Out of the Blue by Simon Armitage

Written in memory of three separate conflicts: 9/11, VE Day following the end of war in Europe, and civil war in Cambodia, these poems are compelling reading: lean, strong, masterful.
I watched Out of the Blue, broadcast on Channel 5 to commemorate events five years before. It follows an English trader working in the World Trade Centre on the day of the terrorist attacks. I hope it is repeated later this year, when another five years will have passed. I visited Ground Zero in 2003 and a few years ago, across the river from Manhattan, observed the New York skyline without the twin towers we remembered from years before; re-reading this poem brings it all back. And so it should.
All lost.
Now all coming back.

We May Allow Ourselves a Brief Period of Rejoicing recalls VE Day, sixty years on. A work colleague once recalled feeling depressed when the War was over and going to her GP to be told that ‘the surgery’s full of people like you’. Simon Armitage explores the aftermath of war in this powerful poem.
Cambodia is close to my heart ever since our trip there eight years ago. I fell in love with this tragic beautiful land, ruined, wrecked but not totally ground into oblivion. I still weep for Cambodia, for those hacked to death during Pol Pot’s reign of terror and those still living through nightmares of the past as they scrabble in the dust, trying to survive. Armitage’s poem was commissioned for BBC Radio thirty years after the rise of the Khmer Rouge.