{"product_id":"9780571249947","title":"Seeing Stars","description":"\u003ch3\u003eAuthor: Simon Armitage\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003ch4\u003ePoetry by individual poets\u003c\/h4\u003e\u003ch5\u003ePublished on 4 August 2011 by FABER \u0026amp; FABER in the United Kingdom.\u003c\/h5\u003e\u003ch4\u003ePaperback | 88 pages\u003cbr\u003e197 x 128 x 8mm | 126g\u003c\/h4\u003e\u003chr\u003e\u003cp\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":"Simon Armitage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56153826427205,"sku":"9780571249947","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0994\/3721\/6069\/files\/9780571249947.jpg?v=1762272862","url":"https:\/\/stripyduckbookshopcafe.co.uk\/products\/9780571249947","provider":"The Stripy Duck Bookshop Café","version":"1.0","type":"link"}