RANSOM PUBLICATION DAY & THE VERB
18/03/2021
March 18th is official publication day for RANSOM, Michael’s 8th collection of poems.
Ransom is an intense and vivid exploration of liberty and limit, of what it means to be alive, and the possibility of hope in a fallen, wounded world. The poems in Ransom display all the lyrical beauty and metaphysical ambition for which his work is acclaimed, but with a new urgency, a ragged edge to what the Independent described as his ‘dazzling elegance’. At the heart of this new book are three sequences – one set in occupied Paris, one an elegy for his father, and one a meditation on gratitude – that work at the edges of belief and doubt, both mystical and philosophical. The idea of ‘ransom’ is turned and turned again, poem by poem, seen through the lenses of personal grief and loss, cinematic scenes of kidnap and release, narratives of incarnation and atonement.
You can hear Michael talking about, and reading from, Ransom on Radio 3’s ‘The Verb’, on BBC Sounds: