Book description
Corpus - Michael Symmons Roberts' Whitbread-Prize winning
fourth collection - centres around the body. Mystical, philosophical
and erotic, the bodies in these poems move between different worlds -
life and after-life, death and resurrection - encountering
pathologists' blades, geneticists' maps and the wounds of love and
war.
Equally at ease with scripture (Jacob wrestling the Angel in
'Choreography') and science ('Mapping the Genome'), these poems are a
thrilling blend of modern and ancient wisdom, a profound and lyrical
exploration of the mysteries of the body:' So the martyrs took the
lamb./ It tasted rich, steeped in essence/ Of anchovy. They picked it
clean/ And found within, a goose, its pink/ Beak in the lamb's mouth
like a tongue.' Ranging effortlessly between the physical extremes of
death - from putrefaction to purification - and life - drought and
flood, hunger and satiation - the poems in Corpus speak most
movingly of 'living the half-life between two elements', of what it is
to be unique and luminously alive.
Michael Symmons Roberts was born in Preston, Lancashire, in 1963. He
has published three previous books of poetry,
Soft Keys
(1993),
Raising Sparks
(1999) and
Burning Babylon
(2001) and is a frequent collaborator with the composer James
MacMillan. He is also an award-winning radio writer, and makes
documentary films for the BBC.
