The second poem in Simon Armitage’s new poetry collection is titled “Drey” – a reference to the small hanging baskets of branches in which squirrels live. Armitage describes a drey as a “twig and leaf crow’s nest squat/ wombed with feathers and moss”. I hadn’t heard of the word before, I tell him. “It often comes up in crossword clues,” the poet laureate replies, in his unusually slow, deliberate voice. “Although if you spell it with an ‘a’, it has something to do with beer barrels: ‘A brewer’s dray.’ There’s a richness there. But I was really thinking about animal habitats, and I realised each animal home has a specific word. Almost like an address.”
That conceit is at the heart of Dwell – a playful, magical set of poems, each one devoted to a different habitat in the British landscape. There’s the usual – “Pond”, “Sett”, “Lodge” and “Web “(or “trampolines of death” as the 61-year-old puts it) – but also lesser-known abodes like “Scrape”, the home of a hare, and “Hibernaculum”, the underground shelters used by hibernating animals. Armitage imagines a hedgehog curled up like “spiky boxing gloves”. The poems are like miniature stories, combining his conversational style and startling lyrical precision with that sly narrative wit: “Deer Diary”, for instance, is an elegantly structured tease that plays on that animal’s elusive character and sense of mystery.
