New Cemetery Audiobook in a Card

Simon Armitage’s New Cemetery, the Poet Laureate’s highly acclaimed new collection, is now available as an Audiobook in a Card, a beautiful and simple way to share the gift of poetry.

The Poet Laureate makes peace with the dead in this highly imaginative and wide-ranging new collection. 

The conversion of a local natural-beauty spot into a municipal graveyard is the starting point for New Cemetery. From regular walks around the boundary near his moorland home in West Yorkshire, Simon Armitage chronicles the extraordinary transformation of landscape, both outer and inner. 

These luminous and wry poems – composed in short-lined tercets – reflect the changing world: one of unstable weather patterns and unpredictable news events, all observed across a few acres of Pennine upland. As seasons come and go and the cemetery fills up with new ‘residents’, Armitage charts personal losses of his own, often retreating to his garden shed to navigate blank paper with pen and ink. Encompassing lyrical revelations and everyday vignettes alongside apocalyptic visions and imagined conversations with the deceased, these pages draw us into a parallel neighbourhood of remembrance and celebration.

This full-length audiobook (10 hours), narrated by the Poet Laureate himself, deepens the collection’s atmosphere, guided by his unmistakable voice. 

Each card includes space for a handwritten message and comes with a plain kraft envelope, ready to post or hand-deliver. Inside, a QR code unlocks the full audiobook with simple instructions for instant listening.

A perfect poetry gift for birthdays, Christmas, Father’s Day, or Mother’s Day, and an ideal audiobook gift for bookworms, and anyone who loves contemporary verse. Thoughtful and unique, it’s a wonderful choice for poetry lovers looking for immersive and moving stories from one of the UK’s most celebrated poets. This gift is a must for poetry lovers.

Narrator: Simon Armitage
Length: 1 hr and 10 mins

ONLY AVAILABLE IN THE UK.