New Cemetery
New Cemetery by Simon Armitage, published by Faber & Faber, Limited on September 11, 2025, is a poetry collection that explores themes of loss and transformation. In this 120-page work, the Poet Laureate reflects on the conversion of a local natural beauty spot into a municipal graveyard, using his walks around the boundary near his moorland home in West Yorkshire as inspiration. The collection features a series of luminous and wry poems, composed in short-lined tercets, that capture the changing landscape and the complexities of personal and collective memory.
Readers will find that New Cemetery chronicles the interplay between the external environment and internal emotions, as Armitage navigates his own experiences of loss while observing the cemetery’s evolution. The poems encompass a range of reflections, from lyrical insights to everyday moments, alongside more profound themes of remembrance and celebration. Through imagined conversations with the deceased and vivid depictions of seasonal changes, this collection invites readers into a contemplative space that bridges the ordinary and the extraordinary.
Official synopsis Publisher
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION
The Poet Laureate makes peace with the dead in this highly imaginative and wide-ranging new collection.
The conversion of a local natural-beauty spot into a municipal graveyard is the starting point for New Cemetery. From regular walks around the boundary near his moorland home in West Yorkshire, Simon Armitage chronicles the extraordinary transformation of landscape both outer and inner. These luminous and wry poems – composed in short-lined tercets – reflect the changing world: one of unstable weather patterns and unpredictable news events, all observed across a few acres of Pennine upland.
As seasons come and go and the cemetery fills up with new ‘residents’, Armitage charts personal losses of his own, often retreating to his garden shed to navigate blank paper with pen and ink. Encompassing lyrical revelations and everyday vignettes alongside apocalyptic visions and imagined conversations with the deceased, these pages draw us into a parallel neighbourhood of remembrance and celebration.
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