Born in Preston Lancashire in 1963, poet Michael Symmons Roberts is also an award-winning radio writer, a documentary filmmaker for the BBC, and a frequent collaborator with the composer James MacMillan.
He is the author of several books of poetry, including Soft Keys (1993), Raising Sparks (1999), Burning Babylon (2001), Corpus (2004), The Half Healed (2008), Drysalter (2013), Mancunia (2017), and Ransom (2021).
In addition to being shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize, Corpus was shortlisted for the 2004 Forward Prize and the 2004 T.S. Eliot Prize, and won the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award.
Symmons Roberts is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, is married with three sons, and lives near Manchester.
Judges’ Citation
There is a patient, almost forensic methodology in the poems of Michael Symmons Roberts, a systematic building up or stripping away of layers, until the subject and the sense of each poem is either established or exposed.
There is a patient, almost forensic methodology in the poems of Michael Symmons Roberts, a systematic building up or stripping away of layers, until the subject and the sense of each poem is either established or exposed. This collection, Corpus, is almost a poetic autopsy, an investigation of the body, sometimes for signs of life and sometimes for what might loosely be called the human spirit. But if this is poetry in the religious tradition, there is nothing mystical or superstitious about Corpus. Just to dare to consider such a concept as the soul, the poet must explore wildly differing aspects of human behaviour, from gross acts of torture to moments of ecstatic love; with a photographic accuracy and frame by frame, almost documentary observations, his eye is unflinching. Knowing but never sagacious, confident but never preachy or dogmatic, this is Symmons Roberts at his most readable, most lyrical best.
Selected poems
by Michael Symmons Roberts
I found the world’s pelt
nailed to the picture-rail
of a box-room in a cheap hotel.
So that’s why rivers dry to scabs,
that’s why the grass weeps every dawn,
that’s why the wind feels raw:
the earth’s an open wound,
and here, its skin hangs
like a trophy, atrophied beyond all
taxidermy, shrunk into a hearth rug.
Who fleeced it?
No record in the guest-book.
No-one paid, just pocketed the blade
and walked, leaving the bed
untouched, TV pleasing itself.
Maybe there was no knife.
Maybe the world shrugs off a hide
each year to grow a fresh one.
That pelt was thick as reindeer,
so black it flashed with blue.
I tried it on, of course, but no.
Copyright © 2004 by Michael Symmons Roberts, Corpus, Jonathan Cape
Pelt
A rare dish is right for those who
have lain bandaged in a tomb for weeks:
quince and quail to demonstrate
that fruit and birds still grow on trees,
eels to show that fish still needle streams.
Rarer still, some blind white crabs,
not bleached but blank, from such
a depth of ocean that the sun would drown
if it approached them. Two-thirds
of the earth is sea; and two-thirds of that sea
-away from currents, coasts and reefs –
is lifeless, colourless, pure weight.
Copyright © 2004 by Michael Symmons Roberts, Corpus, Jonathan Cape
Food For Risen Bodies – I
IX
You’ve left the world. There. The land
was thin. The land, let’s be honest, was dying.
X
Technically, this is the crux.
You are living a half-life between
two elements. You may wish at this stage
to be photographed or painted.
Now you know what your solidity is for:
so gravity has something to work with.
Copyright © 2004 by Michael Symmons Roberts, Corpus, Jonathan Cape
from Anatomy of a Perfect Dive
I
When we overwhelm a village,
I am told to make sure
none will ever pull a trigger.
I go in with a machete,
come out with a sack of hands.
My fathers feed me, count the pairs.
In the darkness I feel cool
palms crawl up to stroke
my head, soft hairless
hand-backs on my cheeks.
Thumbs draw down my eyelids,
fingers shush my lips.
II
In a terracotta jar,
a tobacco-brown plant,
tight as a mummified fist.
‘Leave it in the rain,
and see what happens.’
So we tipped it in the sink.
Amid the crockery
it unfurled and began to beg:
ever open, plaintive.
We kept it watered,
then, sick of supplication –
left it in the sun to clench.
Copyright © 2004 by Michael Symmons Roberts, Corpus, Jonathan Cape