Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989–2014 by Simon Armitage review – ‘What surprises is how urgent and contemporary his early poems still read’

A timely retrospective for a soaring talent of modern British verse

• • Ben Wilkinson - The Guardian, Friday 7 November 2014 16.15 GMT

'Skimming across the living language with unmatched exuberance' … Simon Armitage Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/Eamonn McCabe

^“How did it get so late?” wonders Simon Armitage in Paper Aeroplane, his new selected poems. It’s a fair question. The recent fanfare of the Next Generation Poets 2014, a promotion touting fresh voices set to dominate British verse, has coincided with Armitage, once poetry’s poster boy for the original New Generation Poets 1994, releasing this hefty retrospective. Twenty-five years have passed since he stunned the poetry world with his debut Zoom! (1989), his voice distinctive, his energetic style fully formed. Since then there have been: 10 book-length collections, a host of novels, plays, translations and memoirs, not to mention a clutch of TV and radio programmes. What surprises is how urgent and contemporary those early poems still read.
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