Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Michael Symmons Roberts
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
World into Fragments
Something and Nothing
Setting the Trap
Antarctica
Hymn to a Photo Booth
Hitchcockean
A Plea for Clemency
Derivatives
Ascension
Hymn to the Drivers
Something and Nothing
Open Thou Our Lips
From the Dead
Portrait of the Psalmist as an Old Man
Smitten
O Song
Signs and Portents
Elegy for John Milton
To Listen
Orison
Face to Face
The Tourists
Soul Song
Praise Song for a Blizzard
Hymn to November
The Answer
The Original Zoo
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin
Through a Glass Darkly
Something and Nothing
Elegy for the Unknown Elegists
The Darkness is No Darkness
Discoverers
Excise Me
Hymn to a Tolbooth
The Fortune-telling Rabbits of Istanbul
On Easter Saturday
Smoke
We Do Not Know the Day
The Original Zoo
Desert Hermits
The Others
The Count
The Scent
Des Canyons Aux Etoiles
Portrait of the Psalmist in Mid-life
Portrait of a Skull
Passover
Immortal, Invisible, Wise
Animal of Light
The Night Porter’s Promise
Fin De Siècle
After a Line by George Seferis
Night Freight
Whoso List to Hunt
Your Young Men Shall See Visions
The Reckoning
A Dog Heard But Not Seen
What the Night Told Me
Portrait of the Psalmist as a Man in Tears
What is Written
Hiraeth
Hymn to the Faces
Portrait of the Psalmist Through His Bedsheet
Night Train
The Original Zoo
Lupine
Poem From a Line by Osip Mandelstam
Guild of Salters
The Limb That Carried Everything
Portrait of a Dove
A Plate for a Face
In Cutaway
For Want of a Leap Second
The Offset
Rare Sighting
Discoverers
Hymn to a Roller Coaster
Necessary and Sufficient Causes
Hymn to a Ghost Train
Storehouses
What the Body Cannot Hold
On the Tiles
The Wounds I
Summer Prayer
Olympus
How to Raise the Dead
A Note on the Sideboard
Abyss of Birds
The Wounds II
The Foreigners
Desert Hermits
O Song
Out of the Depths
The Wounds III
Asleep in the Back
To Be Read On Arrival
In Case of Apocalypse
Hymn to a Car Factory
To Wish it had Happened Already
The Wounds IV
String Theory
Hymn to a Hurricane Booth
Monkey Gods
Soul Song
Dark Night of the Soul
The Road Retaken
Hymn to the Falschfahrer
Deliver Us This
The Wounds V
Lachrima Negativa
In Babylon
To an Immortal I
Hound-god
In Praise of Flaking Walls
In Praise of the Present
A Crossing
Footfall
Corporeal
The Vows
It is Coming
Aqua Freakshow
To an Immortal II
Portrait of the Psalmist in Utter Darkness
Wetsalter
A New Song
The Defenestrations
The Rind
Bathsheba’s Puzzle
Jetsam
Ascension
From the Dead
Song of Ascent
Discoverers
To an Immortal III
Refuseniks
Automatic Soothsayer Booth
Under His Aegis
The Conjurer Attempts a Final Trick
The Sea Again
Angel of the Abyss
Portrait of the Psalmist as Ultra-singer
On Grace
A Plea for Clemency
The Order
Petition
The End of Civilisation as We Know It
Hymn to a Karaoke Booth
The Mirror Test
Fragments into World
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Michael Symmons Roberts’ sixth – and most ambitious collection to date – takes its name from the ancient trade in powders, chemicals, salts and dyes, paints and cures. These poems offer a similarly potent and sensory multiplicity, unified through the formal constraint of 150 poems of 15 lines.
Like the medieval psalters echoed in its title, this collection contains both the sacred and profane. Here are hymns of praise and lamentation, songs of wonder and despair, journeying effortlessly through physical and metaphysical landscapes, from financial markets and urban sprawl to deserts and dark nights of the soul.
From an encomium to a karaoke booth to a conjuration of an inverse Antarctica, this collection is a compelling, powerful search for meaning, truth and falsehood. But, as ever in Roberts’ work – notably the Whitbread Award-winning Corpus – this search is rooted in the tangible world, leavened by wit, contradiction, tenderness and sensuality.
This is Roberts’ most expansive writing yet: mystical, philosophical, earthy and elegiac. Drysalter sings of the world’s unceasing ability to surprise, and the shock and dislocation of catching your own life unawares.
Michael Symmons Roberts has published five collections of poetry, including Corpus, which won the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the Forward, T.S. Eliot and Griffin International Prizes. He has also published two novels, Patrick’s Alphabet (2006) and Breath (2008), and a non-fiction book Edgelands (2011, with Paul Farley) which won the Jerwood Prize and the Foyles Book of Ideas Award. He is a frequent collaborator with the composer James MacMillan (their opera for Welsh National Opera, The Sacrifice, won the RPS Award) and is also an award-winning radio writer and documentary film-maker.
Soft Keys
Raising Sparks
Burning Babylon
Corpus
The Half Healed
Patrick’s Alphabet
Breath
Edgelands (with Paul Farley)
Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following:
Guardian, Guernica, Image, London Review of Books, Magma, Manchester Review, New Welsh Review, Poem, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Port, Rialto, Temenos.
A number of these poems have been broadcast in drama and feature strands on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4.
The poems linked to the vision of ‘Hotel Splendide’ were commissioned by the Manchester Literature Festival, performed as part of a concert by the Manchester Camerata, and broadcast on Medici TV.
‘The Order’ was commissioned by the CCJ for Holocaust Memorial Day.
‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’ was commissioned for the book Crrritic, published by Sussex Academic Press.
Small breaks first: cup on marble floor,
mirror on staircase, cracked watch-face,
hairlines in roof tiles. Then it escalates.
Plate windows shiver into diamonds,
smoked office towers fold into tobacco heaps,
screens give way to white noise, then blow.
Reasons for this shattering include
too great a tension, too much shrill,
a world more fragile than we thought.
Yet still it goes, ear-splitting, as
great forests disassemble like mosaics,
sugar-glass trees turn shingle, then the sky,
sun and moon as vast burst bulbs,
hot torrential hail. And when it stops,
we see for real, as if through mud and spit.
There is a dancer in the woods outside.
I can hear her at night among
the mink and musk deer, redolent
of truffles, needles. No song,
the only sound a twist and slide
of bare feet on the iced leaf-bed,
her breath quickening on the breeze.
Such is her reverie, she has not seen
the sea fold to the icebreakers,
gritter trucks salting the roads.
I hear her even through shutters,
blackout blinds and sash panes,
even through the steady steep of snow.
I smell her sparks on tinder pines,
and I go to her, since I know no better.
Tell me, o glass beyond glass, pane beyond pane,
if I make an extra meal, one more cup
for the unseen visitor, will it be taken?
Must I dress it, heavy seasoned, pep it up
with spice and goodness? This is played out
in a small town on the wild east coast, asleep
within its own decline, where fish-smacks rot
on long-dry shores and shadows outfly gulls,
where tide is ever out of sight.
And each night herring, olives, bread, salt, oil
are set out at a table with one chair, one napkin,
left unwatched in case the watching spoils,
and each night after dark the bait, untaken,
is removed, the plate washed, table wiped,
and all the vast and empty sky forsaken.
Is sleeping now, its bright fields intercut with suburbs,
ordered rows of clapboard homes, pin-sharp backyards
all ablaze with jasmine and magnolia.
Its citizens are freer than the rest of us,
living off starfruit from the ice forests, bleached quails
that ripen in the milk-orange groves.
No one sleeps alone here, and only fishermen dream
of wax-white orcas, blind and red-eyed, circling
under ice-sheets swept by katabatic winds.
Of course, this is not true Antarctica, where clutches
of tough scientists cross dates off charts. No,
this is alter-Antarctica, home to sibling-selves.
Once a month they send a greyhound to the brink,
where ice peters into water. Then the dog pelts back.
The time it takes gives them a reading of the future.
Drag the curtain closed, spin on the seat
to raise or lower. Now a head fills
the oval. Face-to-face at last. Eyes meet.
So stare. Whoever is this? We oracles
do not use names, all answers are generic.
Feel for the point where soul meets skull,
a bone-fuse or knuckle in your neck
that keeps you of a piece. Look empty,
never smile. Border guards dislike
the imprecision of emotion. Face as wintry
landscape. Flash. You have been shot.
Now step out. No re-entry.
All-seeing-I saw ocular blood clots,
sun-blemished skin and a broken heart.
Now wait while I spit out your mugshots.
The birds are taking over. Not in rows on high wires,
chittering on roofs at passers-by, fixing a lone child
with their red-ringed, sink-hole eyes, not by massing
on our window-sills at dawn and tap-tap-tapping
with the urgency, hunger, blunt-sense of the wild,
not with a skirl and swoop like smoke cut loose from fire,
but with a single egg inside each one of us,
lodged in the fold between lungs, not felt until the break,
la petite mort when shell cracks and a song begins,
an airless, blood-borne trill, a pulse, a stretch of wing,
which may be dun wren, bird of paradise, dull rook,
and none of us can know what kind is ours,
nor even know for sure it’s there, this skitter,
this arrhythmia, this restlessness, this ache that makes
you walk out, mid-meal, steal a car and disappear.
Slowly, come slowly, o agents of despair,
paint the skies with portents, number my regrets,
rent me a hotel room, lend me one more night,
let me name my losses, help me pay my debts,
slowly, come slowly, o agents of despair.