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' 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.
'He displays an amazing talent for intimacy on paper - sometimes, it almost takes your breath away.' -- Kate Kellaway, Observer
'It's all implicit, subtle, hypnotic and often beautiful.' Monocle
'This anthology comprises 150 poems of 15 lines each and tackles a dizzying array of contemporary subjects, from peeling an orange to the complexities of string theory.' Daily Express
Author
About Michael Symmons Roberts
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.
