UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage is gracing Knaresborough’s feva online with readings from Magnetic Field, the volume of work focused on Marsden, the village in Yorkshire in which he grew up.
Simon had been booked for feva 2020, but as with all planned performances, his appearance was cancelled due to the lockdown. But he has stayed loyal to Knaresborough by contributing his readings which will be aired on www.feva.info
during the proposed dates of feva, 14 to 23 August.
This is an opportunity to share in the poet’s vision and the depth of his feelings towards his native place.
Simon Armitage has always associated his early poetic experiences with the night-time view from his bedroom window, those ‘private, moonstruck observations’. Decades on, that window continues to operate as both framework and focal point for his writing, the vastness of the surrounding moors always at his shoulder forming a constant psychological backdrop.
Magnetic Field offers a personal insight into a preoccupation that shows no signs of fading, and his perspective on a locality he describes as ‘transcendent and transgressive’, a genuinely unique region forming a frontier territory between many different worlds.
As well as being Poet Laureate, Simon was also elected Oxford Professor of Poetry (2015 to 2019) and has received numerous accolades including an Ivor Novello and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He is currently Professor of Poetry at Leeds University.
