It was wonderful to hear one of our best contemporary poets, Michael Symmons Roberts, read and talk about his work last week at St. Catherine’s College. This event formed the latest in a series of excellent poetry readings organised by the college’s Shirley Society, which has recently brought ‘A-list’ poets including Sam Riviere, Don Paterson and Lavinia Greenlaw to our doorstep. Although this was a great reading as ever, there was an unusually poor turnout for this event, and perhaps it might have been slightly better advertised.

            Michael read from his three latest collections as well as answering questions about his writing process. He discussed how his books develop as entities, each presenting a meditation on particular theme. At a certain point, Michael told us, he becomes conscious of the theme, tone, or ‘voice’ of the book he is writing, and begins to think of the work developing as a whole. First Michael read from Corpus (2004), which contains poems about the body: pelts, corpses, flesh, genetics, food. The beautiful sequence ‘Food for Risen Bodies’ takes as its starting point the Biblical story of Jairus’s daughter, with the emphasis on the ravenous hunger of those waking from near-death experiences. The work is undeniably spiritual, and indeed suffused with Christian imagery, but in the lightest and most beautiful way possible. Risen bodies eat ‘crab meat’, rooting transcendence in physical (yet translucent) taste and texture. Everything in the poet’s work is clarified in tangible terms, presenting the spiritual as immediate, universal, even secular.

            Next Michael read from Dry Salter, his forthcoming collection due to be released in April. Taking its name from the ancient trade in powders, chemicals, paints, dyes and salts, this book is again about palpable substances, the concrete and corporeal. But Christian imagery is never far away from the poetry, with ‘Salter’ also, delicately, a pun on ‘Psalter’, with the 150 poems in the book constituting a response to the 150 psalms of the Bible. Each poem is just fifteen lines, and Michael discussed the importance of form in his work to provide ‘friction’ or resistance in his poetry in order to maintain the energy of the writing process.

            Lastly, Michael read from The Half Healed (2008), a meditation on conflict moving between broken cities, border-crossings, armistices and scars. In each of the books, there is a concern with the places where we break, the point at which our bodies become fragments, and conversely, where they re-heal. Overall, as it is put in one of the Dry Salter poems, there is an awareness of a world ‘more fragile than we thought’.