Poetry

Soft Keys

When Corpus won the Whitbread Poetry Award, the judges described it as ‘an outstanding, perfectly weighted collection that inspires meditation on the nature of the soul…reading it feels like making an exciting discovery and coming back to an acknowledged classic all at once.’ Michael Symmons Roberts’ first book, Soft Keys, was the original and most exciting discovery of all.

The poems in Soft Keys engage in a search for meaning and order in the everyday and in the extraordinary – a locust officer tracking swarms in an African desert, a hobbyist building a replica of the world out of matchsticks, a chance encounter with the French mystic Simone Weil playing video games in a Torquay arcade… Richly inventive, and written in a wide diversity of poetic forms, Soft Keys looks for those places and moments where the curtain between earth and heaven is thinnest; it was a powerful, arresting debut and the beginning of a remarkable career.

As Les Murray said at the time: ‘Like Nijinsky, he can leap into the air and stay there. You can reach up and feel the thump of the stage finely persisting in an ankle bone. Roberts is a poet for the new, chastened, unenforcing age of faith that has just dawned.’

Awards for Soft Keys

Society of Authors’ Gregory Award

Extract from Soft Keys

Annunciation at the Hookses

With or without wings he is coming
at incredible speed from everywhere
to this baking terrace – to here –
as she pours herself an ice-cold drink
outside a house that rocks on cliffs.
She wears shades, flakes in a deckchair.
A red crescent dries above her lip.

O Gabriel make her waking as gentle
as the eye-blue of a distant sail.
Still she’ll drop her half-full glass
in shock and joy at what you ask.
With a choked-up ‘yes’ it all begins-
the afternoon sea will leap and scale
the cliffs to offer its obedience.

The sun will nuzzle like a pet
at her ankles, and in that twilight
shells will sing the vespers of love,
and momentarily across the globe
the day will check in mid-stride
like it’s just stepped off a tube,
looking for bearings, the way up and out.

Contents of Soft Keys

Angel of the Perfumes
Messiaen in Gorlitz 1940
The Botanical Gardens
Replica
JWs in NSW
Behemoth
Soft Keys
Scrap Metal
Swan-Upping
Compline
Hosea Thomas in the Realm of Miracles
Vanishing Point
To Skin a Tree
Locust People
Stop Fortnight
Malchus
Simone and the Unknown Friend:
I Video Games with Simone Weil
II Front-Line Nurses
III Apple Fool, April Fool
IV Simone’s Last and First
Hang-Gliders
The Telex
The Allotment
Wasps Carry off the Memories of an Old Woman
The Hookses:
I A Definition
II Terrace
III Gulls Going Home
IV In Company
V In the Weeks Before War
VI St Patrick Cross
VII Annunciation at the Hookses

Poetry

BUY FROM AMAZON

Raising Sparks

After his first collection – SOFT KEYS – Michael Symmons Roberts was hailed by Les Murray as ‘a poet for the new, chastened, unenforcing age of faith that has just dawned’. The metaphysical concerns of that first book are central to this new collection, written in a language at once philosophical, sensuous and lyrical. From a doctor who washes lungs to the structure of genes, from mythical hounds born to fire to a cat’s-eye souvenir from a smashed-up road, the scope of this collection is impressive. Whatever the subject, these poems are concerned with elemental themes, with the mapping of experience, and the search for sparks of life at its heart. At the heart of RAISING SPARKS are two sequences – ‘Smithereens’ and ‘Quickenings’ – which form part of a continuing collaboration with the composer James MacMillan; the former set as a song cycle and the latter as amajor choral piece. These sequences – alongside intamate lyrics and dramatic meditations on creation, redemption and the end of time – show a poet of enormous range and depth.

Extract from Raising Sparks

CENTAUR

The story goes that when the war was won,
two men on horseback at either
side of Ypres could see each other
stamp and blow. No stone on stone
stood taller than a rider.

Even for an eyewitness, the image pales.
The clear line between man and mount
has blurred. Now, hands cupped to its mouth,
a hybrid clips across the debris,
crying like a shell-fall for its mate.

Contents of Raising Sparks

Expecting
Fish Mobile
Centaur
The Advent House
Sun-Dogs
Fall
The Lung Wash
Topiary
Scintilla
The Eel Gatherers
Disarmed
Mapping the Genome
Overspill
Losing the Lip
Driftwood
Quickening
The Structure of Genes
Wedding
Salt
Swimming at Gadara
Tending the Flag
Power Cut
Spent
A Near Collision of Free Agents
Smithereens
A Free Lunch
A Calico Coat
Siblings
On Dyeing
Blood Lines
Boathouse
The Hospitality of Abraham
North Moving South
Hosea’s Body
Archaeology
Divers
Swarms
Star-Gazing
Sailboarders
History Makers
Why We Are Still Waiting
Quails
Wireless
The Shortest Day
Chicago Gilt
Shash
December Hoar Frost
Ultramarine
Stills
First Things
Cats Eye

Poetry

BUY FROM AMAZON

Burning Babylon

In his first two collections – Soft Keys and Raising Sparks – Michael Symmons Roberts established himself as a lyric and dramatic poet with metaphysical concerns. In this new collection, those concerns are as strong as ever, but rooted in a specific place and time.

These poems describe the personal and public rise and fall of Greenham Common. The public story, as one of the most contentious missile bases of the cold war, ended with fences removed, buildings demolished, the base returned to common land. The private history emerges from the poet’s own experience, as an adolescent living a mile away from Greenham Common at the height of its powers. That third community of locals – not the USAF or the peace camps – is finally given a voice in Burning Babylon.

This is war poetry, but from an undeclared war in which battle lines were unclear, secrecy was an obsession, and threat was the chief weapon. At the heart of it all was that real and mythic gated city – the base – which was both a key part of the poet’s childhood landscape, and the prime nuclear target in Britain. This image of a huge, occult and lethal power latent behind wire in the middle of England has haunted the minds of a generation – just as the poems in this book will resonate long after it is laid aside.

Awards for Burning Babylon

TS Eliot Prize – shortlist
Poetry Book Society Recommendation
K Blundell Trust Award from Society of Authors

Extract from Burning Babylon

THE QUALITIES OF FALLOUT

Would it be conspicuous as snowflakes,
only white-hot? Or subtle as

that valley rain, which drenches
without ever being other than the air?

Is it like cyanide – odourless
to half the world, burnt almonds to the rest?

Winter solstice. Deep advent.
Darkness is thicker than ever;

people are led through dry streets
by their dogs and their troubles,

and there is a new subtext to the sky,
something of cobweb, salt and star.

Contents of Burning Babylon

Touched
The Qualities of Fallout
Pika
Collateral Damage
Symptoms
The Opposites
The Qualities of Dust
A Pilot’s Coat
The Absence of War
Munitions
Sorties
Protect and Survive
The Baton
A Storm
Payload
Summer Advent
Ground Zero
Dummy Runs
The Toe-Ring
The Star
Feast of the Innocents
Yule Ball
The Ram-Raid
Tented Village
A Ghost-Tree
The Sacrifice
Deposition
Friendly Fire
Melissa Jones
The List
Strange Meeting
Lament
The Disappeared
New Greenham Park
Woad
Restoration
Fauna
Second Strike
Warlords in Waiting
Common Toad
Endgame
Grave Goods
Deus Ex Machine I
The Fence
Remnant
Deus Ex Machina II
A Gift Horse
The Wanderer
Blackout

Poetry

BUY FROM AMAZON

Corpus

Corpus – Michael Symmons Roberts’ Whitbread-Prize winning fourth collection – centres around the body. Mystical, philosophical and erotic, the bodies in these poems move between different worlds – life and after-life, death and resurrection – encountering pathologists’ blades, geneticists’ maps and the wounds of love and war.

Equally at ease with scripture (Jacob wrestling the Angel in ‘Choreography’) and science (‘Mapping the Genome’), these poems are a thrilling blend of modern and ancient wisdom, a profound and lyrical exploration of the mysteries of the body:’ So the martyrs took the lamb./ It tasted rich, steeped in essence/ Of anchovy. They picked it clean/ And found within, a goose, its pink/ Beak in the lamb’s mouth like a tongue.’ Ranging effortlessly between the physical extremes of death – from putrefaction to purification – and life – drought and flood, hunger and satiation – the poems in Corpus speak most movingly of ‘living the half-life between two elements’, of what it is to be unique and luminously alive.

Awards for Corpus

Whitbread Poetry Award – winner
Forward Prize for Best Collection – shortlist
TS Eliot Prize – shortlist
Griffin International Prize – shortlist
Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Extract from Corpus

ASCENSION DAY

In the Blue Lobster Café backyard,
the head chef – arms outstretched –
bears what looks like a body,

but conjures six cook’s shirts,
hot-laundered, pegged out,
dripping in a drench of sun.

As they dry, their half-hearted
semaphore becomes
more urgent, untranslatable.

Sex and death are in the air
this May morning: pollen and spent
blossom on an aimless breeze;

crab-backs, prawn skins, clams,
black-violet mussel shells,
all reek in sun-baked bin-sacks.

Contents of Corpus

1. Pelt
2. Ascension Day
3. Food For Risen Bodies – I
4. Corpse
5. Corporeality
6. Attempts On Your Life
7. Post-Mortem
8. Food For Risen Bodies – II
9. The Box
10. Carnivorous – I
11. Food For Risen Bodies – III
12. The Hands
13. Jairus
14. Grounded
15. Carnivorous– II
16. Flesh
17. Your Eyes Tonight
18. Carnivorous – III
19. The Gifts
20. The Razor
21. Mapping The Genome
22. Carnivorous – IV
23. The Drifter And His White Shadow
24. Madame Zero
25. Carnivorous V
26. To John Donne
27. What Divides Us
28. Food For Risen Bodies – IV
29. Genetics
30. Edge Of The World
31. Menagerie
32. Food For Risen Bodies – V
33. Study For The World’s Body
34. Hide
35. Tongue
36. Pathologist
37. Choreography
38. A Wreck
39. The Frequency
40. Food For Risen Bodies – VI
41. Cosmology
42. Last Things
43. Natal
44. Anatomy Of A Perfect Dive

Poetry

BUY FROM AMAZON

The Half Healed

The poems in Michael Symmons Roberts’s fifth collection move in a world riven by violence and betrayal, between nations and individuals. As ever, this is a metaphysical poetry rooted in physical detail – but the bodies here are displaced, disguised, in need of rescue. A man in a fox suit prowls the woods afraid of meeting true foxes, while a vixen dressed as a man moves among the powerful at society soirées. God no longer ‘walks in his garden in the cool of the day’, but drives through a damaged city in the small hours. At the same time a couple celebrate armistice with an act of love in an anonymous hotel room.

As the judges of the Whitbread Prize noted, Roberts’ poetry ‘inspires profound meditation on the nature of the soul, the body, the stars and the heart – and sparks revelation.’ Roberts is a poet of unusual range and dexterity, fascinated by faith and science, by the physical and the transcendental, and with this new book he confirms his position as a truly original, and thrillingly gifted, lyric poet.

Awards for The Half Healed

ARTS COUNCIL WRITERS AWARD (2008)

Extract from The Half Healed

ARMISTICE

So how is it? A woman in midlife
Is cradling a young man (old warrior)
In a king-size hotel bed. She licks
The scar and camber of his shoulder
as he sleeps, as if to tease the cells
into a new, strong arm or wing.
The sheets are silk with saffron threads,
a palace in old Samarkand. His mouth
lolls, and a silent swarm of bees pixilates
The room. That—she thinks—is how
Dusk comes, but I have never been
Still enough to see it. And so it starts,

In the Intercontinental’s bridal suite,
As the first cars break the roadblocks.

Poetry

BUY FROM AMAZON

Drysalter

Michael Symmons Roberts’ sixth – and most ambitious collection to date – takes its name from the ancient trade in powders, chemicals, salts and dyes, paints and cures. These poems offer a similarly potent and sensory multiplicity, unified through the formal constraint of 150 poems of 15 lines.

Like the medieval psalters echoed in its title, this collection contains both the sacred and profane. Here are hymns of praise and lamentation, songs of wonder and despair, journeying effortlessly through physical and metaphysical landscapes, from financial markets and urban sprawl to deserts and dark nights of the soul.

From an encomium to a karaoke booth to a conjuration of an inverse Antarctica, this collection is a compelling, powerful search for meaning, truth and falsehood. But, as ever in Roberts’ work – notably the Whitbread Award-winning Corpus – this search is rooted in the tangible world, leavened by wit, contradiction, tenderness and sensuality.

This is Roberts’ most expansive writing yet: mystical, philosophical, earthy and elegiac. Drysaltersings of the world’s unceasing ability to surprise, and the shock and dislocation of catching your own life unawares.

Reviews of Drysalter

“I love Michael Symmons Roberts’ poetry. He is a religious poet in a secular age. His work is about connection between the things of the spirit and the things of the world. And his work is about transcendence.”

Jeanette Winterson

“A major new collection of ‘super-sonnets’ demonstrates the poet’s amazing talent for putting intimacy on paper”

Read the full review

Kate Kellaway, The Observer

Awards for Drysalter

Winner of the 2013 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection
Winner of the 2013 Costa Poetry Award
Shortlisted for the 2013 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize
Shortlisted for the 2015 Portico Prize

Extract from Drysalter

HITCHCOCKEAN

The birds are taking over. Not in rows on high wires,
chittering on rooves at passers-by, fixing a lone child
with their red-ringed, sink-hole eyes, not by massing

on our window-sills at dawn and tap-tap-tapping
with the urgency, hunger, blunt-sense of the wild,
not with a skirl and swoop like smoke cut loose from fire,

but with a single egg inside each one of us,
lodged in the fold between lungs, not felt until the break,
la petite mort when shell cracks and a song begins,

an airless, blood-borne trill, a pulse, a stretch of wing,
which may be dun wren, bird of paradise, dull rook,
and none of us can know what kind is ours,

nor even know for sure it’s there, this skitter,
this arrhythmia, this restlessness, this ache that makes
you walk out, mid-meal, steal a car and disappear

Poetry

BUY FROM AMAZON

Selected Poems

This selection of the best poems from six remarkable collections reveals that all the strength and sensuality and strangeness is in there from the start. This is a metaphysical poetry for our age: rooted, steeped in the physical, but stretching for lyric completion, philosophical clarity, emotional truth. These poems achieve their seriousness not through hectoring argument but through their lightness of touch, their wit, their tenderness, their music. Roberts has always been a poet who, in the words of Lavinia Greenlaw, ‘inspires profound meditation on the nature of the soul, the body, the stars and the heart, and sparks revelation’. He is also formally and thematically diverse, restlessly exploring a wide range of subjects from Cold-War fear to love lyrics, genetics to elegies, always returning to the crucial, elemental themes – the mapping of experience and the search for meaning.

After Drysalter, his double-prize-winning tour de force, we now have this opportunity to observe the whole arc to date: the consistency of grace and power, curiosity and risk, passion and intelligence that – together – make Michael Symmons Roberts such a thrilling and essential poet.

Reviews of Selected Poems

‘Michael Symmons Roberts’s Selected Poems brings together six collections of his frequently-prize-winning poetry. His oeuvre, at this stage, is remarkable; it is worth repeating that he is unlike any poet currently writing; he is, in his own realm, the nonpareil of British poetry… inimitable, the exemplar that other poets hanker after but can’t parody or echo, not only because he is an unusually gifted technician but because he busts wide open the many no-go areas of human experience, notably the world of the spirit, even the nature of soul, that loaded word most poets stare at, occasionally prod and weigh, but in the end, have no understanding to what meaningful purpose it should be put.’ PBS BULLETIN ON SELECTED POEMS

Poetry Book Society Citation

Awards for Selected Poems

Poetry Book Society Special Commendation

Extract from Selected Poems

NIGHT TRAIN

Lit not so she can see to clip our tickets,
nor so we can read the news, but lit
to make of us and it an eel-shaped full

vivarium to show the wild hills what
a world can be. And I would like to say
our thoughts, as passengers, crack

between us like a static cloud, and soul
means a million points of interconnection
and bind, but none of this is true tonight.

Instead, the slow fields, level-crossings,
tight, grey farmsteads hear and miss us,
passing like a single slub of thought

from south to north, slowest synapse ever,
one idea, say, life as journey, fading
even as it bears us, and silence in its wake.

Non-fiction

BUY FROM AMAZON

Deaths of the Poets

From Chatterton’s Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats’ death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood; from Dylan Thomas’s eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath’s desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen or John Berryman’s leap from a bridge onto the frozen Mississippi, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work.

The post-Romantic myth of the dissolute drunken poet – exemplified by Thomas and made iconic by his death in New York – has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. Novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept and in control, but poets should be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive. Is this just a myth, or is there some essential truth behind it: that great poems only come when a poet’s life is pushed right to an emotional knife-edge of acceptability, safety, security? What is the price of poetry?

In this book, two contemporary poets undertake a series of journeys – across Britain, America and Europe – to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, honouring inspirational writers, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth. The result is a book that is, in turn, enlightening and provocative, eye-wateringly funny and powerfully moving.

Reviews of Deaths of the Poets

“It is a thoughtful book, structured as a series of pilgrimages to the places where poets have died.”

Lara Feigel, Irish Independent

“Deaths of the Poets is a gripping, witty read, but also asks serious questions about the way the post-Romantic myth of the doomed poet skews the way we interpret their work.”

Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday

“Deaths of the Poets is packed with anecdotes and macabre frisons; its forays through some of poetry’s more sensational edge-lands make for a compelling read.”

Nicholas Roe, Literary Review

“A terrifically entertaining book: thoughtful, funny, informative, with an eye for good quotes and anecdotes, and wide-ranging in both the distance it travels and the material on which it draws.”

Blake Morrison, Guardian