Peter Armstrong’s To No Place includes a substantial selection of new poems written over the last decade in which he has continued to explore the themes of faith and doubt, loss and belonging that have long been the hallmark of his work. Throughout, he pursues an enduring engagement with place, whether in his native North-East England, or the edge-landscapes of Donegal, Hebrides, or the Baltic coast. Anne Stevenson highlighted a cinematic aspect to Armstrong’s poetry, and these poems present a vision of landscape that gives as much weight to a forgotten motorway spur as to a wider rural and post-industrial North, or the yet wider spaces of Western Australia.
The book brings together poems from Armstrong’s four collections, Risings (1988), The Red-funnelled Boat (1998), The Capital of Nowhere (2003) and The Book of Ogham (2012), together with others from his chapbook Madame Noire (2008) and work published in anthologies and journals.
A selection of Peter Armstrong’s early poetry was included in one of Bloodaxe’s first publications, Neil Astley’s anthology Ten North-East Poets in 1980. Now this career retrospective volume is published by Bloodaxe nearly 50 years later on Armstrong’s 70th birthday.
‘The poet, you feel, is a cartographer walking his own map, taking you with him on a guided tour of places and people that are almost out of touch with themselves; and on this journey, nowhere is a place you have to come to, however unsettling the view, however far from home you might feel.’ – Poetry Book Society Bulletin on The Capital of Nowhere
‘A resolute sense of the weight of words and a humorous melancholy. Brilliant!’ – John Hartley Williams, Morning Star, on The Book of Ogham
‘What makes Armstrong’s work so satisfying, and so rewarding to rereadings, is its combination of discreet, uncluttered craftsmanship and readiness to tease complex materials into the light.’ – Sean O’Brien, on The Red-funnelled Boat
‘He is one of the very few poets to have appeared in the last thirty years with the skill to work with the grain of Auden’s English, and turn it to original ends… These intricate, radiant and politically articulate meditations on art, work and the North…represent some of the most intelligent by an English poet writing today.’ – Don Paterson, on The Capital of Nowhere
‘Although Armstrong paints himself as “absurd and reverent in equal measure”, the scales invariably favour the latter. Yet faith is, in these poems, a scotched rumour – vivid doubt is primary. His poetry is that of a man indoctrinated but unpersuaded… He perceives isolation as exaggerated by rough weather and uncompromising landscape… his starting point and destination is a Northumberland of the soul.’ – Kevan Johnson, TLS
‘A poet of North-East England, he has a powerful sense of landscape and history, inwoven with an abiding interest in Christianity. The pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela figures prominently in his work, as here in the strange, visionary ‘Edward Thomas on the Camino Frances’. Armstrong’s ear is both just and surprising: listen to the sure-footed central passage of ‘From the Outlying Islands’, and then to the chiselled line of his elegy for William Beveridge.’ – Sean O’Brien, The Robert Graves Review
‘Read Peter Armstrong’s poems and you’re a stranger in a strange town. The place makes you edgy, but it gives you the thrill of excitement; you look over your shoulder from time to time; you peer more closely into the shadows.’ – Poetry Book Society Bulletin on The Capital of Nowhere
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