Simon Armitage’s Killing Time is the result of a commission from the New Millennium Experience Company; his brief was to write a 1,000-line poem for the year 2000. Rather than one vast slab, Armitage, whose gifts have always tended towards the lyric, alternates zippy quatrains with slightly longer set-pieces, whether accounts of recent newsworthy events (the Paddington rail crash, the Colorado high-school shootings) or meditations, on time, space, religion; the round-the-world ballooning, for instance, of Piccard and Jones becomes for Armitage a flight of fancy when he imagines a utopia with everyone living in hot-air balloons, eliminating national boundaries and the exploitation of land.
The aerial views of this piece are only a more overt example of what Armitage does throughout the volume; a godlike eye surveys the terrain of 1999, and occasionally sermonizes on it. Killing Time is, necessarily, a big poem for a big occasion, an epic in miniature. Armitage, in order to perform such a sweeping survey of history-as-it-happens, employs the products and methods of the global news media; but as a poet, he also questions those story-makers. The volume is almost topped and tailed by pieces about animals – those trusty symbols of innocence and nature – corrupted by information technology; a grotesque image of “some monkey gone wrong, / loud speakers for earlugs, / a microphone tongue” or the last surviving lyrebird, mimicking both the sounds of holocaust and a background of camera whirrs, telephone trillings and “the radiation of news”.
The title page is preceded by a twelve-liner in italics that one might call an epigraph, were it not by Armitage himself. Armitage ends by stating that “NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS”, though the piece also contains an odd allusion to Henry Newbolt: “And it ain’t for the price of a fake tan, / or bringing the government down”, as if the famous “last man in and ten to win” line might have apocalyptic overtones. Newbolt’s poem was also fin-de-siècle, written around 1897, and was a not untypical paean to cricketers’ values as applied to imperial battlegrounds. Armitage takes televised golf as his metaphor for continued military action in the Gulf: “And although these are the opening shots of operation Desert Fox, / not the Ryder Cup, / we have men on the fairway pointing at divots and craters / where objects were blown up”.
Formally, Armitage has borrowed from Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, in that many of the pieces employ long lines alternated with short lines, with the long lines, by and large, end-rhymed. The pieces differ substantially of course; for all that Armitage (successfully) excoriates a world of “infotainment” and ersatz excitements, it remains the case that this is a commissioned work of a topical nature with an unnegotiable deadline, and shows every evidence of having been composed right up to the wire. It may be this pressure of time that leads to the weaker moments; while the look of the poem recalls MacNeice, the rhythm is not as tight, and at times the metre is less Pindaric than MacGonagallesque; the rhymes, likewise, are neither consistently full nor partial, and some (“advertising” / “devices”) are slight to the point of invisibility.
What Armitage has not lost is a happy knack for a direct and effective image. When dealing with a subject as difficult and ugly as the London nail bombings, he manages an image that economically deals with both physical and mental aspects of the horror:
This season, luggage containing terrible
thoughts
was left in Brixton, Soho and Brick Lane,
the kind which scatters the baggage of one
man’s mind
into the public’s brain.
The same tact is employed with regard to the Colorado shootings, with the substitution of flowers for bullets; so the entire tragedy is inverted into epiphany, though one doesn’t forget the horror that inspired it (a little like the effect of Kurt Vonnegut or Martin Amis running the Holocaust backwards), and the tactic is employed again in a neat quatrain on road deaths:
Flowers again at the accident blackspot this
morning
and crumbs of windscreen glass.
And the people bring hubcaps as wreaths to lay
on the road
whenever the petals crash.
Killing Time is very much of its time; its international and historical vision is enabled by the very processes of information technology and dissemination that are sometimes looked at bleakly within the piece. The lists that Armitage’s work is famed for come into play here, necessarily caricaturing their subjects in the same way as the media tends to. What the longer meditations offer is a way past the ephemeral tat and nastiness of the “Year in Review” genre beloved of the national press; a spiritual or community-oriented celebration, or a humanist plea for a little peace and quiet. The final quatrain is wittily pessimistic about that possibility, calling to mind the Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times”. Killing Time is never dull; but it does suggest that a period of calm reflection is the best thing we could call for now.