Soft Keys - Softcover

Roberts, Michael Symmons

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0436419882 ISBN 13: 9780436419881

Publisher: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, 1993

Synopsis

Symmons-Roberts's poetry is written in diverse forms. Much of the subject matter is religious and philosophical, a search for meaning and order in the everyday and the extraordinary - a locust officer tracking swarms in an African desert, a hobbyist building a model of the world out of matchsticks.

About this title

Review:

"The poems are highly accomplished, constituting an intelligent, courageous attempt to write a contemporary religious poetry, one where God and videogames co-exist. This is very hard to do, but the voice of Soft Keys is genuinely contemporary; the best poems are lit with finely-nuanced details which the imagination can relish. A poem such as "The Telex" is sure, strange, beautifully judged" (Robert Crawford)

"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" (Jeanette Winterson)

"An outstanding writer" (Sunday Times)

"Michael Symmons Roberts' poems are intense and sensual explorations of the moment when the soul quickens to some ice-cracking life. The Christian faith gives Roberts' work an iconography, a deep well of symbolism, that links him with poets like David Jones or Geoffrey Hill. Like them, his work exists to errode whatever conceals that glinting mica of truth... through language at once precise and excitingly resonant" (Adam Thorpe)

Book Description:

'These are complex poems of darkness and radiance, miracle and desolation. And behind their answering energies, an awareness of the scintilla of grace' - Pauline Stainer

About this edition

• Publisher: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0436419882
• ISBN 13: 9780436419881
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 64