GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE 2005International Shortlist Book: Corpus
Poet: Michael Symmons Roberts
Publisher: Jonathan Cape Click the book cover or title to purchase Corpus online. Read an excerpt from Corpus. Enjoy audio and video clips of Michael Symmons Roberts reading from Corpus. Biography  Corpus (2004) is the most recently published book of poetry from Michael Symmons Roberts. He has authored three previous published books of poetry: Soft Keys (1993), Raising Sparks (1999) and Burning Babylon (2001). Corpus was shortlisted for the 2004 Forward Prize for Best Collection and the 2004 T.S. Eliot Prize, and has already won the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award; this is his first entry onto the shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Born in Preston Lancashire in 1963, Roberts is also an award-winning radio writer, a documentary filmmaker for the BBC, and a frequent collaborator with the composer James MacMillan. Judges’ Citation “There is a patient, almost forensic methodology in the poems of Michael Symmons Roberts, a systematic building up or stripping away of layers, until the subject and the sense of each poem is either established or exposed. This collection, Corpus, is almost a poetic autopsy, an investigation of the body, sometimes for signs of life and sometimes for what might loosely be called the human spirit. But if this is poetry in the religious tradition, there is nothing mystical or superstitious about Corpus. Just to dare to consider such a concept as the soul, the poet must explore wildly differing aspects of human behaviour, from gross acts of torture to moments of ecstatic love; with a photographic accuracy and frame by frame, almost documentary observations, his eye is unflinching. Knowing but never sagacious, confident but never preachy or dogmatic, this is Symmons Roberts at his most readable, most lyrical best.” FOOD FOR RISEN BODIES - I | A rare dish is right for those who
have lain bandaged in a tomb for weeks: quince and quail to demonstrate
that fruit and birds still grow on trees, eels to show that fish still needle streams.
Rarer still, some blind white crabs, not bleached but blank, from such
a depth of ocean that the sun would drown if it approached them. Two-thirds
of the earth is sea; and two-thirds of that sea – away from currents, coasts and reefs –
is lifeless, colourless, pure weight. From Corpus, by Michael Symmons Roberts
Copyright © 2004 |
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