Soft Keys
  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407092782
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 64

Soft Keys

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Jul 2010
Tr. Paperback
15 Nov 2009
Buy from…
Amazon Apple Books Google Play Kobo Booktopia eBooks.com

'These are complex poems of darkness and radiance, miracle and desolation. And behind their answering energies, an awareness of the scintilla of grace' - Pauline Stainer

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.'
  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407092782
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 64
Categories:
Share…

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.

portrait photo of Michael Symmons Roberts

Also by Michael Symmons Roberts

Ransom
Mancunia
Deaths of the Poets
Selected Poems
Drysalter
Edgelands
Raising Sparks
See all

Praise for Soft Keys

An outstanding writer

Sunday Times

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

Michael Symmons Roberts' poems are intense and sensual explorations of the moment when the soul quickens to some ice-cracking life. The Christian faith gives Roberts' work an iconography, a deep well of symbolism, that links him with poets like David Jones or Geoffrey Hill. Like them, his work exists to errode whatever conceals that glinting mica of truth... through language at once precise and excitingly resonant

Adam Thorpe

The poems are highly accomplished, constituting an intelligent, courageous attempt to write a contemporary religious poetry, one where God and videogames co-exist. This is very hard to do, but the voice of Soft Keys is genuinely contemporary; the best poems are lit with finely-nuanced details which the imagination can relish. A poem such as "The Telex" is sure, strange, beautifully judged

Robert Crawford