Ransom

One of the finest poets writing today... Ransom... moved me greatly.

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.

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE 2021** 
 
*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. The poems in Ransom display all the lyrical beauty and metaphysical ambition for which his work is acclaimed, but with a new urgency, a ragged edge to what the Independent described as his 'dazzling elegance'. At the heart of this new book are three powerful sequences - one set in occupied Paris, one an elegy for his father, and one a meditation on gratitude - that work at the edges of belief and doubt, both mystical and philosophical. The idea of 'ransom' is turned and turned again, poem by poem, seen through the lenses of personal grief and loss, cinematic scenes of kidnap and release, narratives of incarnation and atonement. This is a profound and timely book from one of our finest poets.

Deaths of the Poets

An entertaining journey into how the deaths of great poets have shaped our culture's distorted sense of poetry

A rollicking mixture of literary biography, commentary, travelogue and anecdotage, much of it deeply amusing.

So much material of such innate interest is presented with just the right balance of panache, wit, insight and elegy… A good, clever, kindly and enjoyable book it is, like eavesdropping on two smarter friends when they are sparking off each other… Farley and Roberts are always entertaining and illuminating, gentle guides and quixotic questers.

Deaths of the Poets is packed with anecdotes and macabre frisons; its forays through some of poetry’s more sensational edge-lands make for a compelling read.

A terrifically entertaining book: thoughtful, funny, informative, with an eye for good quotes and anecdotes, and wide-ranging in both the distance it travels and the material on which it draws.

Deaths of the Poets is a gripping, witty read, but also asks serious questions about the way the post-Romantic myth of the doomed poet skews the way we interpret their work.

It is a thoughtful book, structured as a series of pilgrimages to the places where poets have died.

The authors are agreeable, well-informed and slyly humorous company.

Poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts make a comic routine out of their own relative longevity… An absorbing, if melancholy trip.

On their pilgrimage, Michael and Paul honour their poetic heroes, but also investigate and interrogate the myth, sending themselves up in the process. The result is a book… that is enlightening and provocative, eye-wateringly funny and powerfully moving.

The book is a fascinating if slightly ghoulish examination of poets’ deathbeds, and sometimes their last words, such as Philip Larkin’s bleak remark, “I am going to the inevitable”… Deaths of the Poets is highly readable, informative and resonating with a literary hinterland.

It’s an undertaking that explores the often linked ideas of poetry and mortality, but with a questing humour.

A witty and erudite journey into the characters of doomed poets using location as a steer.

Michael Symmons Roberts (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. Paul Farley (Author) Paul Farley is the author of four collections of poetry and has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whitbread Poetry Award and the E.M. Forster Award. He broadcasts regularly on radio and presents The Echo Chamber on Radio 4. Edgelands, co-written with Michael Symmons Roberts, received the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Award and the 2011 Foyles Best Book of Ideas Award and was serialised as Radio 4 Book of the Week.

From Dylan Thomas’s eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath’s desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen; from Chatterton’s Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats’ death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work. 
 
The post-Romantic lore of the dissolute drunken poet has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. Novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept and in control, but poets should be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive. Is this just an illusion , or is there some essential truth behind it? What is the price of poetry? 
 
In this book, two contemporary poets embark on a series of journeys to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth.

Mancunia

'A collection that constantly defies expectation... superb, substantial and intricately varied.' Kate Kellaway, Observer 
 
Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize 
PBS Autumn Recommendation

Superb, substantial and intricately varied... One of the wonderful things about Symmons Roberts is his way of pushing poems – and himself with them – in a direction you were not expecting. He constantly reconstitutes the world... Symmons Roberts reminds us of how easy it is to see human extremity without seeing it – a moving feat in what is a first-rate collection.

There is pleasing variety here… Articulate and well-achieved… Symmons Roberts’s voice reverberates the most.

It is a book for our times, hopeful yet grounded, and not above its subject.

A powerful and nuanced portrait of one of England's most dynamic and fascinating cities...a must-read.

Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize 
Longlisted for the 2019 Portico Prize 
PBS Autumn Recommendation 
 
Mancunia is both a real and an unreal city. In part, it is rooted in Manchester, but it is an imagined city too, a fallen utopia viewed from formal tracks, as from the train in the background of De Chirico’s paintings. In these poems we encounter a Victorian diorama, a bar where a merchant mariner has a story he must tell, a chimeric creature – Miss Molasses – emerging from the old docks. There are poems in honour of Mancunia’s bureaucrats: the Master of the Lighting of Small Objects, the Superintendent of Public Spectacles, the Co-ordinator of Misreadings. Metaphysical and lyrical, the poems in Michael Symmons Roberts’ seventh collection are concerned with why and how we ascribe value, where it resides and how it survives. Mancunia is – like More’s Utopia – both a no-place and an attempt at the good-place. It is occupied, liberated, abandoned and rebuilt. Capacious, disturbing and shape-shifting, these are poems for our changing times.

Selected Poems

The definitive introduction to a major poet

Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

This selection of the best poems from six remarkable collections reveals that all the strength and sensuality and strangeness is in there from the start. This is a metaphysical poetry for our age: rooted, steeped in the physical, but stretching for lyric completion, philosophical clarity, emotional truth. These poems achieve their seriousness not through hectoring argument but through their lightness of touch, their wit, their tenderness, their music. Roberts has always been a poet who, in the words of Lavinia Greenlaw, ‘inspires profound meditation on the nature of the soul, the body, the stars and the heart, and sparks revelation’. He is also formally and thematically diverse, restlessly exploring a wide range of subjects from Cold-War fear to love lyrics, genetics to elegies, always returning to the crucial, elemental themes – the mapping of experience and the search for meaning. 
 
After Drysalter, his double-prize-winning tour de force, we now have this opportunity to observe the whole arc to date: the consistency of grace and power, curiosity and risk, passion and intelligence that – together – make Michael Symmons Roberts such a thrilling and essential poet.

Drysalter

A new poetry collection from the award-winning writer of Corpus and Edgelands. 
 
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

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.

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.

Edgelands

Shortlisted for the 2012 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and winner of the Foyles Best Book of Ideas Prize - this is a book about the blank spaces on the A-Z: the lost and unloved 'edgelands' between cities and countryside

This book is a delight: witty and wryly contrarian

A masterpiece of its kind... Even more uplifting is the chapter on weather - truly one of the most extraordinary passages of prose I have read in some time... This is, quite simply, beautiful, but it is also typical of a beautifully conceived work of exploration, by two emissaries to the wilderness who do the wasteland proud

Marvellously quirky, fascinatingly detailed and beautifully written

The edgelands, where the veneer of civilisation peels away, are the most despised and ignored of landscapes. Ambition turns to dust in the sewage farm and landfill site. But Farley and Roberts's mischievous and elegant forays into these marginal wastes, show that dust turns back to life in them - into riotous ecologies, agitprop architecture and the wonderful business of playing. A provocative, left-field read

Haunting, often inspiring book...Edgelands covers an impressive range of politics, reminiscence, investigation and rumination

Edgelands delights with its sly, impish wit and observation

Eye-opening and hugely enjoyable book  ... overall this is an original, surprising and rather wonderful addition to our literature of place

A book that begs us to use our imaginations; to appreciate what we pass by every day but never really see

This is a delightful and important book.  By focusing on the fringes,  on the shabby reality of suburban life, these poets remind us that there are always new myths for old, that the 'edgelands' may even be our true centre

With chapters on paths, dens, wastelands, business parks and many other topics, this book has opened my eyes to all kinds of things I might not have noticed before

The year's most unusual travel book

[An] eye-opening and hugely enjoyable book

Written in a delectable prose that scatters flashes of poetry over a sardonic undertow of social comment, Edgelands is a lyrical triumph. On Britain’s grotty margins, the duo trace “desire paths” to find beauty and mystery in the rough darkness on the edge of town

The wilderness is much closer than you think. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged: the edgelands - those familiar yet ignored spaces which are neither city nor countryside - have become the great wild places on our doorsteps. 
 
In the same way the Romantic writers taught us to look at hills, lakes and rivers, poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites, taking the reader on a journey to marvel at these richly mysterious, forgotten regions in our midst. 
 
Edgelands forms a critique of what we value as 'wild', and allows our allotments, railways, motorways, wasteland and water a presence in the world, and a strange beauty all of their own.

Michael Symmons Roberts

In this remarkable book, Symmons Roberts explores his complex ongoing relationship with Messiaen's visionary work , alongside reflections on grief, faith and the creative process… Symmons Roberts writes with wit, beauty and piercing insight... In responding to Messiaen's radiant masterpiece, Symmons Roberts has created a masterpiece of his own

This wonderful book should help to win the strange, bird-fixated composer new admirers.

Symmons Roberts’ prose…is silky and emotive, with his success in weaving the personal strands with the musical partly owed to the deep connections wrought by his poems, each one seemingly chosen to heighten our understanding of what precedes it

Every sentence is beautifully assembled and polished... A properly engrossing exploration of music, place, religion and what it is to be human

Sarah Tarlow, author of THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LOSS

I love Michael Symmons Roberts' poetry. He is a religious poet in a secular age. His work is about connection between the things of the spirit and the things of the world. And his work is about transcendence

He displays an amazing talent for intimacy on paper – sometimes, it almost takes your breath away

On Music, Grief and Birdsong

'This is a rich, lively, profound book' ROWAN WILLIAMS 
 
A personal reckoning with grief, doubt, faith and poetry set to one of the most celebrated musical works of the twentieth century, from the award-winning poet and librettist. 
 
The story goes like this: on a freezing winter night in 1941, a new piece of chamber music was performed to a crowd of prisoners of war on a three-stringed cello, clarinet, violin and pub piano with sticky keys. It was the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps. 
 
Listeners since then have been captivated by the ecstatic music and mythology of Messiaen’s masterpiece. Michael Symmons Roberts’ own lifelong fascination with the Quartet– having chanced upon it in a record shop in his late teens and fallen in love with its title - leads him on a quest to understand its enigmatic power. His fascination – at times frustration – with Messiaen’s vision opens into an exploration of grief, of personal faith and doubt, of the end of time and what may lie beyond it. Interwoven with poetry and wit, this book is an expansive evocation of music, loss, hope and time, seen through the lens of the Quartet's technicolour, apocalyptic vision. 
 
Quartet for the End of Time is a moving, intimate and unforgettable book, attentive to ways of listening – in our noisy world – to birdsong, music, poems and radio silence, and to the call and response that we may find. 
 
'A properly engrossing exploration of music, place, religion and what it is to be human' SARAH TARLOW, author of The Archaeology of Loss

Michael Symmons Roberts

Praise for Quartet for the End of Time

In this remarkable book, Symmons Roberts explores his complex ongoing relationship with Messiaen's visionary work , alongside reflections on grief, faith and the creative process… Symmons Roberts writes with wit, be ...

This wonderful book should help to win the strange, bird-fixated composer new admirers.

Symmons Roberts’ prose…is silky and emotive, with his success in weaving the personal strands with the musical partly owed to the deep connections wrought by his poems, each one seemingly chosen to heighten o ...

In this remarkable book, Symmons Roberts explores his complex ongoing relationship with Messiaen's visionary work , alongside reflections on grief, faith and the creative process… Symmons Roberts writes with wit, be ...

This wonderful book should help to win the strange, bird-fixated composer new admirers.

Symmons Roberts’ prose…is silky and emotive, with his success in weaving the personal strands with the musical partly owed to the deep connections wrought by his poems, each one seemingly chosen to heighten o ...

In this remarkable book, Symmons Roberts explores his complex ongoing relationship with Messiaen's visionary work , alongside reflections on grief, faith and the creative process… Symmons Roberts writes with wit, be ...

This wonderful book should help to win the strange, bird-fixated composer new admirers.

Symmons Roberts’ prose…is silky and emotive, with his success in weaving the personal strands with the musical partly owed to the deep connections wrought by his poems, each one seemingly chosen to heighten o ...

Books by Michael Symmons Roberts

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