Journal of Language and Literature Volume 2 Number 1 2003 ISSN 1478 - 9116

Review

Simon Armitage, The Universal Home Doctor
Faber and Faber, £6.99, 0 571 21860 1

Armitage has been called by Sean O'Brien "the first poet of serious artistic intent since Philip Larkin to have achieved popularity". Such praise must have had certain academic nostrils flaring: accessibility and quality were surely mutually exclusive?

Armitage's first five prize-winning collections were said to have brought the real world and the vernacular back into poetry, along with a sense of contemporary cool. What distinguishes him is his equivocal relationship to his subjects, and the fresh takes on clichés and demotic discourses.

"His most personal collection yet", asserts the blurb to The Universal Home Doctor. In "Birthday", the poet-persona's partner is found crouched over the eponymous household medical textbook, "chromosomal abnormalities explained, / progesterone secretion, / cervical incompetence …". I wished the poem had ended on the two lines: "Susan, for God's sake. / I had to edge towards it, / close the cover with my bare foot", but with uncharacteristic heavy-handedness, Armitage moves into classical allusion with the black-gloved god Anubis "checking the bins for bones and meat". The bleakness of the bedroom perspective is a delicate indication of a real or potential miscarriage: "Dawn at the pace of a yacht. / The first bus, empty, carries its cargo of light from the depot, like a block of ice".

His ambivalence towards the lyrical "I" of the poems suggests a well-defended personality, as well as a post-modern playfulness concerning The Death of the Author. Death, of the stagey variety, features often, most wittily in the elegant piece "The Strid", a crossing-point on the River Wharfe, over which bridegroom carries bride "for the fuck of the century under the stars". The drowned pair are discovered a week later, "dead to the world, husband and wife", a concretisation of the marriage vows, and a hint at the putrefaction of the personality in marriage.

Significantly, the opening poem is a tricky one, as if Armitage is raising the stakes at the outset. "The Shout" is the tale of his schoolboy self testing the range of the human voice with a boy "whose name and face / I don't remember". The poet-persona later learns that the friend shot himself in Western Australia; the poem ends "you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you". It seemed to demonstrate authorial responsibility to a silenced voice, but how could the "I" have discovered the distant suicide of a nameless figure from the past? Was he blatantly appropriating the title of the Seventies' film The Shout (based on a Robert Graves short story and also set in Australia?). In the film, the character of the listener gradually doubts the authenticity of the tale; but it seems that, even without the intertextuality, we are meant to wonder whether the sensitive poet-persona is deliberately distanced.

"The Short Way Home" is not, unexpectedly, one of his drives-noirs, but a self-conscious proposal of co-habitation. The tone is elaborately casual, opening with "Here's something you might want to consider", and goes on to warn the woman that the maddest thing he is ever likely to do is reverse the car up a hill at night, and ask her to pick up a cat's eye which has popped out of its socket. Then, in the ritual retreat of the courtship dance, he debunks the eye as an exotic courtship offering, "Not much use / unless you're the type who wants to sit there / with the curtains drawn, shining a torch / into its iris / looking for Jesus". The word torch unleashes a display of macho savvy as police and night watchmen handle torches in an over-arm position, like truncheons. The second stanza returns to the softer tone, and the whimsy of an extended proposition: what if he goes downstairs to make coffee, and finds snow has fallen overnight ("the roads baffled with snow, nothing moving / the great outdoors comatose, and dreaming"), and then takes her up a scoop of snow on a communion wafer "like heaven on toast"? Then, another bout of laddishness: "don't ask me if you should eat the thing, though / it was more of a concept". He finally reaches the point: "But if that were the extent, if I went / so far each time but no further, could you / settle for as much? could you live with it?". In its transparent, low-key rhetoric, this leaves us feeling, like the woman, worked on, but respectfully.

Armitage can still make the reader laugh aloud. Take the parody of a catalogue of a conceptual art exhibition, "Assault on the Senses": "Shit for Brains / mixed media: / glass case containing baked life-size brain sculpted in artist's own excrement, positioned on domestic "Libra" weighing scales, overbalanced by tin of dogmeat." In "All for one", the poet addresses his mind, which won't leave him alone. "Evenings when I need to work, to get things done / nine o'clock, my mind stands with its coat on / in the hall. Sod it. We drive to the pub, / it drinks, so yours truly has to drive home". Three poems on do-it-yourself go beyond the merely comic, and explore states of mind, all in a honed language apposite to the theme. "Chainsaw versus Pampas Grass" is the most successful, as it moves beyond allegory and creates a monster.

His accuracy of eye and description ("the baby bird was crossing the gravel path / in the style of a rowing boat crossing dry land") is matched by the sensitivity to register. In "The Laughing-Stock" he creates the collective voice of a stereotyped working class: "Arse-time. Weight off the spine. The hour of the couch. / now and again, one of us scrubs up well, crosses / the border, gets so far he opens his cake hole / asks for meals by the wrong name in the wrong order".

He creates accessible worlds - bleak, humorous, sinister, beautiful, surreal - but the boundaries shift within and across poems; and in exploring the tensions between the expected and the creative, he leads the reader into stranger, more challenging terrain.

Joan Hewitt, University of Northumbria, UK

Email: j.hewitt@northumbria.ac.uk