Simon Armitage reads 'Aviators' from Seeing Stars

Simon Armitage's new collection is by turns a voice and a chorus: a hyper-vivid array of dramatic monologues, allegories, parables and tall tales. Here comes everybody: Snoobie and Carla, Lippincott, Wittmann, Yoshioka, Bambuck, Dr Amsterdam, Preminger. The man whose wife drapes a border-curtain across the middle of the marital home; the English astronaut with a terrestrial outlook on life; an orgiastic cast of unreconstructed pie-worshipers at a Northern sculpture farm; the soap-opera supremacists at their zoo-wedding; the driver who picks up hitchhikers as he hurtles towards a head-on collision with Thatcherism; a Christian cheese-shop proprietor in the wrong part of town; the black bear with a dark secret, the woman who curates giant snowballs in the chest freezer. Celebrities and nobodies, all come to the ball.

[@jiggerypoetry1766]

Just brilliant Armitage ❤️

[@annereese3513]

I love the opening story you told- funny! Fun poem. Very vivid images!

[@ninarockford6397]

Fanfookintastic. Simon Armitage is King.

[@gk411]

He's a good egg 🥚 that Simon is. ☺

[@Ryan-xq4gi]

Boring