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Kid
Book by Armitage, Simon
88 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 57 reviews
January 3, 2020
I've seen another reviewer here mention that Armitage is either a poet you will love and savour or one to add to your avoid list. Personally with Kid, I generally didn't know what to expect. This collection was OK, in the sense of titles such as "Poem", "Robinson In Two Cities" and "The Guilty" being the stand-out poems here. Others fell a little flat for me, due to the overall mood and little rhyming. Pacing a little disjointed.
June 1, 2015
Simon Armitage seems to be a love him or hate him kind of poet and I feel that his collections of poetry are very mixed. Kid had some interesting themes and concepts that were open to interpretation but his poems don't flow well for me. There were one or two that particularly stood out (both 'Song' and 'Poem' especially), but ultimately i struggle to get into his work. Maybe one I'll have a go at re-reading at a later date.
November 29, 2015
When I first opened this book I was delighted. There was an unexpected murder or a theft, a mysterious encounter or a suicide--something--happening on almost every page. It seemed like there was always enough time at the end of every poem for someone to die or get hit by a car. I read with morbid suspense, waiting to laugh inappropriately. Simon Armitage is great, I thought. Not every writer can squeeze an inappropriate laugh out of you, after all.
Then the book fell flat and impenetrable, the stories disappeared, and I got lost in a sea of words that had no connection to me. His everyman, "Robinson," was at first delightfully mysterious, but then he became an annoying shield that stopped me from getting closer. I also stopped laughing. It was almost like a disintegrating marriage. I kept on trying to grab onto something, but couldn't. It's too bad. I'd like to read more by Simon Armitage. He was a great first date. Maybe I'll have better luck next time.
Still, Kid opens with one of my favorite poems of all time (if only the rest of the book were so good):
Then the book fell flat and impenetrable, the stories disappeared, and I got lost in a sea of words that had no connection to me. His everyman, "Robinson," was at first delightfully mysterious, but then he became an annoying shield that stopped me from getting closer. I also stopped laughing. It was almost like a disintegrating marriage. I kept on trying to grab onto something, but couldn't. It's too bad. I'd like to read more by Simon Armitage. He was a great first date. Maybe I'll have better luck next time.
Still, Kid opens with one of my favorite poems of all time (if only the rest of the book were so good):
Gooseberry Season
Which reminds me. He appeared
at noon, asking for water. He’d walked from town
after losing his job, leaving me a note for his wife and his brother
and locking his dog in the coal bunker.
We made him a bed
and he slept till Monday.
A week went by and he hung up his coat.
Then a month, and not a stroke of work, a word of thanks,
a farthing of rent or a sign of him leaving.
One evening he mentioned a recipe
for smooth, seedless gooseberry sorbet
but by then I was tired of him: taking pocket money
from my boy at cards, sucking up to my wife and on his last night
sizing up my daughter. He was smoking my pipe
as we stirred his supper.
Where does the hand become the wrist?
Where does the neck become the shoulder? The watershed
and then the weight, whatever turns up and tips us over that razor’s edge
between something and nothing, between
one and the other.
I could have told him this
but didn’t bother. We ran him a bath
and held him under, dried him off and dressed him
and loaded him into the back of the pick-up.
Then we drove without headlights
to the county boundary,
dropped the tailgate, and after my boy
had been through his pockets we dragged him like a mattress
across the meadow and on the count of four
threw him over the border.
This is not general knowledge, except
in gooseberry season, which reminds me, and at the table
I have been known to raise an eyebrow, or scoop the sorbet
into five equal portions, for the hell of it.
I mention this for a good reason.
April 17, 2017
'Without Photographs'
We literally stumble over the bits
and pieces, covered with ash
and tarpaulin, stashed into corners,
all that tackle under the old mill.
I don't know how we finally figure it out,
poking around in the half-dark,
coming across the neatly coiled strips
of soft lead-flashing
and the fire-blackened melting equipment
but it all fits together, falls into place.
For three weeks we light up the adapted oil-drum
with anything combustible:
door frames from the tip, spools, bobbins,
pallets, planks, old comics even which we sneak
from the house beneath our anoraks
and deliver on the run like parachute drops.
When we are forced to take a few steps backwards
and the heat stays in our faces like sunburn -
that's when the fire is hot enough.
We slide the melting-pot across the grill
(a stewing pan with no handle, a cooker shelf)
and toss in the lumps of lead
like fat for frying with. It doesn't melt
like butter, slowly, from the bottom upwards
but reaches a point where it gives up its form
the way the sun comes
strongly around the edge of a cloud.
Then it runs, follows the dints
in the pan, covers the base so we see ourselves -
an old mirror with patches of the back missing.
For moulds we use bricks.
Like stretcher-bearers we life the pan
between two sticks then pour the fizzing lead
into the well of a brick.
Sometimes it splits it clean in half with the heat.
Today we watch the mould, prod it
through its various stages of setting, and can't wait
to turn it out like a cake, feel
its warm weight and read the brickwork's name
cast in mirror writing along its length.
But in the days that come, the shapes will mean less
and less, giving in to the satisfaction of the work.
What there is in the sweat, and the burns,
and the blisters, is unmistakably
everlasting. Not what is struck in the forged metal
but in the trouble we know we are taking.
And something about friends, walking home,
grinning like bandits, every pocket
loaded,
all of us black-bright and stinking like kippers.
from 'Kid', Simon Armitage, 1992
We literally stumble over the bits
and pieces, covered with ash
and tarpaulin, stashed into corners,
all that tackle under the old mill.
I don't know how we finally figure it out,
poking around in the half-dark,
coming across the neatly coiled strips
of soft lead-flashing
and the fire-blackened melting equipment
but it all fits together, falls into place.
For three weeks we light up the adapted oil-drum
with anything combustible:
door frames from the tip, spools, bobbins,
pallets, planks, old comics even which we sneak
from the house beneath our anoraks
and deliver on the run like parachute drops.
When we are forced to take a few steps backwards
and the heat stays in our faces like sunburn -
that's when the fire is hot enough.
We slide the melting-pot across the grill
(a stewing pan with no handle, a cooker shelf)
and toss in the lumps of lead
like fat for frying with. It doesn't melt
like butter, slowly, from the bottom upwards
but reaches a point where it gives up its form
the way the sun comes
strongly around the edge of a cloud.
Then it runs, follows the dints
in the pan, covers the base so we see ourselves -
an old mirror with patches of the back missing.
For moulds we use bricks.
Like stretcher-bearers we life the pan
between two sticks then pour the fizzing lead
into the well of a brick.
Sometimes it splits it clean in half with the heat.
Today we watch the mould, prod it
through its various stages of setting, and can't wait
to turn it out like a cake, feel
its warm weight and read the brickwork's name
cast in mirror writing along its length.
But in the days that come, the shapes will mean less
and less, giving in to the satisfaction of the work.
What there is in the sweat, and the burns,
and the blisters, is unmistakably
everlasting. Not what is struck in the forged metal
but in the trouble we know we are taking.
And something about friends, walking home,
grinning like bandits, every pocket
loaded,
all of us black-bright and stinking like kippers.
from 'Kid', Simon Armitage, 1992
March 26, 2020
"Holy robin-redbreast-nest-egg-shocker!
Holy roll-me-over-in the-clover,
I'm not playing ball boy any longer
Batman, now I've doffed that off-the-shoulder
Sherwood-Forest-green and scarlet number
for a pair of jeans and crew-neck jumper;
now I'm taller, harder, stronger, older"
February 16, 2023
I am not British enough to understand some of these, BUT the ones I could comprehend were stunning.
"Poem" (haha) destroyed me-- "Here's how they rated him when they looked back: Sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that." On that note, when I bought this itty bitty collection at Waterstones last fall, I was rather drawn to the title "Kid" being one. But Armitage is writing about youth as a state of being rather than an age.
These poems carry an impressive curiosity and sensitivity, an attention to detail that has the often under-rationalizing and overthinking qualities of a child who is underestimated and overprotected. I think I can resonate with that lol. I'm doing such a horrible job of explaining this, but what I'm trying to say is that Armitage shows us that poets can be like children. Hiding in the bushes and poking into people's business but also making impressive neural connections like a skirt being the color of salami, or night feeling thick and heavy like a blanket."The rich! I love them." - Armitage 1992. Anyways, I MAJORLY recommend "Kid." So fascinating. So creative. Good from start to finish.
"Poem" (haha) destroyed me-- "Here's how they rated him when they looked back: Sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that." On that note, when I bought this itty bitty collection at Waterstones last fall, I was rather drawn to the title "Kid" being one. But Armitage is writing about youth as a state of being rather than an age.
These poems carry an impressive curiosity and sensitivity, an attention to detail that has the often under-rationalizing and overthinking qualities of a child who is underestimated and overprotected. I think I can resonate with that lol. I'm doing such a horrible job of explaining this, but what I'm trying to say is that Armitage shows us that poets can be like children. Hiding in the bushes and poking into people's business but also making impressive neural connections like a skirt being the color of salami, or night feeling thick and heavy like a blanket."The rich! I love them." - Armitage 1992. Anyways, I MAJORLY recommend "Kid." So fascinating. So creative. Good from start to finish.
June 21, 2023
2.5 Stars!
How annoying, another GR title that doesn't have my edition...oh well I'll just settle for this one...
“His fingers were astronauts found dead in their spacesuits.”
So goes a lovely line from possibly my favourite poem in here, “Not the Furniture Game”. Armitage clearly has a talent for language bending and twisting it into all sorts of pleasing forms in this collection. Although I neither loved or loathed this, it did have its share of eye catching moments here and there and was worth the read.
How annoying, another GR title that doesn't have my edition...oh well I'll just settle for this one...
“His fingers were astronauts found dead in their spacesuits.”
So goes a lovely line from possibly my favourite poem in here, “Not the Furniture Game”. Armitage clearly has a talent for language bending and twisting it into all sorts of pleasing forms in this collection. Although I neither loved or loathed this, it did have its share of eye catching moments here and there and was worth the read.
May 11, 2022
There's some good individual poems in here but on the whole it's a bit lacklustre. Some poems are personal, some reach for something political, some are full of whimsy and others caked in grit... a lot of things are thrown into the mix but they don't connect! It feels like a collection having an identity crisis, and not on purpose. If you'd told me these poems were written by 6 different people, and none of them could see what the other was writing, I would believe you. Also it's a bit too horny.
Read
July 23, 2022pfffff I feel it's probably hard to love SA's work though he seems a pleasant chap overall w/ vague monarchist hue of laureatism aside. I enjoyed this collection more than I'd anticipated though much of it is smear there were stand outs which were Actually Stand Outs - meaning I liked them. At Sea and Speaking Terms really shone ! I was very pleased
words being what they are
we wouldn't want to lose the only sense
we can share in: silence.
I could say the clouds
are the action of or day
stopped here to evidence
the last four hundred miles
like a mobile, hardly moving.
But I ask you the time
and you tell me, in one word, precisely.
words being what they are
we wouldn't want to lose the only sense
we can share in: silence.
I could say the clouds
are the action of or day
stopped here to evidence
the last four hundred miles
like a mobile, hardly moving.
But I ask you the time
and you tell me, in one word, precisely.
September 9, 2015
Armitage's talent is his wit and the pace of all of his poems. Reading any of his collections to me so far has been an exciting experience, punctuated with moments of great emotional clout. Kid, his first collection, is no different, and it is quite lovely to see his early work, only really knowing his more recent poems.
May 10, 2015
This is the first time I've read anything by Simon Armitage - maybe his other books are more accessible. I struggled to be interested in the poems, was even repulsed by some of them. Not a wavelength/style that meshed with me.
June 25, 2007
love the simon
September 27, 2010
Just read this for the first time 18 years after it was first published, and although I enjoyed it I prefer his later stuff
May 21, 2013
ilu simon <3
January 24, 2014
One of those books that's stayed with me. Probably the first book of "real" poetry I ever read and actually thought about.
December 10, 2016
Northern childhoods, the universe and everything. Armitage is still one of the best.
August 11, 2016
Modern Narrative Poetry
Each poem in this collection is like a world unto itself. Dark and funny poetry peopled with those whose voices are not often heard.
Each poem in this collection is like a world unto itself. Dark and funny poetry peopled with those whose voices are not often heard.
December 13, 2019
I really wanted to like this poetry collection, but sadly that was not the case. This is the first time I've read Armitage's own writing, but I loved the flow and the general feel of his "Gawain and the Green Knight" translation I read a couple of years ago, which is why I hoped to enjoy his own poetry too. Sadly, most of the poems just felt flat and stilted. Armitage's voice was just not really coming through and it just really didn't work for me...
January 26, 2022
Some good ones, some wired ones
Overall enjoyed it but some made me want to fall asleep
Overall enjoyed it but some made me want to fall asleep
October 5, 2018
I first came across Simon Armitage reading his books on walking "Walking Home" and "Walking Away." One of his poems is on the wall of a building where I work and I often read it whilst waiting for the bus. So I thought I'd give his poetry a go and have to say I really enjoyed it. I love the twists at the end of some of the poems and following the journey of Robinson through a series of poems. So I'm I look forward to reading some more of his work very soon.
March 7, 2014
I find it difficult to appreciate books on poetry unless they come with notes explaining the background of the poems themselves. I have never been educated with regards to poetry so unless it is in the form of an 'idiots guide' alot of it is lost on me.
Some of Armitage's poetry is very easy to enjoy and witty but alot of it doesn't make sense unless you know the background therefore alot of the poems I just skipped over.
Some of Armitage's poetry is very easy to enjoy and witty but alot of it doesn't make sense unless you know the background therefore alot of the poems I just skipped over.
January 9, 2015
This and its sisters have been adorning my various poetry shelves for many years. I've started it before, but I don't think I've finished it.
There are some pieces in here I quite like -Song, Gooseberry Season, Speaking Terms, maybe Poem and Great Sporting Moments- but the Robinson stuff is just dull. What with this and The Death of King Arthur, I start to suspect that Armitage may not be versecasting on my wavelength.
There are some pieces in here I quite like -Song, Gooseberry Season, Speaking Terms, maybe Poem and Great Sporting Moments- but the Robinson stuff is just dull. What with this and The Death of King Arthur, I start to suspect that Armitage may not be versecasting on my wavelength.
May 30, 2018
This is my second book of Armitage's poetry that I have tried to read. Unfortunately even though it is earthy and points out the basic things in life it is also dead. There is no life to his poetry. I hear the monotone voice of William Hague reading it in my head; its like the worst family history lecture in the world. Not a fan and will not be trying again.
July 21, 2013
I only really liked two poems in this collection (hence the two stars). They were the aptly named 'Poem' and 'About His Person'. I found the others to be inaccessible and somewhat lackadaisical. Soz, Simon, bbz.
September 24, 2018
I have read this collection before, and I'm not sure I respond to it as vividly as I did that time. I think now I find Armitage's insistence on violence less interesting - because he doesn't actually do a great deal with it. But there's still some beautiful stuff in there.
May 24, 2012
I am definitely not a Simon Armitage fan but have only been reading his works to help my son revise/study for his English Literature exams.
June 2, 2015
Some brilliant, accessible poems that a joy to read. Some slightly pretentious gubbins that isn't.
May 15, 2016
Hit and miss with these poems.
February 1, 2021
Not his best work.
A lot of poems were lost on me I was completely confused. I, for one, have no idea who Robinson is or why he keeps popping up. There wasn’t a lot of rhythm or pattern to a lot of the work. I get what people are saying that you either love or hate Armitage, I love him but this collection still felt a bit ..... bad.
But! On the other hand there were so many poems that hit for me after about half way (as I find with a lot of his collections actually)
Poem
Abstracting electricity
In our tenth year
Great sporting moments: the treble
Speaking terms
A few donts about decoration
Not the furniture game
About his person
A lot of poems were lost on me I was completely confused. I, for one, have no idea who Robinson is or why he keeps popping up. There wasn’t a lot of rhythm or pattern to a lot of the work. I get what people are saying that you either love or hate Armitage, I love him but this collection still felt a bit ..... bad.
But! On the other hand there were so many poems that hit for me after about half way (as I find with a lot of his collections actually)
Poem
Abstracting electricity
In our tenth year
Great sporting moments: the treble
Speaking terms
A few donts about decoration
Not the furniture game
About his person
April 24, 2023
I am possibly using some of these poems within this collection for my English Literature dissertation, and as well as the ‘Robinson’ collection within this, here are some of my favourites across ‘Kid’:
- Gooseberry Season
- True North
- Robinson in Two Cities
- Poem
- The Guilty
- Kid
- Robinson’s Life Sentence
- Not the Furniture Game
- Robinson’s Resignation
A great collection. I am only 20, and I know I’ll return to this collection across the rest of my life and learn new life lessons and see the poems in many different lights.
- Gooseberry Season
- True North
- Robinson in Two Cities
- Poem
- The Guilty
- Kid
- Robinson’s Life Sentence
- Not the Furniture Game
- Robinson’s Resignation
A great collection. I am only 20, and I know I’ll return to this collection across the rest of my life and learn new life lessons and see the poems in many different lights.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 57 reviews