routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

488 The twentieth century: 1945 to the present
TOWARDS THE TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY
If Irish poetry is undergoing something of a renaissance, there is no
lack of variety in English writing. Craig Raine’s ‘Martian’ school, after A
Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), enjoyed a vogue, but more
recently the vivid urban expression of Simon Armitage, in Zoom! (1989),
Kid (1992), and The Dead Sea Poems (1995), and Glyn Maxwell, in Tale
of the Mayor’s Son (1990) and Out of the Rain (1992), have attracted
considerable acclaim. Their technical accomplishment, in the tradition
of Larkin and Harrison, has become a vital part of poetic achievement.
Simon Armitage’s Xanadu (1992) is a film poem, set in Lancashire,
using twenty-six alphabetically named blocks of flats – being demolished
– as the background for his reflections on social deprivation.
I have to say I’d never thought
of this place as a ski resort.
Ashfield Valley
and its thousand chalets,
a case of the half-light
making me snow-blind.
In any case,
this house of cards, these Meccano apartments
thirty years ago were the cat’s pyjamas.
So instead
of putting the cart before the horse
I should trace this rumour back to its source;
the place: perhaps a council chamber,
the date: nineteen-sixty something or other . . .
Writers like Ben Okri, born in Nigeria – where his Booker Prize-winning
novel The Famished Road is set – Grace Nicholas, and John Agard, born in
Guyana, and Benjamin Zephaniah, born in Birmingham but brought up in