A Book of the Year

We were thrilled to read Simon Armitage's choices for his books of the year in this week's Guardian. He describes his reasons for selecting A Year in the Bull-Box as follows: "a poem-sequence detailing the turning of the seasons and the eternal processes of nature from the vantage point of a "bull-box" (that's a stone hut to you and me) in the Ribble Valley. It is also a meditation on mortality, written as Hughes succumbed to the cancer that was to take his life earlier this year. In those last 12 months he seemed to have found a grace and contentment that is both humbling and inspiring, and I don't ever remember being as moved by a book of poems."