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Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
@stevewh16944270
10:22 AM 19th January 2018
arts

Poem Of The Week - Night Shift - Simon Armitage

 
Night Shift

Once again I have missed you by moments;
steam hugs the rim of the just-boiled kettle,

water in the pipes finds its own level.
In another room there are other signs

of someone having left: dust, unsettled
by the sweep of the curtains; the clockwork

contractions of the paraffin heater.
For weeks now we have come and gone, woken

in empty acres of bedding, written
lipstick love-notes on the bathroom mirror

and in this space we have worked and paid for
we have found ourselves, but lost each other.

Upstairs, at least, there is understanding
in things more telling than lipstick kisses;

the air, still hung with spores of your hairspray;
body-heat stowed in the crumpled duvet.



Reared on the edge of a bleak stretch of the Pennines in Marsden, Simon Armitage came to poetry indirectly. Trained as a probation officer, and working amongst the dereliction of Manchester's eighties underside, the experience, together with an almost visionary instinct for the geography and culture of his own locale, vouchsafed themes which have fired a singular poetic imagination ever since.

It is significant that Armitage polished his skills early at a creative writing group at Huddersfield library, and that, in spite of the logistical blandishments of much later fame (he has won many awards and has been Professor of Poetry at the universities of Oxford, Manchester and Leeds), he has never abandoned this obscure corner of West Yorkshire as either domicile or muse.

And out of the intensely personal and acute observations of minutiae, Armitage has contrived a poetry of the universal, corroborating, perhaps better than anyone, the old invocation that writers should first write about that with which they are familiar. From the familiar - remembered schooldays, Pennine landscapes, even the red livery of Huddersfield's 'Merrie England' cafe girls - are conceived enduring elegies, homages, and kaleidoscopic impressions of cultural nuances.

A vein of subcutaneous sadness surfaces in many of Armitage's poems, colouring meaning in shades of loss, and the poet's adherence to formal poetic structures does not always mitigate a sense of isolation and separation.

The narrator of 'Night Shift' is a detached observer of detail who yet remains hyper-sensitive to the emotional impact of another kind of detachment. Armitage's use of personification in the poem - steam hugs a kettle, curtains have the power to unsettle, and a paraffin heater contracts like a woman in labour - conveys an absence highlighted by visual and aural tokens. Each line of sparse couplets is a regular decasyllabic inventory of measured time, so that the 'weeks' of daily absences slow to a crushing crawl.

But where a semi-detachment of domestic machinery fails to yield comfort beyond reminder, resonances of human warmth go some way to recovering the sense of loss. There is narcotic consolation in the haven of bedroom where the iron of slowed time acts to suspend hairspray 'spores' in contained air, and, in an astonishingly persuasive metaphor, where the stowing of body heat in a nest of duvet releases nothing less than love.