National Trust Blossomise Best

Blossomise – a glorious collaboration between Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate and the illustrator Angela Harding, celebrating the transformations of spring.

An age-old subject is given new perspectives in a collection with change and transformation at its heart.

Blossomise celebrates the ecstatic arrival of spring blossom just as it acknowledges, too, its melancholy disappearance. Full of energetic leaps of imagination and language, the 22 poems hopscotch between intense momentary haikus that honour the Japanese traditions of the blossom festival and stand-alone lyrical pieces that take in the stylistic tones of ballads, hymns, songs, prayers and nursery rhymes.

From a crashed Ford Capri wrapped around the immovable trunk of a cherry tree, to saplings flourishing among skyscrapers and urban sprawl, the fizz and froth of the annual blossom display is explored here both as an exuberant emblem of the natural world and a nervous marker of our vulnerable climate. 

Simon Armitage is Poet Laureate and Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. He has received numerous prizes and awards for his writing, including the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, 2018.

Angela Harding is a fine art painter and illustrator inspired by British birds, nature and countryside.