Publisher's Synopsis
Simon Armitage's new collection brings news from unusual places, whether from the recent past (an island being born off the coast of Iceland, the 'Women of Merrie England' coffee houses of the poet's Huddersfield youth) or from the remote warrior worlds of the Bayeux tapestry, the Odyssey and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Other poems belong to a future that is extinct before it arrives, or that is a small and sinister step away from the would-be solidities of our present. But what Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Corduroy Kid engages with above all is the matter of England, here and now. The poet's preoccupation with utopias and new republics, with visions and intimations, is in the service of a sharpened focus upon this island - 'here at the Empire's end' - just as his evolutionary concerns lock into a heightened sense of where we now stand, in the company of animals (birds, sloths, horses), and where we part company to give rein to the beast within. Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid is a book of oppositions. From the David and Goliath of the epigraph to the man-against-nature of the final page, Armitage details one conflict after another: between youth and age, between the ancient and modern, between science and myth, and between east and west. The result is his wittiest, most alertly combative and impassioned collection to date.
