Drysalter
Within the severe constraint of 150 fifteen-line poems, religious resonance, urban reality, bodily sensation, and metaphysical thought intersect. The compressed structure intensifies the layered feel of experience and the unease of the world.
Work Information
Prayer and urban noise collide inside the same poem.
Drysalter takes its title from an old trade in chemicals, pigments, and cures, and uses 150 fifteen-line poems to move back and forth between worldly disorder and spiritual searching. The language often sounds like prayer as it crosses cities, markets, deserts, and night landscapes.
Review Summaries
-
Readers value the way formal severity and sensory richness appear at once. The movement between religion and everyday life can feel powerfully magnetic, though some find the density demanding.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Jonathan Cape
- Published
- 2013-04-04
- Pages
- 176 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 22.86 x 15.24 x 3.18 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780224093590
- ISBN-10
- 0224093592
- Price
- 969 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/History & Criticism/Criticism & Theory
Winner of the 2013 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection Winner of the 2013 Costa Poetry Award Shortlisted for the 2013 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize Shortlisted for the 2015 Portico Prize 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. 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 was born in Preston, Lancashire in 1963. He has published six collections of poetry and received a number of accolades including the Forward Prize, the Costa Poetry Award and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. As a librettist, his work has been performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world. An award-winning broadcaster and dramatist, he has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Reviews
-
A wonderfully constructed set of poems, one hundred and fifty poems at fifteen lines each is quite delightful and provides a pleasant poem for each day.
-
This is a book of treasures - 150 poems, each of 15 lines (yet in a wide range of stanzaic variations), on themes that are familiar in lyric poetry but which the poet treats with tenderness, endless ingenuity, wit, self-deprecation and physicality. I'm reading it slowly, just three or four poems at a time, because the facility of writing could easily tempt a superficiality of reading - which would be a great shame. Several individual poems (even particular lines) are full of delicacy and subtle perception, yet turn out to be making a big - often cosmic - point. Three stanzas from 'Smoke' as an example: 'One building bleeds into another. / Torch beams shrink to yellow burrs. / Headlamps fade to dandelion clocks. // Distances collapse. Shouts could cross / streets, valleys, oceans. Silence, broken / by a siren on another continent. // And what burns? Sweet and salt, / bracken, berries, hair. What new edifice / hardens within, waits for the world to sharpen?' Warmly recommended, even if (like me) you already have far too many poetry books to fit on your shelves...
-
This is a lively, engaging, provocative book of poems that play with life at many levels. I like the particularity of it -- this response, at this moment, in this context. As in the Book of Psalms, there are a hundred and fifty poems, but that is the end of the definite connection. This is not a free version, nor do the poems correspond to Psalms in any way. But it is packed with allusions, references, starting points, reflections, and an alignment with the starting-point of the notional Psalmist. It starts in life -- where are we today? what's going on? how do I live through it? it's not that bad, really; and so on -- and it returns to life, as in the illustrations in a psalter, or in the mix of exotic, aromatic and transformative goods suggested by the title. I like it.
-
Very enjoyable poetry book, very emotive and decisive in tone. I felt a good understanding of linguistic processes. I very much enjoyed it.
-
There are a few really top class poems here, but sadly they're lost in the poor quality of the rest of the work. The collection needed a much stronger editor and a significant amount of culling.