Vintage Poetry | Part Two | Michael Symmons Roberts

Our Poetry Special - part two! This time we're talking to Michael Simmonds Roberts about his new poetry collection, Mancunia... Read an extract from the book: http://po.st/f9Igdl Manchester books that will make you want to visit http://po.st/ACfKjx 

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Michael Simmonds Roberts - Mancunia Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot 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.

Read more at https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1112493/mancunia/#ZiVegydh6ISYfdki.99 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.