POETRY
Soft Keys
Raising Sparks
Burning Babylon
Corpus
The Half Healed
Drysalter
FICTION
Patrick’s Alphabet
Breath
NON-FICTION
Edgelands (with Paul Farley)
for Ruth, Joe, Paddy and Griff
‘The world is the closed door. It is a barrier.
And at the same time it is the way through.’
Simone Weil
Messiaen in Görlitz 1940
The composer Olivier Messiaen was a prisoner of war at a camp in the Silesian town of Görlitz when he wrote his Quatuor pour la fin du temps.
Locust People
Dolly Blue: was an ultramarine cleaning agent, which turned the mills where it was made the same colour.
Annunciation at the Hookses
The Hookses: in Pembrokeshire, lies at the extreme south-west of Wales.
The Qualities of Fallout
The poems from Burning Babylon describe the rise and fall of Greenham Common, the missile base in Berkshire which became the UK’s chief Cold-War battlefield.
Payload
The first deployment of USAF cruise missiles to Greenham Common was on 14 November 1983.
The Sacrifice
Yellow Gate women: The women’s peace camp at Greenham Common was made up of communities at each of the camp’s main gates. These were given the names of colours.
Night Drive
The epigraph is taken from the published text of David Mamet’s play American Buffalo, where it is cited as a folk tune.
Hooded
Photographs of hooded and abused prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were released in 2003/4, to widespread international condemnation.
Last Words
This sequence was commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to mark the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Poems from Drysalter
Drysaltery was the ancient trade in powders, cures, salts, dyes and poisons. The name also echoes the psalter, or book of Psalms.
Animal of Light
There are numerous Hotels Splendide but the one I had in mind was Rimbaud’s Splendide-Hôtel from his Illuminations. Another great poet – Pablo Neruda – described himself in later life as having become an animal of light.
*
Acknowledgements are due to all the editors and commissioners, but especially to Robin Robertson.
This selection of the best poems from six remarkable collections reveals that all the strength and sensuality and strangeness is in there from the start. This is a metaphysical poetry for our age: rooted, steeped in the physical, but stretching for lyric completion, philosophical clarity, emotional truth. These poems achieve their seriousness not through hectoring argument but through their lightness of touch, their wit, their tenderness, their music. Roberts has always been a poet who, in the words of Lavinia Greenlaw, ‘inspires profound meditation on the nature of the soul, the body, the stars and the heart, and sparks revelation’. He is also formally and thematically diverse, restlessly exploring a wide range of subjects from Cold-War fear to love lyrics, genetics to elegies, always returning to the crucial, elemental themes – the mapping of experience and the search for meaning.
After Drysalter, his double-prize-winning tour de force, we now have this opportunity to observe the whole arc to date: the consistency of grace and power, curiosity and risk, passion and intelligence that – together – make Michael Symmons Roberts such a thrilling and essential poet.
Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.
From the night-shift cement works,
dust built on fields, seeped
into buildings, coughed me awake.
It fused with fallen rain
to make a crust so thin one heel
could break the landscape open.
I held my breath, the sheet
pulled up across my face,
afraid my lungs would set.
When you woke me, the dust
cleared. I heard dawn crack,
smelt on your hands burst
fruit. Old skins, bruised black,
you split with thumbnails, found
seeds of new bodies inside intact.
Starting with this bowl of fruit,
he decided to build a replica world
out of matchsticks. It would
be fully working and life-size.
The apple was his first failure.
Its cool varnish, imperfect shape
and inaccurate colour all
added up to fake fruit.
As the nights drew in he did too.
He monitored all his bodily functions,
checked and double-checked,
kept on working.
He struck and blew them out,
cut off the heads that piled up
like peppercorns, set another wood
wick to an imitation orange.
Planning ahead, he mulled over
Europe, its technical problems –
rivers, animals. The room’s smell
sharpened with phosphorus.
He caught a rainbow trout,
a six-inch clot of light and water.
The hook became the fastened mouth,
barbed.
He could not free, or kill it,
he could only watch it bristle,
changing colour as it dried to death,
and he, more slowly, dried towards it.
He buried it, with colours fixed fast
pale, beneath the silver birch.
By Autumn, it had rotted up the roots,
and now the trunk was peeling bark
like silver scales.
Last Autumn, bark was paper.
This time, fish.
There is more than one way
to skin a tree.
With or without wings he is coming
at incredible speed from everywhere
to this baking terrace – to here –
as she pours herself an ice-cold drink
outside a house that rocks on cliffs.
She wears shades, flakes in a deckchair.
A red crescent dries above her lip.
O Gabriel make her waking as gentle
as the eye-blue of a distant sail.
Still she’ll drop her half-full glass
in shock and joy at what you ask.
With a choked-up ‘yes’ it all begins –
the afternoon sea will leap and scale
the cliffs to offer its obedience.
The sun will nuzzle like a pet
at her ankles, and in that twilight
shells will sing the vespers of love,
and momentarily across the globe
the day will check in mid-stride
like it’s just stepped off a tube,
looking for bearings, the way up and out.
I was born believing, able to see sounds as colours.
The underfeeding in this camp has magnified that faculty
so birds spout northern lights, and guards shout ribbons.
In the misery of this bitter bright Silesian December
I long for an end to time, a finish to the mystery of God,
the coarse-grained setting of faith into a blinding fact.
A sympathetic guard brings pencils and manuscript.
We can only make with what we have; in God I have it all,
but here a three-stringed cello, piano, violin and clarinet.
Its world premiere will take place in a washroom,
where I know this French and Polish audience of peasants,
doctors and priests will be the most attentive I have seen.
We have all felt the same last vital forces stirring,
moving through the camp like water did before the pipes froze,
the promise of all I have hoped for, have loved and still love.
Though it is not for us to know or guess, perhaps as we begin
to play the eighth and final movement – beyond the day of rest
after creation into ceaseless light and peace –
the end may come, the seventh angel crowned with a rainbow,
one foot in flames on the Pacific Ocean, the other
burning without melting, light as a leaf on Silesian snow.
Barefoot, and the gum trees letting go
a secondary, slower fall of rain.
Unable to believe in the soul,
he brings body and mind to his garden
in the hope that a faculty equal
to this moment may seed and grow.
A soul’s the only place deep enough
to give thanks for a found daughter
you have never seen, whisked off
to lead a real life in another house;
and a parallel spectral one here
where she grew up stern, mysterious.
The two great moments in his past
he gave away too soon, the first to brothers
carpeting a new Kingdom Hall
before the outside walls
were up – who smiled, called the others
to spread it even further; and the last
he took straight to a telephone,
and dialled through his address book.
Now, but now, he rubs leaves with fingers,
sniffs out the orange from the lemon,
holds still as two grey and pink galahs
tap the feed tray with alternate beaks.
To hold this news against the palate
is to make the lawn he cut
from bush a garden party for the prolix
waiting dead, up from their hammocks
light and thin as fibre-optics,
to compare his limbo with their hiatus.
The Botanical Gardens are closed
for the winter. The beds are all black.
The shrubs are sprung like wire traps.
Through the scrollwork gates we see
the vanilla-painted ice-cream house
being licked dirty by the rain.
The tide has deserted the marine lake.
The peacocks have been stuffed
and boxed, their tails now hats and fans.
The empty iron coops rattle
out of shape. The last of the season’s
bread swells and melts uneaten.
Only the glasshouse keeps its insides
green. Water runs like a brass rail
through it, air too rich to breathe.
Our gloves have frozen to the gates.
All we can see of the glasshouse
is a jet of smoke from across the lake.
In Florida they’re islands, if you’re 21
today they’re cast in cake, but if a keystone
was, all domes would cave to rubble,
so the keys to our abyss are hard to find.
It’s key to be soft on piano, to pedal,
gloving the hammers for delicate tones,
but the bunch which opens on to calm
seas or true wisdom swings like giblets
heavy frozen, snaps in the lock and fills it;
the single one that lets you in
to someone’s heart is often softer than you
thought, whilst those that used to wind
clocks tight and once kept day and night
in place are muzzy with dust and neglect.
As we praise the timing of quartz,
the keys to praise are held by birds
who scutter over their majors and minors
for he who unlocks hell and heaven.
The key to those binary soft ons and offs
of a computer is a single finger’s
weight which teeters on the edge of thought,
the edge of a letter being born – it was.
And though a wedge for splitting wood or stone
must be spot on or else it bends
or shatters like the doors of death,
the dry winged fruits that ash trees send
to ground are such perfection of design
they open up the earth and rise.
So scratch some grooves into a wall
to make the final coat of plaster stick,
then pick up all these keys and try
the softest, that like skeletons can open
anything, but with much greater secrecy,
so all our locks are really ready-picked
and we just have to use the handles.
Myopic, straining at the screen through pinched,
round lenses, smooth fingers on the joystick
and fire button, Simone, thin as a marble sculpture
pared too far, rocks on her small scuffed shoes
back and forward with the play.
This is willing slavery. That’s why she’s here,
in a crappy arcade in Torquay out of season,
slowly getting hooked so she will understand
their absolute pinpoint aim on the present-
past forgotten and no future to look on to,
how to exorcise ill-fortune by affording it