Simon Armitage - Magnetic Field Recordings, episode 2.

Poet Laureate Simon Armitage reads from his latest poetry collection Magnetic Field in a new weekly broadcast from Marsden.
This week's poem is Privet.
Growing up in Marsden among the hills of West Yorkshire, Armitage has always associated his early poetic experiences with the night-time view from his bedroom window, those ‘private, moonstruck observations’ and the clockwork comings and goings in the village providing rich subject matter for his first poems. Decades on, that window continues to operate as both framework and focal point for the writing, the vastness of the surrounding moors always at his shoulder and forming a constant psychological backdrop, no matter how much time has elapsed and how distant those experiences.
Magnetic Field brings together Armitage’s Marsden poems, from his very first pamphlet to new work from a forthcoming collection. It offers personal insight into a preoccupation that shows no signs of fading, and his perspective on a locality he describes as ‘transcendent and transgressive’, a genuinely unique region forming a frontier territory between many different worlds. Magnetic Field also invites questions about the forging of identity, the precariousness of memory, and our attachment to certain places and the forces they exert.

[@northernjimpoetry]

Privet always makes me think of the school stick insect I looked after one summer. It ate privet from our garden, but escaped in the house and laid eggs all over the place which hatched at various times so that we experienced a biblical infestation over the subsequent months … loved the poem : ) JH

[@scottishcalv]

I'm there on top of that hedge. Lovely.

[@flivesey5889]

It's late, lockdown blues, then the poet laureate calls in for a natter. Not that bad, is it?