Simon Armitage has two poems, both titled Sympathy, at Poetry Daily today. Both reflect on the limitations of the justice system and, in northern vernacular, suggest ways in which guilty parties might be brought to account for their crimes. Simon Armitage is unpopular in some quarters, mainly because he has been commercially successful, but I like a fair bit of his material. I’m not really into these poems though, despite the presence of a few great details – the “burnt-out Vauxhall Nova/ for a garden shed, one dead cooker on t’lawn” and “outrunning a dark belt of summer rain/ in his soft-top Merc with the roof rolled down.” The idea of getting people to face up to the reality of their crimes is good, but the narratives in these poems, while they had their twists, didn’t make for particularly striking poetry. 2½/6
Aelgifu of Northampton Falls for The Leader of the Pack, 1016 is Micki Myers’s offering at No Tell Motel. The real Aelgifu was King Canute’s wife. Here she’s recast as a sixties chick who falls for the Leader of the Pack from the Shangi-Las song. It’s a great idea of course. Not sure if Micki Myers really pulls it off, especially at the close where the tears blurring the name on the slate seems rather unlikely, and I couldn’t see how they could turn Cnut into Canute in any case. This poem didn’t grip me or make me laugh and the images it used seemed fairly ordinary, other than the “F in Norwegian” line, which I liked. 2/6
