Simon Armitage is a poet, playwright, and translator whose work often centers on relationships and a strong sense of place. His poem "Mother, Any Distance Greater Than a Single Span," originally published in the 1993 collection Book of Matches, uses an extended metaphor of measuring distances inside a house to portray the relationship between the speaker and his mother.
In the poem, the speaker's mother comes to help him measure different household fixtures and rooms. The mother stands at the base end while the speaker unspools the tape and reports the measurements back to her. This becomes a metaphor for years passing as the speaker travels further up through the house, and eventually he reaches the top of the house where a hatch opens to reveal the sky. There, he is free to fall or fly—to fail or succeed in his own life.
The Book of Matches was well-received; it was reviewed positively in publications such as The London Magazine, The Independent, and The Antioch Review. Divided into three sections, the first section (which gives the book its title) is composed of thirty poems that can be read in the time it takes a match to burn out. The British Council on Literature notes that one of Armitage's poetic strengths is his willingness to write about any subject, and this is evident both in the Book of Matches and in his body of work as a whole.
