2016 read #18: Walking Home: A Poet's Journey by Simon Armitage.

Walking Home: A Poet's Journey by Simon Armitage
289 pages
Published 2013 (British edition published 2012)
Read from March 12 to March 13
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

From the glowing, sylvan, almost mythological optimism of Roger Deakin, and the more measured, philosophical cadences of Robert Macfarlane -- not to mention the golden light and luminous rains of my trip to Ireland, seven years ago and still my only venture off this continent -- I've become something of an Anglophile, in the sense that I've developed a long distance love affair with this idealized conception of England, and the British Isles generally. The subtitle of the British edition of this book, Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way, would have hooked me in and gotten me reading it a lot sooner than its watered-down American sobriquet. Poets or troubadours make no difference to me; it's the bit about tramping the Pennine Way that would have reeled me in.

In that sense, it's interesting that Walking Home is the first book in my reading history that depicts something less than an idealized experience, both of hiking a long-distance path and of the ostensibly "wild" places of the English countryside. Where Deakin finds tranquil immersion in the unlikeliest fens and urban waterways, and Macfarlane finds pockets of the wild in every hedgerow, Armitage acknowledges the intrusion of the modern into the remotest moors. Towers and radar domes and farms turned junkyards are the mileposts of his walk, drenching somewhat my immediate reaction of "I simply must hike the Pennine Way someday!" Armitage's walk is measured by poetry readings, and his perception of the world picks up people and human concerns; the journey is essentially the spine of his book, while the pages crowd with personalities and nightly counts of donations at the door. You can just sense that heath and moor and rock and fog is not where Armitage, given his druthers, would rather be. Which makes this something of a unique narrative in my experience, approaching it as I do with the canons of hiking books and English nature writing as my compass points.

I'm no judge of poetry, so I can't rate the occasional poem Armitage includes. They didn't do much for me, for the most part. And his prose, while certainly adequate, doesn't have the warmth and beauty of Deakin's or Macfarlane's or Helen Macdonald's -- perhaps because he isn't so clearly infatuated with the scenes he depicts. The anecdotes and asides are funny, but the book as a whole has a middling feel, almost a sense of a big project planned in advance and then completed with flagging enthusiasm, much like Armitage's hike itself.