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Title details for Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid by Simon Armitage - Available

Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid

by Simon Armitage
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From one of the most important British poets at work today comes a brilliant new collection that meditates on human battles past and present, on youth and age, on monsters and underdogs, on the life of nations and the individual heart.
In Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid, we meet a writer who speaks naturally, and with frankness and restraint, for his culture. Armitage witnesses the pathos of women at work in the mock-Tudor Merrie England coffeehouses and gives us a backstage take on the world of Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger. He makes a gift to the reader of the sympathy and misery and grit buried in his nation’s collective consciousness: in the distant battle depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry and in the daily lives and petty crimes of ordinary people. In poems that are sometimes lyrical, sometimes brash and comic, and full of living voices, the extraordinary and the mythic grow out of the ordinary, and figures of diminishment and tragedy shine forth as mysterious, uncelebrated exemplars. Armitage tells us ruefully that “the future was a beautiful place, once,” and with a steady eye out for the odd mystery or joyous scrap of experience, examines our complex present instead.
AFTER THE HURRICANE
Some storm that was, to shoulder-charge the wall
in my old man’s back yard and knock it flat.
But the greenhouse is sound, the chapel of glass
we glazed one morning. We glazed with morning.
And so is the hut. And so is the shed.
We sit in the ruins and drink. He smokes.
Back when, we would have built that wall again.
But today it’s enough to drink and smoke
amongst mortar and bricks, here at the empire’s end.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 28, 2013

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780307804310

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780307804310
      • File size: 2284 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from July 21, 2008
      Armitage is one of the U.K.’s most popular, important and prolific poets—as well as a writer for TV and radio, a translator, a teacher and a member of a rock band. Following his 2005 selected poems The Shout
      , as well as a recent translation of Sir Gawain
      and a dramatic version of The Odyssey,
      this is Armitage’s first individual collection to appear in the U.S., and it’s high time. The collection, Armitage’s 11th, amounts to an ambitious, personal meditation on the ugliness of life in a Western civilization at war with the Middle East, something Americans and the British have in common. A passage from the Cyclops section of The Odyssey
      , in which the hero and his crew commit an “act was to haunt us,” sets the stage for haunted political poems like “Republic,” where the government forbids all but one color of car each day of the week, and “After the Hurricane,” in which citizens “drink and smoke/ amongst mortar and bricks, here at empire’s end.” More personal poems bring the same feeling home with darkly self-deprecating humor: “I’m ugly because I proved God to be a mathematical impossibility.” This collection attests that Armitage deserves to be seen as major poet at the peak of his powers on both sides of the pond.

    • Library Journal

      October 15, 2008
      Women of the Merrie England Coffee Houses "wiped the crumbs from under our genius poems." A beautiful "you" and an ugly "I" offer startling contrasts: "You're beautiful because you prefer home-made soup to the/packet stuff./I'm ugly because once, at a dinner party, I defended the/aristocracy and wasn't even drunk." A string of "Sympathy" poems capture stories that are creepy or sad, with one ending with a father's cri de coeur about a birthmarked child: "blemish me for me sins. Punish me, not'er." British poet Armitage ("Zoom!") writes poems that can be bizarre, dark, or weirdly playful, but you never feel that he's trying to shock you for shock's sake. Instead, he uses twisted little scenarios and fresh language to wake you up. The result is a strong, effective, and affecting work that ought to be read by anyone serious about poetry.Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

      Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Library Journal

      April 15, 2009
      Women of the Merrie England Coffee Houses wipe "the crumbs from under our genius pomes." A beautiful "you" and an ugly "I" offer startling contrasts. A string of "Sympathy" poems captures stories that are creepy or sad. And throughout, British poet Armitage uses his fresh language and oddly inventive little scenarios to wake you up. Poetry as offbeat storytelling. ("LJ" 10/15/08)

      Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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