Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems

"The Tyre" tells how Armitage and other children found a tyre on the moor above Marsden, and set it rolling between their worlds.[13]

The scholar of English literature Marion Thain, writing in Worldviews, calls "The Tyre" the poem which most clearly explores Armitage's thoughts about the borderland between city and countryside, Marsden being in her view just such a place. She notes that the scholar and critic Raymond Williams describes the car as embodying humanity's current relationship with the world, and argues that the tyre symbolises the interface between urban and rural, as well as the division between the two cultures.[lower-alpha 1] The poem tells of finding a tyre on the moor "Lashed to the planet with grasses and roots". The narrator and the other children prise it free and make it roll. It bounds on to the road and rushes down to the village; they imagine "a phone-box upended, children erased, police and an ambulance in attendance," but when they arrive, they find no trace of it. The poem ends, she writes, with the children accepting a supernatural explanation for the tyre's disappearance. Thain notes that Armitage's semi-autobiographical 1998 travel book All Points North gives more detail of the tyre: "we must have tripped right over it, because it was sewn to the earth with tuft-grass and rushes, and the stitching had to be unpicked before we could prize it out of the peat and lift it up." The travel book, too, describes the tyre as "the giant vulcanized beast we'd brought to life", and tells how it crossed a main road, the A62, "between two wagons going at sixty miles an hour in opposite directions." Thain comments that the tyre is "ostensibly" back in the urban world of motor traffic, but is from the alarmed drivers' point of view "a beast run wild". The children wonder if they will find it, inanimate, "embedded in a house", or living, "lying in the gutter, playing dead". In her view, Armitage manages to "[marry] innocent and adult viewpoints" in his "allegory turned fairytale", avoiding closure and so connecting the geographic borderland with the natural/supernatural borderland of the poem.[13]

Sarah Crown, writing in The Guardian, comments that "Snow Joke" set up Armitage's style with its opening line "Heard the one about the guy from Heaton Mersey?"[15] Crown describes the poem as playing out a classic Armitage psychodrama, as a hubristic middle-aged married man, complete with mistress in another town, is found dead in his car, having ignored police warnings and driven through the snow. She admires the poem's ending, with its "final, ethereal image of the car buried in snow, its 'horn, moaning / softly like an alarm clock under an eiderdown'". In her view, comparing Armitage to Philip Larkin, this elevates the poem from its humdrum setting "to ethereal heights with a well-placed phrase".[15]

The poems are each situated geographically around the village, keyed with red lettering to their page numbers. The provision of maps (small detail shown) has been noted as a convenient feature of the book.[16] The marked outline denotes an inset map of the area around the poet's childhood home.

The poet Jonathan Humble, in The Yorkshire Times, calls the book "a love letter to a muse that was there for the poet at the beginning and has continued to be a source of inspiration through to the present day."[16] He notes that Armitage calls Marsden "genuinely unique … as a liminal, transcendent and transgressive location", and agrees it is an interesting place with a thriving cultural scene. He admires the book's production as "a lovely thing to behold", with its "handy maps", should the reader wish to walk what he predicts will become the "Armitage Trail", and the cover photograph of Marsden including the author's terrace house, and a shiny central band "illustrating (I believe) the magnetic attraction he feels towards the village."[16] He writes that "The Marsden Poet" remains as Samuel Laycock, commemorated in stone in the village's park, noting that "this seems to rankle the Poet Laureate (and with some justification", as Laycock left Marsden when he was 11 years old).[lower-alpha 2] Humble concludes that Armitage "surely deserves some physical recognition in the village as, with understated skill and marvellous accessibility, [he] continues to put Marsden on the map."[16]

The critic and editor Kate Simpson, in Poetry School, describes Magnetic Field as "a complex and alluring interpretation of our connection to both interior and exterior spaces: the grass is near touchable; the evening breeze tangible; the 'horizon ablaze' ("Emergency"). The fields await our return."[17] In her view, the Marsden poems "are like cardinal directions, pointing back to the landscape and inviting readers to gather in a geographical amphitheatre."[17]

• Armitage, Simon (2020). Magnetic field: the Marsden poems. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-36144-1. OCLC 1153334504.

• Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems on Armitage's website, with six episodes of the poet reading the poems
• A walk around Marsden based on the book on the Literary Rambles website