometimes, I learned something about Armitage. One poem, for instance, laments the death of “[t]he Fall guy.” I’m Armitage’s age (well, six months younger than), and I knew the Manchester band he was referring to, but couldn’t remember the lead singer’s name or when he died. Wikipedia reminds me: Mark E. Smith, the lead singer, songwriter, and only consistent member of the Fall, died of cancer in 2018. But Wikipedia tells me more: Armitage is a lifelong music fan, particularly of the Fall, and the only UK poet laureate who is also a deejay. So the poem, despite its apparently offhand reference to Smith, is about a band Armitage loves, and its final imagining, in the last three stanzas, of Smith’s resurrection goes beyond elegy:

Here’s Smith’s infamous irascibility, his voice like a cawing crow, his lung cancer, his aggression, and Armitage’s deep love of all of it.

I wanted to give a sense of how Armitage writes about the landscape, particularly the cemetery, but it’s hard to pick just one poem. Here’s “[Orange Footman],” chosen more or less at random, since singling one poem out feels wrong:

I apologize for the dark photos, but it’s too frustrating to quote an entire poem on my phone, thumbing one character at a time, and if I turn on my seat light, the poem disappears into the harsh shadow of my hands. Also, the app I’m using wipes out the indentations. Oh well—I’ll fix it later.

Here’s a photo, one of my copy’s title page, inscribed by the author, who was the keynote speaker at the conference in Leeds I’m flying home from:

He seems to have misspelled my name, a detail which inspired this poem. It tries to imitate Armitage’s form, and his reliance on half-rhymes and alliteration, and while it might not be very good (I hesitate to include it here), it exists, which means that I can keep working on it:

The Famous Poet Signed his Book

but he seems

             to have misspelled

                       my name,

perhaps because 

             he misheard 

                       it (I’m told

I mumble) or maybe

             he’s fed up with 

                       the poetry dog 

and pony show, the claims 

             on his time, big and small,

                        the lectures and commissions,

tours and interviews, 

              and the grinning, nervous 

                        fans who line up waving

hardcovers and paperbacks 

              and babbling garbled praise, 

                        when he’d prefer 

wrestling rhymes in his attic

              room, his pen, the village quiet,

                        and a cooling cup of tea.

30. Sarah Tolmie, All the Horses of Iceland

I’m not sure how All the Wild Horses of Iceland came into my possession—I suspect my friend Tanis MacDonald sent it to me in trade for some books about walking, because there’s a postcard from her tucked inside—but I’m glad it did, and that I read it near the end of my trip to England, since it’s partly about the difficulties of travelling across continents a thousand years ago. Eyvind of Eyri, the protagonist of the story our unnamed narrator tells, travels from Iceland to somewhere in Central Asia and back, and his remarkable and life-changing story makes the small problems of contemporary travel (missed trains, airline food) seem very small indeed.

I was impressed by the way Tolmie imagines Eyvind’s world, which is so dramatically different from ours, in a way that feels completely believable. This is a kind of fantasy, of course, but it has a dense texture and heft. I know “heft” suggests a long book, which this isn’t—it’s short enough that I read most of it over dinner last night—but I can’t find another word that describes its serious evocation of historical otherness. So many people love fantasy fiction, and although there are no elves or wizards here, that otherness, that strangeness, ought to appeal to those readers. At the same time, though, there’s a complexity and nuance here. No clashes between good and evil, no moral absolutes, just people navigating events and obstacles they didn’t choose.

And the writing! What a voice. I wish I could write like this. No single quotation is likely to give you a sense of what the prose is like, particularly because of the way Tolmie immerses us in Eyvind’s world. A quotation from the middle of the book wouldn’t make sense; you’ve got to begin at the beginning, slowly developing a feeling for this alien but recognizable environment.

The internet tells me that All the Horses of Iceland made the New York Times list of the best books of 2022. It deserves that honour.

So, Tanis, if you read this, thanks for the book, and I wish I’d read it sooner.

27. Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

I brought Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place: Moving through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma with me on this trip because a) it’s been on my desk for ages, and b) I live in a flat place (or so I thought, but not according to Masud’s use of that term), and c) I heard that it’s a book about walking. I’m happy I did. A Flat Place is a beautifully written, thoughtful articulation of living with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD). That’s not all this book is about, but it’s the beginning of a description of the territory it explores.

For Masud, literal flat places—she lives in UK, and the flat places she visits are the fens of Cambridgeshire, Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay, Newcastle Moor, and Orkney—evoke both her interior emotional landscape and a place she regularly saw but never visited in Lahore, Pakistan, where she grew up. That flat place, a large field near her childhood home, occupies a huge place in her memory. It is, she explains, paraphrasing Virginia Woolf, the base that her life stands upon, mostly because it was open and apparently unrestricted, two qualities that were absent from her life. Her father, a doctor, kept the family isolated from outsiders. He was perhaps paranoid, perhaps narcissistic—language Masud doesn’t use—and definitely angry, emotionally distant, threatening, and potentially violent. A raging man with firearms is frightening. Masud describes him as “a megalomaniac and a fantasist.” Her mother had experienced childhood trauma and may have been raped by her husband before their marriage; she could not protect her daughters from him. The rest of the household—it wasn’t a nuclear family; her grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins lived in the tiny house—were just as emotionally disturbed. Her grandmother, for instance, was emotionally scarred by the years of turmoil caused by the Partition of British India into Hindu and Muslim states in 1948 and “married off at sixteen to a man who hardly spoke.” She once told Masud that hugging a baby will turn it into a weakling. Masud describes her Pakistani grandfather as “half mad.” Her other grandfather, who was Scots, took his own life. The trauma on both sides of her family goes back generations, and for her Pakistani relatives, it’s part of the legacy of colonialism. Masud is infuriated by the blithe acceptance by white Britons of the trauma colonized and racialized people are simply supposed to accept. Nobody in her family is evil, just damaged, and even her father has his good points, but the result of the chaos and coldness, for Masud, is cPTSD.

Unlike regular PTSD, which typically results from some clearly marked horror, cPTSD is the result of many, even daily, small traumatic events, like the ones Masud experienced with her father. The trauma, following psychiatrist Judith Herman, is prolonged and repeated. But, because those events seem so minor, people with cPTSD often don’t understand how they could have had such an effect. But Masud was shaped by those daily events, the chronic lovelessness, the ongoing fear and rejection. When she was sixteen, her father told his wife and children to leave. Her older sister had committed some offence at university in Europe—a photograph was sent, and although we don’t get the details, it may have been sexually compromising in some way—and for whatever reason, he blamed them. I wonder if the sister was with another woman in the photo; Masud herself is queer, or seems to be. She saw him once more, eight years later. When he died, she felt little.

But she usually feels little. She has friends but finds intimate connections difficult. Her flat emotional life, her suicidal thoughts, suggests depression, but she has other symptoms: physical pain; stomach problems; derealization, a dissociative disorder; chronic freezing and fawning responses to stressful situations—which, for Masud and her strained nervous system, can be just about anything.

How does all of this relate to flat places? They have “always given meaning to a world that made no sense to me,” she explains. “Flat places have always given me a way to love myself.” They “quieter the thing in me that’s always crying,” she continues. The contradiction she sees in them—between everything being visible and there being nothing to see—sends a message that’s impossible to decode. “Flat landscapes ask us to tolerate not knowing things,” Masud tells us. “Not knowing what is beneath the surface, whether anything is. A flat landscape’s combination of complete exposure and complete withholding asks us to accept that there are things we’ll never understand.” By presenting us with this uncertainty, flat places “help us to reimagine what it means for something to ‘matter’”—and, for her, “they provide solace for someone who doesn’t experience conventionally heightened feeling.” They give her permission “to be numb, to be without feeling or desire.”

That’s a hard way to live, and in part Masud’s walks through flat places help her become less numb. And, in part Masud’s, they just provide her with the reassurance she describes. Even if she doesn’t feel emotions strongly, her writing is beautiful, absolutely stunning. I opened the book at random and found this paragraph about the Newcastle Moor, which I find lovely:

The cows were sometimes on one side of South Nuns Moor, sometimes on the other. People say that cows lie down when rain is coming. But the moor cows lay down, and stood up, and I found out that neither meant anything, in terms of the weather. Once I found three of them arranged in a kind of triskelion shape, tail to tail and gazing implacably out across the moor. “Hello, gorgeous!” I catcalled as I passed, and they said nothing.

The phrase “in terms of the weather” leaves open the possibility that the cows’ actions might have some other meaning, perhaps one known only to them—the “not knowing” she finds reassuring. And who hasn’t spoken to an animal or bird as they passed? I do that all the time, and while that might be unusual, I doubt that it is. Plus the word “triskelion”! The whole book is full of such writing. Masud is an award-winning scholar of twentieth-century literature, and her prose suggests that she might win other kinds of prizes, too.

A Flat Place is an original book that brings place and psychology and walking together. If you’re interested in any of those things, check it out.