Kirjahaku

When a teenage couple are found murdered in their car, a boy called Adam Sligo is the only suspect. The letter A is found blazoned on the wall at the murder scene and is soon followed, around town, by the other letters of the alphabet, each immaculately painted in red.

In a country recovering from a brutal and divisive civil war, a young boy, Jamie, is knocked off his bike and dies in a city street. His father agrees to allow one of Jamie's lungs to be removed and flown over the border for a transplant.

This collection of poems is a blend of modern and ancient wisdom and an exploration of the mysteries of the body. The bodies in these poems move between different worlds - life and after-life, death and resurrection - encountering pathologists' blades, geneticists' maps and the wounds of love and war.

Includes poems which takes into a world riven by violence and betrayal, between nations and individuals.

When Corpus won the Whitbread Poetry Award, the judges described it as 'an outstanding, perfectly weighted collection that inspires meditation on the nature of the soul...reading it feels like making an exciting discovery and coming back to an acknowledged classic all at once.' Michael Symmons Roberts' first book, Soft Keys, was the original and most exciting discovery of all. The poems in Soft Keys engage in a search for meaning and order in the everyday and in the extraordinary - a locust officer tracking swarms in an African desert, a hobbyist building a replica of the world out of matchsticks, a chance encounter with the French mystic Simone Weil playing video games in a Torquay arcade... Richly inventive, and written in a wide diversity of poetic forms, Soft Keys looks for those places and moments where the curtain between earth and heaven is thinnest; it was a powerful, arresting debut and the beginning of a remarkable career. As Les Murray said at the time: 'Like Nijinsky, he can leap into the air and stay there. You can reach up and feel the thump of the stage finely persisting in an ankle bone. Roberts is a poet for the new, chastened, unenforcing age of faith that has just dawned.'

*A FINANCIAL TIMES 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK*Ransom, the new collection from Michael Symmons Roberts, is an intense and vivid exploration of liberty and limit, of what it means to be alive, and searches for the possibility of hope in a fallen, wounded world.

In these poems we encounter a Victorian diorama, a bar where a merchant mariner has a story he must tell, a chimeric creature â?? Miss Molasses â?? emerging from the old docks. Mancunia is â?? like Moreâ??s Utopia â?? both a no-place and an attempt at the good-place.

An inviting and poignant new collection exploring our increasingly turbulent relationship with nature, from award-winning poet Michael Symmons Roberts 'I love Michael Symmons Roberts' poetry... His work is about connection between the things of the spirit and the things of the world' Jeanette Winterson 'An outstanding writer' Sunday Times Dog Star is a book of linked poems rooted in encounters with real, imagined or mythical birds, trees, fish, flowers, bacteria, chimeras – ancient connections reshaped by technological and political change and critically endangered by species and habitat loss. In Roberts’ previous work, his poems are attentive to glimpses of grace and presence, but always embodied and grounded. In this new book, that attention is sharper and more urgent than ever, at a time when the essential spiritual relationship between humanity and other forms of life is broken or lost. In a line from his collection Drysalter – ‘there is no way to the soul but through the body’ – he sets out the bearings for these new poems as attempts to tap into what D.H. Lawrence called ‘heaven’s wolfish, wandering electricity.’ Some encounters in Dog Star are head-on, face-to-face, some are more slant, distant, missed connections. There’s an elegiac sequence for the poet’s mother with each step measured in animals, an extended riff on the world as an aquarium and our lives seen through water – creatures dead and living, met in the flesh or mediated via film or stories. This is a profound, remarkable book by one of our major poets.