Product Description

"Zoom!" is the book which launched Simon Armitage's meteoric rise to poetic stardom. One of Bloodaxe's bestselling titles, it has gone into several impressions and sold over 12,000 copies. Poetry Book Society Choice. Shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66998 in Books
• Published on: 1989-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 80 pages

Review
You couldn't mistake Simon Armitage for any other poet. He has found his voice early, and it really is his own voice - his language and rhythms drawn from the Pennine village where he lives: robust, no-nonsense and (above all) honest. --Peter Sansom

Astonishingly good for such a young writer... poems with an energy which comes directly from life now and the living language. --Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian

Armitage creates a muscular but elegant language of his own out of slangy, youthful, up-to-the-minute jargon and the vernacular of his native northern England. He combines this with an easily worn erudition, plenty of nous and the benefit of unblinkered experience...to produce poems of moving originality. --Peter Reading, Sunday Times

About the Author
Simon Armitage was born in 1963 in Huddersfield, England. After studying Geography at Portsmouth Polytechnic, he worked with young offenders before gaining a postgraduate qualification in social work at Manchester University. He worked as a probation officer in Oldham until 1994. His poetry books include Zoom! (Bloodaxe Books, 1989), Xanadu (Bloodaxe Books, 1992), and later collections published by Faber, including Kid (1992), and CloudCuckooLand (1997). He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1988. Zoom! was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for a Whitbread Poetry Award. He was named 'Most Promising Young Poet' at the inaugural Forward Poetry Prize in 1992, won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 1993, and was Poet in Residence for the New Millennium Experience Company in 1999. Mister Heracles (2000), an adaptation of Euripides' Heracles, was commissioned by the West Yorkshire Playhouse. His Selected Poems was published by Faber in 2001, followed by The Universal Home Doctor (2002) and a new verse adaptation of Homer's Odyssey in 2006. He is also the author of All Points North (1998), a collection of essays about the north of England and Gig (2008), a memoir of a life of music and poetry, and two novels Little Green Man (2001) and White Stuff (2004). Simon Armitage is currently a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004. His latest collection of poetry is Tyrannosaurus versus the Corduroy Kid (2006).

Customer Reviews

Still one of his best.
Armitage's first collection, and still one of his best. Everything is bursting into life here - the poems are coming out of all shapes and sizes of experience, from the bizzare to the mundane. Zestfull, inventive and wry. Nothing like it.