Travelling songs

The Universal Home Doctor, Simon Armitage's flesh-and-blood account of numerous personal journeys, reads like a private encyclopaedia of emotion and health.

Vivid and engaged, the poems range from the rainforests of South America to the deserts of Western Australia, but are set against that ultimate and most intimate of all landscapes - the human body.

Equally, the body politic comes into question, through subtle enquiries into Englishness and the idea of home.

Simon Armitage once observed that there are two types of poems - those that try to work out the chemical equation for language, and those that tell stories and sing songs.

The poems in Travelling Songs are very much the latter, a handful of lyrics and verses written over a number of years, many being commissioned to celebrate or commemorate public events, others being part of larger projects in theatre, radio and television.

Erotic, witty, flippant, poignant and always melodic, Travelling Songs is a kind of busker's handbook, the kind of work that might win a poet a decent meal when singing for his supper.