New Cemetery, a new collection from British Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, is a vivid, sometimes exhilarating read. Occasioned, as its title baldly remembers, by the creation of a cemetery near his home outside Huddersfield, it is a sequence of short poems all written in terse tercets and titled with the names of moth species.
Though many of these poems have already appeared untitled in various magazines and newspapers, they now bear these names (and with only the occasional thematic correspondence), because as Armitage explains in his introduction, “Moths,” he went on several nighttime walks through the cemetery, saw the creatures flitting around the lights left by mourners, and began to think of their intricate wing patterns as “signs and signals,” highly varied but all suggestive of alarm at the climate change which endangers this “indicator species.” Indeed, the poems are “fragile,” like their namesakes, “diminutive and moth-like” in their design, so that the collection can consider mortality beyond that of humans, even the projected end of nature itself.
Readers may be surprised at the simplicity and directness of such poems as “Dark Brocade,” placed second in the collection, which announces the saga foursquare: “So the new cemetery / goes ahead, bulldozers / peeling back turf / from those level fields above Berry Brow, yellow diggers / clawing at dark soil / in the pinched shadow of Castle Hill.” (Those sturdy proper place names, complements to the moths’ names, will appear throughout and help root New Cemetery in its rugged north, from which it has views of the West Riding to the east and “Brontë country” further north, though there are excursions to places like Bristol Parkway.) Armitage then turns to address Kirklees Council, responsible for the excavation, and says ruefully that he’d rather see the plot filled with the dead than with the living. The latter he calls, in a startling outburst, “hippopotami of the shopping aisles, / weed-killer gardeners, / Haribo chefs / in camouflage jimjams / burning the midnight oil.” In other words, consumers of gelatin, petroleum, etc., and thus despoilers of what at the end of the poem is called “the good earth.”
One may be troubled by the more than hint of misanthropy here and elsewhere, but “Haribo chefs” is a wonderful confection. And the greatest pleasures in New Cemetery these brief, sometimes comic visions, of shopping hippos, or windblown balloons and toys that “trim and bauble” a wall of the cemetery, or Armitage’s mother removing clothes from the tub, “hauling drowning sailors / from sea to deck,” or the two hands of a clock in their “perfected ballet positions.”
I was charmed by a series scattered through the book where Armitage speaks to his “Dear reader” or the “Dear planet” and watches himself, “the poet,” from the outside, “elbowing / cloud-edge and cloud-base / onto a scrawled page” in his shed, under a Velux window. But charm is always flirting and skirting with cutesiness, especially when the subject is the speaker: unfortunately, a poem like “Burnished Brass,” in which he lists anagrams of Simon Armitage (“Mismanage Riot, / Origami Stamen”), crosses over into that territory of cringe. The only other weakness here is the occasional disconcertingly bland, lamentful opening line, like “Twelve months to the day” (since a father’s death) or “I never did identify” (a particular moth). Perhaps not coincidentally, these begin those poems that use the first person most assertively and share less with the reader.
When only obliquely autobiographical, Armitage has great ambition without grandness, to be found and admired in the best poems in New Cemetery, such as “False Mocha” and “Pauper Pug.” The first describes sunsets, and the second, sun and moonlight through that Velux window. “False Mocha” opens dramatically, “Darkness descends,” but then the elaboration is whimsical: “I want to say / awkwardly, / stumbling into ginnels / and snickets.” Night is not just personified but made into a farcical operation of many invisible persons, as “Sections of dusk / are airlifted in.” The solemn tone returns, but changed by the memory of the whimsical, so that Armitage can call “the predicament” of the world cloaked in the dark “beyond serious” and still be taken seriously. “Pauper Pug” has it that the window is a “hatch in the mind” at the top of the “Glider cockpit,” also a “chancel-for-one,” making of the poet a pilot-priest, who guides “angled thought / through diagonal light.” Day and night, disorienting before, is also a generous arrangement for those attentive to shadings, and moonlight, however often it has been hymned, offers the poet something we haven’t seen before and right under his nose.
Armitage makes us see the mere reflection as a substance, ready to accept other substances: “the tinsmith moon / delivers / an empty tray / to the narrow desk.” When the moon is a metalworker, what is created has turned creator, and we have what we can really call poetry, both plainly and as high praise. Armitage is some craftsman, both when he catches the light and when he casts it.
POETRY
By Simon Armitage
Knopf
Published January 20, 2026
