{"product_id":"seeing-stars","title":"Seeing Stars","description":"\u003cp\u003eSeeing Stars by Simon Armitage - the Poet Laureate - is a striking and original collection. .\u003cbr\u003eSimon 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe storyteller who steps in and out of this human tapestry changes, trickster-style, from poem to poem, but retains some identifying traits: the melancholy of the less deceived, crossed with an undercover idealism. And he shares with many of his characters a star-gazing capacity for belief, or for being 'genuine in his disbelief'.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLanguage is on the loose in these poems, which cut and run across the parterre of poetic decorum with their cartoon-strip energies and air of misrule. Armitage creates world after world, peculiar yet always particular, where the only certainty is the unexpected.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paperwing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57051147206987,"sku":"9780571249947","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0943\/0643\/5403\/files\/9780571249947.jpg?v=1776372753","url":"https:\/\/paperwing.co.uk\/products\/seeing-stars","provider":"Paperwing","version":"1.0","type":"link"}