Michael Symmons Roberts – författare
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27 produkter
27 produkter
Häftad, Engelska, 2007
123 kr
Skickas inom 11-20 vardagar
When a teenage couple are found murdered in their car, a boy called Adam Sligo is the only suspect. The letter A is found blazoned on the wall at the murder scene and is soon followed, around town, by the other letters of the alphabet, each immaculately painted in red. What do the letters mean? Is Sligo playing games with the police? Or putting a spell on the town? Perry Scholes is mixed up in all this from the start: a man haunted by cars and death - and photographic images of both. He trawls the motorways and edgelands listening to police radio, getting to the car-crash or the crime scene before them. He makes a living selling these shots to the papers. He is the one who spots the painted letters, and begins to document their appearances. As the town is paralysed by fear and paranoia, a vigilante cult emerges, arming itself for the battle against evil. Perry finds himself trapped in a nightmare. A killer is at large, and the alphabetical messages he leaves seem to be personal messages for him.
Häftad, Engelska, 2012
144 kr
Skickas
The wilderness is much closer than you think. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged: the edgelands - those familiar yet ignored spaces which are neither city nor countryside - have become the great wild places on our doorsteps. In the same way the Romantic writers taught us to look at hills, lakes and rivers, poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites, taking the reader on a journey to marvel at these richly mysterious, forgotten regions in our midst. Edgelands forms a critique of what we value as 'wild', and allows our allotments, railways, motorways, wasteland and water a presence in the world, and a strange beauty all of their own.
Häftad, Engelska, 2018
207 kr
Skickas
From Dylan Thomas’s eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath’s desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen; from Chatterton’s Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats’ death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work. The post-Romantic lore of the dissolute drunken poet 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 an illusion , or is there some essential truth behind it? What is the price of poetry?In this book, two contemporary poets embark on a series of journeys to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth.
Häftad, Engelska, 2008
156 kr
Skickas inom 11-20 vardagar
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.
Häftad, Engelska, 2009
136 kr
Skickas inom 11-20 vardagar
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.'
E-bok
Engelska, 2010161 kr
Läs direkt efter köp
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.
E-bok
Engelska, 2010161 kr
Läs direkt efter köp
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.'
E-bok
Engelska, 201097 kr
Läs direkt efter köp
In a country recovering from a brutal and divisive civil war, a young boy, Jamie, is knocked off his bike and dies in a city street. His father agrees to allow one of Jamie's lungs to be removed and flown over the border for a transplant. As the night unfolds and the plane travels across the war-ravaged country, we see the drama from three different perspectives: the father, grieving for the son he perhaps never knew well enough; the lung's recipient, an old man fighting for breath; and in the turbulent sky between them, the young pilot who is closest to Jamie - or at least to his breath, his spirit, his voice.
E-bok
Engelska, 201097 kr
Läs direkt efter köp
When a teenage couple are found murdered in their car, a boy called Adam Sligo is the only suspect. The letter A is found blazoned on the wall at the murder scene and is soon followed, around town, by the other letters of the alphabet, each immaculately painted in red. What do the letters mean? Is Sligo playing games with the police? Or putting a spell on the town? Perry Scholes is mixed up in all this from the start: a man haunted by cars and death - and photographic images of both. He trawls the motorways and edgelands listening to police radio, getting to the car-crash or the crime scene before them. He makes a living selling these shots to the papers. He is the one who spots the painted letters, and begins to document their appearances. As the town is paralysed by fear and paranoia, a vigilante cult emerges, arming itself for the battle against evil. Perry finds himself trapped in a nightmare. A killer is at large, and the alphabetical messages he leaves seem to be personal messages for him.
E-bok
Engelska, 201075 kr
Läs direkt efter köp
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.
E-bok
Engelska, 201078 kr
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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.
E-bok
Engelska, 2010108 kr
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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.
E-bok
Engelska, 2011118 kr
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The wilderness is much closer than you think. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged: the edgelands - those familiar yet ignored spaces which are neither city nor countryside - have become the great wild places on our doorsteps. In the same way the Romantic writers taught us to look at hills, lakes and rivers, poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites, taking the reader on a journey to marvel at these richly mysterious, forgotten regions in our midst. Edgelands forms a critique of what we value as 'wild', and allows our allotments, railways, motorways, wasteland and water a presence in the world, and a strange beauty all of their own.
E-bok
Engelska, 2017140 kr
Läs direkt efter köp
From Dylan Thomas’s eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath’s desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen; from Chatterton’s Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats’ death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work. The post-Romantic lore of the dissolute drunken poet 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 an illusion , or is there some essential truth behind it? What is the price of poetry?In this book, two contemporary poets embark on a series of journeys to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth.
E-bok
Engelska, 2013166 kr
Läs direkt efter köp
Winner of the 2013 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection Winner of the 2013 Costa Poetry AwardShortlisted for the 2013 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize Shortlisted for the 2015 Portico PrizeMichael 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. Drysalter sings of the world’s unceasing ability to surprise, and the shock and dislocation of catching your own life unawares.
Ljudbok
201272 kr
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California 1936. Florence Owens Thompson and her family have joined the thousands of migrant workers flocking across America in search of work. Homeless, desperately hungry and faced with the threat of mob violence, her hopeful resolution is quickly fading. Photographer Dorothea is following the migrants to their make-shift refugee camps, desperate to find the image which will capture the extent of their hardship, to bring about a change in American policy and hearts. A chance meeting with Florence could bring about the image she is looking for. Although inspired by a true story, certain events and characters have been created or changed for dramatic effect. Starring Teresa Gallagher as Dorothea and Anne Wittman as Florence, with Ian Porter, Kerry Shale, Allen Lidkey, Oliver Lee and Kathryn Hunt. Music by Pat Mo Sheeran. Written by Michael Symmons Roberts. Directed by Susan Roberts. Producer: Charlotte Riches.
E-bok
Engelska, 201697 kr
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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.
E-bok
Engelska, 2017100 kr
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Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot PrizeLonglisted for the 2019 Portico PrizePBS Autumn RecommendationMancunia is both a real and an unreal city. In part, it is rooted in Manchester, but it is an imagined city too, a fallen utopia viewed from formal tracks, as from the train in the background of De Chirico’s paintings. In these poems we encounter a Victorian diorama, a bar where a merchant mariner has a story he must tell, a chimeric creature – Miss Molasses – emerging from the old docks. There are poems in honour of Mancunia’s bureaucrats: the Master of the Lighting of Small Objects, the Superintendent of Public Spectacles, the Co-ordinator of Misreadings. Metaphysical and lyrical, the poems in Michael Symmons Roberts’ seventh collection are concerned with why and how we ascribe value, where it resides and how it survives. Mancunia is – like More’s Utopia – both a no-place and an attempt at the good-place. It is occupied, liberated, abandoned and rebuilt. Capacious, disturbing and shape-shifting, these are poems for our changing times.
E-bok
Engelska, 2021100 kr
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**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE 2021***A FINANCIAL TIMES 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK*Ransom, the new collection from Michael Symmons Roberts, is an intense and vivid exploration of liberty and limit, of what it means to be alive, and searches for 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 powerful 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. This is a profound and timely book from one of our finest poets.
E-bok
Engelska, 2025200 kr
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‘Wonderful’ Spectator‘This is a remarkable book’ TLSA personal reckoning with grief, doubt, faith and poetry set to one of the most celebrated musical works of the twentieth century, from the award-winning poet and librettist. Strange, ecstatic and apocalyptic – listeners of Olivier Messiaen’s masterpiece, Quartet for the End of Time, have been captivated by its music and mythology since the first extraordinary performance in a prisoner of war camp in 1941.After discovering his music by chance as a teenager, Michael Symmons Roberts’s own fascination with the Quartet leads him on a quest to understand its enigmatic power.What follows is a moving, unforgettable exploration of grief, of personal faith and doubt, of the end of time and what may lie beyond it.‘A rich, lively, profound book' Rowan Williams‘An outstanding writer’ Sunday Times
Häftad, Engelska, 2026
155 kr
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‘Wonderful’ Spectator‘This is a remarkable book’ TLSA personal reckoning with grief, doubt, faith and poetry set to one of the most celebrated musical works of the twentieth century, from the award-winning poet and librettist. Strange, ecstatic and apocalyptic – listeners of Olivier Messiaen’s masterpiece, Quartet for the End of Time, have been captivated by its music and mythology since the first extraordinary performance in a prisoner of war camp in 1941.After discovering his music by chance as a teenager, Michael Symmons Roberts’s own fascination with the Quartet leads him on a quest to understand its enigmatic power.What follows is a moving, unforgettable exploration of grief, of personal faith and doubt, of the end of time and what may lie beyond it.‘A rich, lively, profound book' Rowan Williams‘An outstanding writer’ Sunday Times
E-bok
Engelska, 2026222 kr
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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'An existential wrestle between body and soul ... sure-footed' Guardian, Best New PoetryDog 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.His poems are always 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.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
Ljudbok
Engelska, 2025178 kr
Lyssna direkt efter köp
Brought to you by Penguin.A personal reckoning with grief, doubt, faith and poetry set to one of the most celebrated musical works of the twentieth century, from the award-winning poet and librettist.The story goes like this: on a freezing winter night in 1941, a new piece of chamber music was performed to a crowd of prisoners of war on a three-stringed cello, clarinet, violin and pub piano with sticky keys. It was the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps.Listeners since then have been captivated by the ecstatic music and mythology of Messiaen’s masterpiece. Michael Symmons Roberts’ own lifelong fascination with the Quartet– having chanced upon it in a record shop in his late teens and fallen in love with its title - leads him on a quest to understand its enigmatic power. His fascination – at times frustration – with Messiaen’s vision opens into an exploration of grief, of personal faith and doubt, of the end of time and what may lie beyond it. Interwoven with poetry and wit, this book is an expansive evocation of music, loss, hope and time, seen through the lens of the Quartet''s technicolour, apocalyptic vision.Quartet for the End of Time is a moving, intimate and unforgettable book, attentive to ways of listening – in our noisy world – to birdsong, music, poems and radio silence, and to the call and response that we may find.''This is a rich, lively, profound book'' ROWAN WILLIAMS''A properly engrossing exploration of music, place, religion and what it is to be human'' SARAH TARLOW, author of The Archaeology of Loss© Michael Symmons Roberts 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025
Inbunden, Engelska, 2025
218 kr
Skickas
'This is a rich, lively, profound book' ROWAN WILLIAMSA personal reckoning with grief, doubt, faith and poetry set to one of the most celebrated musical works of the twentieth century, from the award-winning poet and librettist. The story goes like this: on a freezing winter night in 1941, a new piece of chamber music was performed to a crowd of prisoners of war on a three-stringed cello, clarinet, violin and pub piano with sticky keys. It was the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps. Listeners since then have been captivated by the ecstatic music and mythology of Messiaen’s masterpiece. Michael Symmons Roberts’ own lifelong fascination with the Quartet– having chanced upon it in a record shop in his late teens and fallen in love with its title - leads him on a quest to understand its enigmatic power. His fascination – at times frustration – with Messiaen’s vision opens into an exploration of grief, of personal faith and doubt, of the end of time and what may lie beyond it. Interwoven with poetry and wit, this book is an expansive evocation of music, loss, hope and time, seen through the lens of the Quartet's technicolour, apocalyptic vision.Quartet for the End of Time is a moving, intimate and unforgettable book, attentive to ways of listening – in our noisy world – to birdsong, music, poems and radio silence, and to the call and response that we may find.'A properly engrossing exploration of music, place, religion and what it is to be human' SARAH TARLOW, author of The Archaeology of Loss
Häftad, Engelska, 2021
131 kr
Skickas
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE 2021***A FINANCIAL TIMES 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK*Ransom, the new collection from Michael Symmons Roberts, is an intense and vivid exploration of liberty and limit, of what it means to be alive, and searches for 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 powerful 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. This is a profound and timely book from one of our finest poets.
Häftad, Engelska, 2026
168 kr
Skickas
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'An existential wrestle between body and soul ... sure-footed' Guardian, Best New PoetryDog 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.His poems are always 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.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
Häftad, Engelska, 2017
129 kr
Tillfälligt slut
Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot PrizeLonglisted for the 2019 Portico PrizePBS Autumn RecommendationMancunia is both a real and an unreal city. In part, it is rooted in Manchester, but it is an imagined city too, a fallen utopia viewed from formal tracks, as from the train in the background of De Chirico’s paintings. In these poems we encounter a Victorian diorama, a bar where a merchant mariner has a story he must tell, a chimeric creature – Miss Molasses – emerging from the old docks. There are poems in honour of Mancunia’s bureaucrats: the Master of the Lighting of Small Objects, the Superintendent of Public Spectacles, the Co-ordinator of Misreadings. Metaphysical and lyrical, the poems in Michael Symmons Roberts’ seventh collection are concerned with why and how we ascribe value, where it resides and how it survives. Mancunia is – like More’s Utopia – both a no-place and an attempt at the good-place. It is occupied, liberated, abandoned and rebuilt. Capacious, disturbing and shape-shifting, these are poems for our changing times.