House of Anansi, 2007
Read by Aaron Tucker
There is a joy in Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid that readers will be hard pressed to find in many other books of poetry. Armitage employs a child-like wit and innocence through the images and tone of his poems, which allows each piece a whimsical playfulness reminiscent of plastic figurines and bedroom floors. While this tone is consistent, even funny, throughout, the lyric work as a whole is too fragmented to maintain any sort of momentum and the reader, working from one poem to the next, is often left puzzled or half-satisfied.
That is not to say the smaller suites of poems don’t work as contained units. Often they do. However, those suites are arranged distractedly, haphazardly and disparate. A reader must jump consistently from one idea to the next, making it hard to pinpoint any continuing fluidity of thought or theme. Further, the line breaks are often choppy and off-putting as they alternate between the longer prose lines and jumpy, brief poetic bursts. In this way, the quirky narratives and extended jokes that Armitage is attempting to ground his poems in are almost always undercut.
Some of the smaller pieces, when taken individually, can be rewarding. Armitage’s translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Bayeux Tapestry and in particular The Odyssey are quite well done, and show the potential balance between humour and poetics that Armitage is striving for in the rest of the work. Similarly, in the pieces that work well, such as “Poems on His Birthday,” the small compartments that cause some trouble in the rest of the work actually build up upon each other and create a forward movement that enchants the reader.
In smaller segments, Tyrannosaurus can be an enjoyable, sometimes entertaining and fun read, but as a complete work, lacks a throughline to unite it, leaving the reader without the necessary traction to appreciate the text as a whole.
