Mancunia

Michael Symmons Roberts

ISBN 10: 1911214292 / ISBN 13: 9781911214298

Published by Jonathan Cape, London, 2017

About this Item

A fine unread 1st impression of a paperback original with french flaps. Signed and dated [14.01.18] by the Author on the title page. Signed at the T S Eliot Prize shortlist event at the Festival Hall London.P&P will be reduced to cost.

Seller Inventory # 008236

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Mancunia
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape, London
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1911214292
• ISBN 13: 9781911214298
• Binding: Paperback Original
• Edition: First Edition
• Condition: New
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Michael Symmons Roberts was born in Preston, Lancashire in 1963. He has published six collections of poetry and received a number of accolades including the Forward Prize, the Costa Poetry Award and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. As a librettist, his work has been performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world. An award-winning broadcaster and dramatist, he has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.