Cloudcuckooland

by Simon Armitage

From his home in a West Yorkshire village proverbially associated with cuckoos, Simon Armitage has been probing the night sky with the aid of a powerful Russian telescope. The sequence of eighty-eight poems at the heart of CloudCuckooLand springs from this preoccupation, each poem receiving its title from one of the constellations, while turning out to be less concerned with pure astronomy than with moments in the life of the poet's mind.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published September 22, 1997

About the author

Simon Armitage, whose The Shout was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, has published ten volumes of poetry and has received numerous honors for his work. He was appointed UK Poet Laureate in 2019

Armitage's poetry collections include Book of Matches (1993) and The Dead Sea Poems (1995). He has written two novels, Little Green Man (2001) and The White Stuff (2004), as well as All Points North (1998), a collection of essays on the north of England. He has produced a dramatised version of Homer's Odyssey and a collection of poetry entitled Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid (which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize), both of which were published in July 2006. Many of Armitage's poems appear in the AQA (Assessment and Qualifications Alliance) GCSE syllabus for English Literature in the United Kingdom. These include "Homecoming", "November", "Kid", "Hitcher", and a selection of poems from Book of Matches, most notably of these "Mother any distance...". His writing is characterised by a dry Yorkshire wit combined with "an accessible, realist style and critical seriousness."

Reviews

[J.S. Watts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cloud Cuckoo Land is quite a thick collection, but many of the poems in it are very short. The heart of the collection is a sequence of eighty-eight poems, each one linked to one of the starry constellations in the night sky. The preceding fourteen poems are interesting, but I didn’t fully connect with the collection until I started reading the astronomically themed ones. Having said that, though the poems take their titles from the night sky, their subjects are wide ranging and more frequently focused on internal mindscapes than heaven-wide skyscapes.

Some of the poems are little more than riffs on the constellation title, some are so short they are over before you’ve taken you’re first breath, others, like “Canis Major” are moving, fully realised poems. The latter is an exploration of youthful violence and misplaced loyalty in terms of “a dog/ that wouldn’t turn back”. In my opinion, not all of the works are of equal calibre, but the outstanding poems stand out like burning stars in the night sky.

[Nicholas · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with a lot of poetry books and some music albums I liked a few but here I did not 'get' a lot of them; rather impenetrable despite short.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crazy music and wild sense. I will read any and all I can of Armitage's -- because of his devotion to sound and bounce, with the raw scream of us just underneath. Sometimes these poems fatigued me, something there is of Ogden Nash's relentless joking and that bouncing cadence (that I just said I liked). But then there are the star poems, glimpses of story and you feel like you are watching a play of play-lettes. And then, whoa, the play itself: a drunk modern Shakespeare comedy.

[Debs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Am reading again, some of the poetry is excellent but some of the poetry is baffling. I like the format.

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

You don't get to be Poet Laureate by writing a load of junk. (I'll never be poet laureate)
I feel in safe hands with Armitage, and here he doesn't disappoint. A nice collection of works tied to a single theme - tied loosely with a ball of green twine from some half-delapidated greenhouse drunk slumped against a hand-wrought stone wall on the more lugubrious side of town - is roughly how he'd put it I reckon.
The theme was fun, and I liked the nods to the constellations. His usual style delivered the earthy, natural world stained with a grim darkness and odd spark of beauty in the most mundane of settings.
If you like his work, you'll like this. It wasn't superstellar (yep I did), but some little gems - favourites include the humour in The Tyre and Hercules, weirdness of The Gift Horse, beautiful horror of The Fox, Lepus because, well, hares, and sadness of The Peacock.
Some of the poems are very short, even one liners, and some I just didn't 'get'. For that I've knocked a star off.

[Mark Friend · Rating 3 out of 5]

Responding to the names of all the constellations, CloudCuckooLand felt like a playful exercise in idea creativity, generating a pool of fragments - bits and pieces collected together under this novel premise. Some pieces barely form as loose threads while other poems do stand out and grow beyond their source stimulus.

As a fan of Simon Armitage, I ultimately enjoyed this collection as something akin to bowl of nuts and snacks. An appetiser to enjoy whilst waiting for something more substantial to come along. I’m glad that I followed my curiosity and read Cloudcuckooland, which may be the prelude to Armitage’s excellent 2011 ‘Seeing Stars’ in style and playfulness?

A few poems that grabbed with me: Mojo, Hercules, The Sculptor, The Ram, The Furnace, The Crane and Crux.

[Serge ♆ Neptune · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5
Standout poems: A Glory, The Ram, The Swordfish

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was disappointed that so few of the poems really held anything for me. The ideas were not explained enough to be able to relate to them.

[John M · Rating 2 out of 5]

Words words words with very little tangible sense or meaning. The kind of poems that give poetry a bad name as unintelligible, effort-laden mystery. I wanted to like, correction love, this collection but found myself become irritated, feeling somehow tricked by Armitage to fall into a carefully laid trap of expectation and reputation. Absolutely pointless for me.