Simon Armitage and the Lay of the Land: Walking, Writing, Publishing

Abstract

ABSTRACT The publication of Walking Home (2012), by Simon Armitage with its subsequent series of site-specific poems Stanza Stones (2013), coincides with the confirmation that a new wave of nature writing has swept over British bookshops. By walking from north to south instead of the conventional approach to this challenging route, the poet transforms what might have been an individual and subjective experience into a collective one; the shared dimension of the text corresponds to the fluidity of the medium he has chosen since the final book (and Stanza Stones) turns this project into a surprising object which embodies the complex position held by Armitage in his attempt to connect land and poetry in a down-to-earth manner. This paper therefore examines how the two books correspond to this new ethos of nature writing, in which writing, reading and publishing seem to become part of a singular process.