Short And Sweet - 101 Very Short Poems

If your attention span has been raised on notification pings, half-finished cups of tea, and the noble belief that you’ll “just read one more thing before bed,” then Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems (1999) by Simon Armitage is basically a poetry book designed to meet you where you live — in the land of brief encounters with meaning.

Published by Faber and Faber (ISBN 9780571200016), this is a pocket-sized festival of compact poems: small, sharp, witty, surprising, and occasionally capable of landing an emotional punch with the efficiency of a well-aimed paper aeroplane. The premise is gloriously simple: 101 poems, all very short, none of them wasting your time — which is ironic, because you’ll still end up spending ages rereading them, because short poems are like that. They’re tiny, and then they echo.

Armitage’s selection has the feel of a brilliantly stocked sweet shop where everything is bite-sized but strangely intense. You’ll find poems that flirt, poems that brood, poems that joke, poems that stab you lightly and then apologise. The range is the point: different voices, different eras, different moods — all squeezed into neat little verbal parcels that you can open in a minute and carry around in your head for the rest of the day.

And the irony of the title is perfect. “Short and sweet” sounds like something you’d say to a long-winded colleague. Here it’s a promise: you can have poetry without committing to a 40-line epic about a swan’s soul. You can dip in while the kettle boils. You can read one on the bus. You can read three and pretend you’re a person of culture. Then you’ll read another, because they’re small and you’re only human.

This is also the kind of book that quietly teaches you why poetry still matters: because in a few lines it can compress a thought, a feeling, a scene, or a punchline into something that’s cleaner and stranger than prose. It’s verbal shorthand for life — the bits you can’t quite say any other way.

Condition: Good, meaning it’s a solid, readable copy — perfect for dipping, gifting, leaving by the sofa, or keeping in a bag as an emergency supply of language. It’s the sort of book you don’t “finish” so much as keep returning to, like a tin of biscuits you insist is for guests but somehow keeps getting lighter.

Perfect for: poetry dabblers, busy readers, people who like clever brevity, anyone who wants to feel something in under 30 seconds, and anyone who suspects their soul could use a quick tune-up between emails.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — because sometimes the best poems aren’t long. They’re just enough.

Keep browsing: See more Poetry books Other books by Simon Armitage