Michael Symmons Roberts – författare

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

‘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

'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

**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.

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