Michael Symmons Roberts is still something of an emerging voice in British poetry; which is surprising, when one considers his work to date. The marvellous Soft Keys appeared in 1993, followed by Raising Sparks (1999) and Burning Babylon, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2001. Throughout these works, he has returned to certain key ideas: the experience of the body, notions of sacrifice and redemption, what we mean when we talk about love, the possibility of commitment to a truly moral / religious life in a secular / fundamentalist world, (as exemplified with extraordinary beauty and daring by the figure of Simone Weil in Soft Keys, for example) and a concern with how we might know the world around us without allowing that knowledge to lead to the kind of reductive ideology that informs some contemporary (pseudo-) scientific thinking.

All these concerns have come to fruition in Corpus, not only Symmons Roberts finest collection to date, but as fine a book of poetry as any published in the last several years. His religious explorations are both vivid and compelling, as in 'Food for Risen Bodies II', quoted here in its entirety:

On that final night, his meal was formal:
lamb with bitter leaves of endive, chervil,
bread with olive oil and jars of wine.

Now on Tiberias' shores he grills
a carp and catfish breakfast on a charcoal fire.
This is not hunger, this is resurrection:

he eats because he can, and wants to
taste the scales, the moist flakes of the sea,
to rub the salt into his wounds.


In this extraordinary poem, the reference to the simple pleasure of a barbecue, of eating 'because he can' could be read as almost heretical; yet what emerges is a superb image of the risen man, not yet returned to God, able finally to delight in the quotidian pleasures of life, his work done, his suffering over. It is a reminder of Jesus' assertion that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand: in the natural world, in the bodies we are and the bodies we love, in family, in the land, in a simple meal of charcoal-grilled fish. Such poems re-sacralise the ordinary components of our highest rituals: bread, wine, oil, flesh, blood, seed.

Elsewhere, a number of angry, but also very witty, poems (see 'Mapping the Genome', for example) in Corpus attack the pseudo-scientific / commercial enterprise of our time which would reduce those magical components to mere numbers and patents. et, even as they explore new territory, these works are continuous with Symmons Roberts concerns to date, proving him to be one of our most politically-engaged and questioning writers, as well as the foremost religious poet of his generation. Corpus is unmissable: the work of a poet working at his full power, challenging, sensual and deeply satisfying.