Drysalter

Winner of the 2013 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection Shortlisted for the 2013 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize Shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Poetry Award Shortlisted for the 2015 Portico Prize In an innovative digital first for Cape poetry, hear Michael Symmons Roberts read the entirity of his prize-winning collection, Drysalter and introduce the ideas behind the poetry. 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.

About the Author :
Michael Symmons Roberts was born in Preston, Lancashire in 1963. He has published eight collections of poetry and received a number of accolades including the Forward Prize, the Costa Poetry Award and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. His Selected Poems was published in 2016. As a librettist, his work has been performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world, and he is an award-winning broadcaster and dramatist. He is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, his Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief and Birdsong was published in 2025.

Review :
He displays an amazing talent for intimacy on paper – sometimes, it almost takes your breath away. It's all implicit, subtle, hypnotic and often beautiful. 150 poems of 15 lines, combining dazzling elegance and a rare imaginative humility. 150 poems of fifteen lines, tackling multiple subjects from peeling an orange to the universe's "scattergram of long-dead suns". Not a dud among them. Roberts’ most ambitious collection offers a potent and sensory multiplicity.