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This website is a source of information and news about the poet Michael Symmons Roberts.
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'The Sacrifice' wins RPS Award
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New novel - 'Breath' - published
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Breath Front Cover
  just published - March 2008
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Poetry

“In his gorgeously meditative collection, Corpus, Michael Symmons Roberts takes a cool, hard look at his own mortal coil, moving between images of his body ‘on the slab’ and glimpses of intimacy and absence.”
The Independent
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Libretti

MacMillan makes Roberts' words flow as naturally as psalm-pointing. One moment he is as desolate as Rilke ("came a single lightning bolt"), the next as subtle as Sappho or a Tang dynasty poem ("Under my shell was a smithereen of sun/ hidden in snow among wild yellow olives").…the effect is hypnotising.’
The Independent
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Broadcast

“The poet and dramatist Michael Symmons Roberts is an outstanding writer, whom radio has done much to nurture.”
Sunday Times
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PELT

I found the world’s pelt
nailed to the picture-rail
of a box-room in a cheap hotel.

So that’s why rivers dry to scabs,
that’s why the grass weeps every dawn,
that’s why the wind feels raw:

the earth’s an open wound,
and here, its skin hangs
like a trophy, atrophied beyond all

taxidermy, shrunk into a hearth rug.
Who fleeced it?
No record in the guest-book.

No-one paid, just pocketed the blade
and walked, leaving the bed
untouched, TV pleasing itself.

Maybe there was no knife.
Maybe the world shrugs off a hide
each year to grow a fresh one.

That pelt was thick as reindeer,
so black it flashed with blue.
I tried it on, of course, but no.