検索キーワード： 著者 "Simon Armitage" すべてのカテゴリー

The wandering poet has always been a feature of our cultural imagination. Odysseus journeys home, his famous flair for storytelling seducing friend and foe. The Romantic poets tramped all over the Lake District searching for inspiration. Now Simon Armitage, with equal parts enthusiasm and trepidation, as well as a wry humor all his own, has taken on Britain’s version of our Appalachian Trail: the Pennine Way.

Lily Cole stars as Helen of Troy, ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’, in Simon Armitage’s vivid, visceral adaptation of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. For 10 years, the Greeks have been laying siege to Troy to win back their abducted queen, Helen. But as the war drags on, and the battlefields run scarlet with blood, the opposing forces are entrenched in a bitter stalemate. As gods and mortals squabble amongst themselves for the spoils of war, the exhausted warriors go to extreme lengths in a desperate grab for victory....

"My fame is written in the heavens, and my fate too..." So speaks Odysseus as he starts to recount his struggles to sail home to Ithaca, in one of the greatest pieces of storytelling in Western literature. The Odyssey is his incredible traveller's tale, and also the story of his faithful wife Penelope who waits for him, besieged by suitors, and their son Telemachus who has a quest of his own.

In summer 2010 Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way. The challenging 256 mile route is usually approached from south to north, from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm, the other side of the Scottish border. He resolved to tackle it the other way round: through beautiful and bleak terrain, across lonely fells and into the howling wind, he would be walking home, towards the Yorkshire village where he was born.

A combination of verse from Simon Armitage and prose from Jeff Young lends a voice to the chain of events depicted on the famous Bayeux Tapestry. This production chronicles the history surrounding the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the ascension of Duke William of Normandy to the English throne. Harold, Duke of Wessex, takes the English throne, despite Edward the Confessor's wish that William Duke of Normandy should be his heir.

Drawing upon all of his award-winning poetry collections, including Kid, Book of Matches, The Universal Home Doctor, Seeing Stars and The Unaccompanied, as well as his medieval translations and verse dramas, Paper Aeroplane represents a generous and thrilling gathering of work from one of contemporary poetry's most essential voices. 

Following the success of his acclaimed translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl, Simon Armitage shines light on another jewel of Middle English verse. In his thoroughly enjoyable version, Armitage communicates the energy, charm and humour of the tale - the earliest example of a 'debate poem'. An unnamed narrator overhears a fierce verbal contest between the two eponymous birds, which moves entertainingly from the eloquent and highfalutin to the ribald and ridiculous. 

Over the course of several years, Simon Armitage has written hundreds of poems for various projects, commissions, collaborations and events, which stand outside of his mainstream collections but now form a substantial body of work in their own right. They vary from single poems, such as 'Zodiac T Shirt', written to be performed at the launch of Beck's Song Reader, to the suite of 10 poems about Branwell Brontë written at the time of the writer's bicentenary.

With their epic tales of gods, heroes, magic and monsters, the Greek myths have thrilled us for more than 2,000 years and inspired countless adaptations. Now, in this captivating collection, two award-winning playwrights bring their own fresh, contemporary takes to the famous legends of Odysseus, Orpheus and Eurydice.

The Owl and the Nightingale, one of the earliest literary works in Middle English, is a lively anonymous comic poem about two birds who embark on a war of words in a wood, with a nearby poet reporting their argument in rhyming couplets, line by line and blow by blow. In this engaging and energetic verse translation, Simon Armitage captures the verve and humor of this dramatic tale with all the cut and thrust of the original.