It's been quite a year for poetry: Ted Hughes became a posthumous superstar and the faffing over who would succeed him filled the papers for months. So when the organisers of the official millennium celebrations hired Simon Armitage to mark the dawning of the bright new age, one thing was clear: this time "public verse" would be just that. Remarkably, the New Millennium Experience Company has got something right. Long after the Dome has been recycled as Greenwich World of Carpets, historians and lovers of language will be picking over Armitage's masterly summing-up.
Killing Time's 1,000 lines are a progress through the big news stories since last Christmas: Desert Fox, the Paddington Rail Crash, the Colorado high-school shootings, the London nail-bombings, Kosovo Armitage is not a story-stretcher: he once edited a collection of mini-verse, Short and Sweet, claiming "a whole universe can be concocted in just a couple of lines". So what we get are setpieces of 80 or 90 lines, separated by pithy quatrains that now reinforce, now undercut them.
In Kate Rowland's enthralling production for Radio 3, Armitage's blunt tones mingled with a stream of persons-in-the-street, snatches of opera and dance music and grim soundbites from news programmes.
Killing Time begins with a tale of a news-junkie monkey, "a new freak in the ape house", and you wonder: is that us? Is that me?
Already world-weary ("No news is good news"), Armitage is further saddened by the way language is twisted and deracinated, war sanitised by "men on the ground, in the field, describing in terms/of stroke-play golf/how laser-guided missiles were teed-off from abroad". His poem is a counter-attack, reclaiming words' power, making bitter, bright images from bland components. Nail bombs are "luggage containing terrible thoughts", starvation "the ultimate striptease".
It could be unbearable - yet another venting of fin-de-siecle angst. But Armitage finds wry humour in the clouded-over eclipse, flashes of hope in the balloon races. "We could do worse/than hang around up there while wounds heal, battlefields go to pot, weapons to rust/Impossible of course/but couldn't we just, couldn't we just?" I felt tears pricking.
"We live in an age where we are bombarded with stuff and nonsense coming at us from every angle," Armitage once wrote. "Most of it is unsolicited, unavoidable and garbage." Not this.
• The film of Killing Time will be broadcast on Channel 4 on New Year's Day.
