The Shout

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2005 by Simon Armitage

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, Boston, in 2005.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The poems in this work were previously published in the following collections: The Dead Sea (London: Faber & Faber, 1995); Moon Country by Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell (London: Faber & Faber, 1996); CloudCuckooLand (London: Faber & Faber, 1997); Book of Matches (London: Faber & Faber, 2001); The Universal Home Doctor (London: Faber & Faber, 2002); Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid (London: Faber & Faber, 2006, and New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Armitage, Simon, 1963–
The shout : selected poems / Simon Armitage.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi book.”
“Originally published by Harcourt in 2005.”
eISBN: 978-0-307-95874-7
I. Title.
PR6051.R564A6 2012
821′.914—dc22 2012003210

Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

v3.1

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The Shout

Gooseberry Season

At Sea

Poem

Kid

Lines Thought to Have Been Written on the Eve of the Execution of a Warrant for His Arrest

Not the Furniture Game

Robinson in Two Cities

The Lost Letter of the Late Jud Fry

To Poverty

Parable of the Dead Donkey

Hitcher

To His Lost Lover

Mr. Robinson’s Holiday

The Dead Sea Poems

Man with a Golf Ball Heart

I Say I Say I Say

White Christmas

Before You Cut Loose,

Goalkeeper with a Cigarette

A Week and a Fortnight

Dream Holiday

Chapter and Verse

The Two of Us

Five Eleven Ninety Nine

Robinson’s Life Sentence

Song of the West Men

Tachograph

A Glory

The Tyre

The Winner

For the Record

Homecoming

8 P.M. and Raining When Robinson

You’re Beautiful

All for One

Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass

The Strid

The Twang

The Strand

Salvador

The Golden Toddy

Birthday

The Night-Watchman

The Jay

The Summerhouse

The English

Working from Home

The Back Man

Robinson’s Resignation

Incredible

A Note About the Author

Other Books by This Author

THE SHOUT

We went out

into the school yard together, me and the boy

whose name and face

I don’t remember. We were testing the range

of the human voice:

he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm

from across the divide to signal back

that the sound had carried.

He called from over the park—I lifted an arm.

Out of bounds,

he yelled from the end of the road,

from the foot of the hill,

from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell’s Farm—

I lifted an arm.

He left town, went on to be twenty years dead

with a gunshot hole

in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.

Boy with the name and face I don’t remember,