Soft Keys
Raising Sparks
Burning Babylon
Corpus
The Half Healed
Drysalter
Selected Poems
Patrick’s Alphabet
Breath
Edgelands (with Paul Farley)
Deaths of the Poets (with Paul Farley)
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VINTAGE
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Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Michael Symmons Roberts 2017
Cover illustration © Thorn Head, WA2010.11 by Graham Vivian Sutherland © The artist’s estate. Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Michael Symmons Roberts has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Jonathan Cape in 2017
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.
Oscar Wilde
… once went further and saw Manchester, / And once the sea, that blue end of the world.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
What a world it represented – cotton and shipping and commerce, the like of which we shall never see again. It’s a wonder they didn’t use gold bars instead of bricks and stone.
Beryl Bainbridge
Six thousand years in the Sahara looks like six months in Manchester.
Tom Stoppard
because I cannot sleep and this unsteady
moon has lured me out with promises
to light one final act for me.
Filthy sky-black pea-coat,
I shrug it from my shoulders, grip the collar,
and begin to shake it out.
The stars cannot give second thought
to such a slight shift in the world’s array,
but still they flinch with each down-draught.
The backyard breeze, coaxed into mimicry,
awakens fallen leaves from cherries, acers,
laurels, limes, a silvered cloud of tree,
a crack of pylons at the edge of town.
Within an hour, it will be lifting flags
in empty cities you and I have never seen.
I curse myself for waiting days to do this,
given all the places we have been
– turbid rivers, search-lit walls,
dry fields sown with thorns and mines –
no wonder it shakes out so many
splinters, dog-hairs, baggage-tags, such rain.
And given all those half-forgotten places,
it is scant surprise that – look! –
my cloth, unfurled, is twice the size.
I had no sense it was so bunched and hemmed,
but now it opens into trench coat, cloak,
black wedding-train, tarpaulin, tent,
and still the dross flies from its folds.
I am a vignette: man-in-silent-yard-sees-light,
or sings-of-where-he’s-been-and-what-he-almost-knows.
O moon, have a heart, my arms are agony,
I cannot stop for fear that when I do,
my old coat will no longer be a fit for me.
Mancunia at night looks like embers from above,
but hold the dive and it reassembles, cools,
coalesces into districts, flyovers, a motherboard,
now stadiums like unblinking eyes,
car lots set out as piano keys, parks with lake wounds,
counter-flow of arteries in red and white,
the bass clef curves of cul de sacs
in outlying estates, then factories with starting guns
of smoke that sting and make you squint,
now you can pick out individual cars, nags’ heads
down in dark fields, glow of dressed shop windows,
drunks on their tightrope walk home,
black poplars’ ragged tops, roof tiles, kerbstones,
air that drops from ice to cloud to everything a city
cooks at once until the road meets you
face-to-face, down and under, slower, denser
and the clay arrests you, holds you as a pulse for good,
so what keeps this city alive is you.
I give you the Northern Quarter in full vamp,
its post-drizzle glory, sun an arc lamp
on that mural of a blue-tit, vast and antic,
with bindweed blooms like blast-holes in old brick.
Spiralling above this massive passerine,
painted candles rise towards some heaven.
I thought how you would hate that twist,
since you dismiss the promise of all worlds but this,
how you would sooner have your cold cadaver
thrown into a skip than warrant any hope of a hereafter.
The street-cleaners are out in force,
steam from Northern Tea Power frosts its glass,
vintage frock stores shake their racks for moths.
The last payphone on Newton Street rings out,
and picking through the gutter at your feet
a blackbird holds the same trill on repeat.
This is no epiphany, but so close-up,
such is the soft density of darkness on its nap
that like an inverse star it could pull everyone,
the whole unrescued world through to oblivion.
If there is another place, another chapter,
I suggest this Ancoats skylark is its harbinger.
But then you pick it up and show how light it is,
its air sacs and its fluted bones: it flies.
Between back-to-backs along the alleys
he lifts wrung-out sheets
and shirts hung up to dry,
in search of a repeat
glimpse of a goddess out to get
a tan. Meantime, her right-hand-woman
uses his old sweat-soaked gym vest
as gift-wrap for a T-bone,
thus reprogramming his own stray
pack of pit bulls, staffies, akitas,
to see their master as their prey.
They do. So said the stars.
I know exactly how you feel:
you’re like some drunken bluebottle
which wakes from winter’s bite not just alive
but in the tropics, and cannot believe
that this is real, such paradise,
with plates of fruit and meat, you buzz
from room to room and this
becomes complete for you, a universe.
How could you know
that just beyond that picture window