Book description
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.'
Michael Symmons Roberts has published five collections of poetry,
including
Corpus
, which won the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award and was short-listed for the
Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize, and
The Half Healed
(2008). He has also published two novels,
Patrick's Alphabet
(2006) and
Breath
(2008). He is a frequent collaborator with the composer James MacMillan
and is also an award-winning radio writer and documentary film-maker.
