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  • Published: 5 May 2016
  • ISBN: 9781473524057
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 192
Categories:

Selected Poems



The definitive introduction to a major poet

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.

  • Published: 5 May 2016
  • ISBN: 9781473524057
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 192
Categories:

About the author

Michael Symmons Roberts

Michael Symmons Roberts was born in Preston, Lancashire in 1963. He has published six collections of poetry and received a number of accolades including the Forward Prize, the Costa Poetry Award and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. As a librettist, his work has been performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world. An award-winning broadcaster and dramatist, he has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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