Poetry
Dog Star
An inviting and poignant new collection exploring our increasingly turbulent relationship with nature, from award-winning poet Michael Symmons Roberts
‘I love Michael Symmons Roberts’ poetry’ Jeanette Winterson
Dog Star is a book of linked poems rooted in encounters with real, imagined or mythical birds, trees, fish, flowers, bacteria, chimeras – ancient connections reshaped by technological and political change and critically endangered by species and habitat loss.
In Roberts’ previous work, his poems are attentive to glimpses of grace and presence, but always embodied and grounded. In this new book, that attention is sharper and more urgent than ever, at a time when the essential spiritual relationship between humanity and other forms of life is broken or lost. In a line from his collection Drysalter – ‘there is no way to the soul but through the body’ – he sets out the bearings for these new poems as attempts to tap into what D.H. Lawrence called ‘heaven’s wolfish, wandering electricity.’
Some encounters in Dog Star are head-on, face-to-face, some are more slant, distant, missed connections. There’s an elegiac sequence for the poet’s mother with each step measured in animals, an extended riff on the world as an aquarium and our lives seen through water – creatures dead and living, met in the flesh or mediated via film or stories. This is a profound, remarkable book by one of our major poets.
‘The clearest and purest voice currently sounding in British poetry’ Carol Ann Duffy
‘An outstanding writer’ Sunday Times
Extract from Dog Star
RED SMOKY HEARTS
Having been in hibernation for so long,
for millennia of winters,
– though it felt like an instant,
too quick for atomic clocks –
a wakening starts, no rush, these hearts
have all the time they need.
The ones kept under stone slabs push them up,
wrinkled ones like prunes in jars stir,
those dried to husks in urns,
or atrophied to damsons
pulse and jitter.
Close by, out of sight for now,
drapes are torn from windows,
locks picked, tables laid, doors thrown open.
It all counts, nothing is forgotten.
