Michael Symmons Roberts*

Michael Symmons Roberts is a British poet, broadcaster, and librettist ― collaborating often with the Scottish classical composer James MacMillan. His most recent poetry collection is Ransom (2021, Jonathan Cape). Carol Ann Duffy has called him “The clearest and purest voice currently sounding in British poetry.”

The following poem is from Ransom, and is the fifteenth poem from the central section “Vingt Regards,” which he explains “was written in response to Olivier Messiaen’s set of twenty short piano pieces about the incarnation: Vingt Regards sur l‘Enfant-Jésus.” The poems were commissioned by pianist Cordelia Williams who was curating a series of Messiaen events around the UK back in 2015.

For these poems Michael Symmons Roberts reflects on the various contemplations of the Christ child, but also on life in German-occupied Paris during 1944 where Messianen was composing his Twenty Contemplations of the Infant Jesus, and simultaneously Marcel Carné was working on his cinematic masterpiece Les Enfant du Paradis. He has said, “the poems are an attempt to explore the same theological or mystical ground as the music ― the scandal and sheer risk of the incarnation, the liberating power of it.”

Rehearsal For The Death Scene

If trees could walk like men,
beautiful boy-god, I would bear you
on my shoulders through this city,
show you every boulevard and alley,
every market stall and park.

You would tower above
the cavalcades and rallies,
peer into penthouse suites and boardrooms
witness to so many acts of cruelty and love,
safe among my needles.

Then when you nod tired
in the cold and thickening dark
I would stand on the riverbank,
as long slow barges mutter by,
and sing you to sleep in my many tongues:

the bat-high silvered songs
of linden, plane; slow lullabies
of quince and medlar from the gardens;
long laments of empress, foxglove
in the windless squares.

I would carry you for years,
until you grow so heavy that they
nail you up to keep you here. It is needless,
because even if my back broke,
I would never let you fall.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Michael Symmons Roberts: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Michael Symmons Roberts*

Michael Symmons Roberts is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. His most-recent poetry book is Selected Poems (2016). He tells me his next collection, Mancunia, is scheduled to appear in August of 2017. Robert Potts wrote for The Guardian, “He reflects on the world in a way that is informed by a sense of grace, of transcendence, but the pieces are grounded in detail, beautifully expressed, subtly luminous.”

He is one of the poets featured in my new anthology The Turning Aside: The Kingdom Poets Book of Contemporary Christian Poetry — (available here) and through Amazon.

Besides being a poet, Michael Symmons Roberts is a novelist and librettist. The opera The Sacrifice, which he wrote with composer James MacMillan won the RPS Award for opera in 2008.

The following poem is from Drysalter and his Selected Poems — both published by Jonathan Cape.

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 smoke 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.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Michael Symmons Roberts: first post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Michael Symmons Roberts

Michael Symmons Roberts is a British poet who has six full-length poetry books, all published by Jonathan Cape. His fourth, Corpus (2004) was awarded the Whitbread Prize, and was also short-listed for both the Griffin and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His latest collection, Drysalter (2013) recently received the Forward Prize and the Costa Prize. In 2006, in connection with a BBC television series, he published The Miracles of Jesus (Lion-Hudson). He has also published two novels.

When Symmons Roberts arrived as a student at Oxford, as a confident atheist, he intentionally changed his course to Theology and Philosophy, and selected a Christian college so he could talk believers out of their faith. "As university went on I got deeply into philosophy — and the philosophy completely undermined my atheism, by making me realize that there was no overarching objectivity, no Dawkinsian bedrock of common sense if you strip everything away. I realized that atheism was just as culturally conditioned as being a Catholic."

Novelist Jeanette Winterson has described him as “a religious poet in a secular age. His work is about the connection between the things of the spirit and the things of the world. And his work is about transcendence.”

Jairus

So, God takes your child by the hand
and pulls her from her deathbed.
He says: ‘Feed her, she is ravenous.’

You give her fruits with thick hides
– pomegranate, cantaloupe –
food with weight, to keep her here.

You hope that if she eats enough
the light and dust and love
which weave the matrix of her body

will not fray, nor wear so thin
that morning sun breaks through her,
shadowless, complete.

Somehow this reanimation
has cut sharp the fear of death,
the shock of presence. Feed her

roast lamb, egg, unleavened bread:
forget the herbs, she has an aching
fast to break. Sit by her side,

split skins for her so she can gorge,
and notice how the dawn
draws colour to her just-kissed face.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Michael Symmons Roberts: second post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.