The Not Dead is a short collection of war poems written, not in battle, but as a response to the testimonies of ex-soldiers featured in the programme. As Simon Armitage points out in his eloquent, self-effacing introduction, time is no "great healer" for people scarred by war. Each poem focuses on a flashback scene one of the ex-soldiers has struggled to forget. "Remains", for example, written for someone who served in Basra, tries to capture the moment when he shot a man looting a bank. Who are the Not Dead? The ex-servicemen and the ghosts trapped in their memories; the people who live and die and live again every time one of the veterans experiences a bad memory.
"Armitage shows us that modern war poetry, like modern combat, is provisional, chancy, unresolved. These are poems of survivors - the damaged, exhausted men who return from war in body but never, wholly, in mind. In terse, undecorated language, Armitage conveys their sense of nullification, focusing on war's endlessness, the past barrelling insistently into the present at every turn. At one remove from the wars he's writing about, Armitage positions himself as a witness not to the dead but to the living: a poet for today's unsung victims."
Sarah Crown
The Guardian, Friday 19 December 2008
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Simon Armitage CBE (born 26 May 1963, Huddersfield) is a British poet, playwright, and novelist. He was born in Marsden, West Yorkshire. Armitage first studied at Colne Valley High School, Linthwaite, Huddersfield and went on to study geography at Portsmouth Polytechnic. He was a post-graduate student at Manchester University where his MA thesis concerned the effects of television violence on young offenders. Until 1994 he worked as Probation Officer in Greater Manchester. He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters in 1996 from the University of Portsmouth. He then lectured on creative writing at the University of Leeds, the University of Iowa and the Manchester Metropolitan University. In February 2011 he took up the position as Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield.[1][2]
review by simon turner
Simon Turner - Resurrecting the Hyphen: Notes on Simon Armitage's The Not Dead
http://gistsandpiths.blogspot.com/search/label/War%20poetry
