Cover

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

Drysalter

Michael Symmons Roberts

About the Book

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.

About the Author

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.

ALSO BY MICHAEL SYMMONS ROBERTS

POETRY

Soft Keys

Raising Sparks

Burning Babylon

Corpus

The Half Healed

 

FICTION

Patrick’s Alphabet

Breath

 

NON-FICTION

Edgelands (with Paul Farley)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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.

WORLD INTO FRAGMENTS

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.

SOMETHING AND NOTHING

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.

SETTING THE TRAP

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.

ANTARCTICA

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.

HYMN TO A PHOTO BOOTH

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.

HITCHCOCKEAN

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.

A PLEA FOR CLEMENCY

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.