Poems
Poem 4: 'About His Person'
Extract
Five pounds fifty in change, exactly,
a library card on its date of expiry.
A postcard, stamped,
Unwritten, but franked...
Location
'About His Person' is read from the mortuary at Huddersfield Royal Infirmary by Armitage and a small group of mortuary technicians and funeral directors who work with death daily. They talk about the poem. The 'dead body' in the programme is actually an actor.
Summary
The poem tries to reconstruct the identity of a suicide victim from what appears to be a factual list of the small items found 'about his person'. We have in effect a series of pictures or images that are factual snapshots. The choice of words in this list shows how a poet can play with multiple meanings to great effect. The title itself can be read in two ways, as can the final line, 'That was everything.' Many of the words have very violent overtones of finality - 'expiry', 'beheaded' - and all of these meanings are consciously worked on by the poet.
What Simon Armitage Said
'Images are really central to my writing. I think they're the main thing in poetry. I think it's what people are most attracted to, the likening of one thing to another.
'You keep being hit with one image after the other and the total effect rounds on that last line.
'I guess what people do here is chop bodies up and dissect them and dehumanise them and make sense from that. Whereas what I've tried to do is the reverse... to put somebody back together, to look at all these objects, to look at the details, and to make a story out of them, and in making that story, to remake the person.'
Simon Armitage - Passwords 1998
© 2000 Channel Four Television Corporation
