The Dead Sea Poems

Simon Armitage is the most widely and unreservedly praised poet of his generation. The Dead Sea Poems, his fourth collection, culminates in a long visionary poem, 'Five Eleven Ninety Nine'. Elsewhere, questions of belief and trust, of identity and knowledge, dealt with as they occur in everyday domestic life, contribute to a picture of our contemporary world that is at once realistic and touched with a unique imaginative intensity.



Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire in 1963. In 1992 he was winner of one of the first Forward Prizes, and a year later was the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. Among his collections of poetry are Kid, Book of Matches, The Universal Home Doctor, Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid and Seeing Stars. His acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was published in 2007.