The Unaccompanied is Simon Armitage’s first poetry collection in more than a decade during which he wrote drama, translation, travel articles and prose poetry. This collection doesn’t disappoint. It’s a mixture of familiar Yorkshire moors and sea, urban depression, Nature and human nature, globalisation and social media. His poems are accessible; at times witty and sad, they set the big questions of life against the small familiar details of every day.

My favourite poem from this collection is ‘The Unaccompanied’. A walker at night stops to listen to the sound of singing, songs about mills and mines, myth and the mundane. It is a poem about heritage, about traditions spanning generations, from father to son, of the fathers that went before. It reminded me of traditional fishermen’s choirs, still popular on the East Yorkshire coast.

Because of copyright restrictions I am unable to reproduce the poem in full, but please search it out in an anthology or at your local library.

‘Wandering slowly back after dark one night
above a river, towards a suspension bridge,
a sound concerns him that might be a tune
or might not; noise drifting in, trailing off.’

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Read these other excerpts, and perhaps find a new poet to love:-
‘A thousand years, you said’ by Lady Heguri
‘Runaways’ by Daniela Nunnari
‘Digging’ by Seamus Heaney

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
A #poem to read in the bath: ‘The Unaccompanied’ by Simon Armitage https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3Rb via @SandraDanby