Magnetic Field

The large village of Marsden, West Yorkshire not only was home to Simon Armitage's beginnings as writer, but has continued as a vital presence throughout his works: from his very first pamphlet,

Human Geography (1988), to his forthcoming new collection

New Cemetery (scheduled for 2022). This edition gathers all the Marsden poems together to create a 'poetry of place' edition, which will offer a new way of appraising Simon's body of work, as well as celebrating this overlooked region that has meant so much to him personally. Simon will be announcing a decade-long tour of libraries in the UK as a central strand of his laureateship: every spring he'll be reading in a handful of libraries across the country, and would like to feature this collection as part of it, donating a copy to each library. Even in Marsden the extraordinary could happen, apparently. Staring out of that window every night I developed a new sense of the world, one that went beyond the factual and the informational. A sense of what it was like, and how it felt. That was the beginning of my life as a writer, even though I still didn't know how to capture experiences in words.

– Simon Armitage in the

Guardian, on growing up in Marsden.