A teenage couple are found murdered in their car. Perry Scholes, a man haunted by cars and death, is mixed up in the case from the start — it is he who finds the BMW with its young corpses, and now he finds himself trapped in a nightmare.

Patrick's Alphabet

Roberts, Michael Symmons

Literature & Fiction

Vintage Books

As night unfolds, the plane travels through storms across the civil war-ravaged country, to deliver a lung from a boy killed in an accident to a waiting transplant recipient — an old man, fighting for breath — a northerner, with blood on his hands.

Breath

The wilderness is much closer than you think. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged: the edgelands - those familiar yet ignored spaces which are neither city nor countryside - have become the great wild places on our doorsteps. In the same way the Romantic writers taught us to look at hills, lakes and rivers, poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites, taking the reader on a journey to marvel at these richly mysterious, forgotten regions in our midst. "Edgelands" forms a critique of what we value as 'wild', and allows our allotments, railways, motorways, wasteland and water a presence in the world, and a strange beauty all of their own.

Edgelands: Journey into England's True Wilderness

Travel

Farley, Paul

Travel Writing

Deaths of the Poets

Poetry

Vintage

Winner of the Whitbread Prize, this gripping collection of poems centers around the body. Mystical, philosophical, and erotic, the bodies in these poems move between different worldslife and after-life, death and resurrectionencountering pathologists' blades, geneticists' maps, and the wounds of love and war. Equally at ease with scripture and science, these poems are a thrilling blend of modern and ancient wisdom, a profound and lyrical exploration of the mysteries of the body. Ranging effortlessly between the physical extremes of deathfrom putrefaction to purificationand lifedrought and flood, hunger and satiationthe poems in Corpus speak most movingly of living the half-life between two elements,” of what it is to be unique and luminously alive.

Corpus (Cape Poetry)

Jonathan Cape/Random House

As night unfolds, the plane travels through storms across the civil war-ravaged country, to deliver a lung from a boy killed in an accident to a waiting transplant recipient — an old man, fighting for breath — a northerner, with blood on his hands.

Contemporary

JONATHAN CAPE.

In his first collection since the Whitbread Prize-winning Corpus, Michael Symmons Roberts’s poems move in a world riven by violence and betrayal, between nations and individuals. In this, his fifth collection, he confirms his position as a thrillingly gifted lyric poet.

The Half-Healed

"Edgelands" explores a wilderness that is much closer than you think: a debatable zone, neither the city nor the countryside, but a place in-between - so familiar it is never seen for looking. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, ignored, the edgelands have become the great wild places on our doorsteps, places so difficult to acknowledge they barely exist. "Edgelands" forms a critique of what we value as 'wild', and allows our allotments, railways, motorways, wasteland and water a presence in the world, and a strange beauty all of their own. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts - both well-known poets - have lived and worked and known these places all their lives, and in Edgelands their journeying prose fuses, in the anonymous tradition, to allow this in-between world to speak up for itself. They write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites in the same way the Romantic writers forged a way of looking at an overlooked - but now familiar - landscape of hills and lakes and rivers. England, the first country to industrialise, now offers the world's most mature post-industrial terrain, and is still in a state of flux: "Edgelands" takes the reader on a journey through its forgotten spaces so that we can marvel at this richly mysterious, cheek-by-jowl region in our midst.

Edgelands

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Michael Symmons Roberts sixth - and most ambitious collection to date - takes its name from the ancient trade in powders chemicals salts and dyes paints and cures These poems offer a similarly potent and sensory multiplicity unified through the formal constraint of 150 poems of 15 lines Like the medieval psalters echoed in its title this collection contains both the sacred and profane

Drysalter. Michael Symmons Roberts (Cape Poetry)

History & Criticism

From Chatterton’s Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats’ death-warrant in a smudge of arterial blood; from Dylan Thomas’ eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath’s desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen or John Berryman’s leap from a bridge onto the frozen Mississippi, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work. The post-Romantic myth of the dissolute drunken poet – exemplified by Thomas and made iconic by his death in New York – has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. Novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept and in-control, but poets should be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive. Is this just a myth, or is there some essential truth behind it: that great poems only come when a poet's life is pushed right to an emotional knife-edge of acceptability, safety, security? What is the price of poetry? In this book, two contemporary poets undertake a series of journeys – across Britain, America and Europe – to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, honouring inspirational writers, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth. The result is a book that is, in turn, enlightening and provocative, eye-wateringly funny and powerfully moving.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Roberts, Michael Symmons. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Roberts, Michael Symmons

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Roberts, Michael Symmons. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Patrick's Alphabet

Breath

Edgelands: Journey into England's True Wilderness

Deaths of the Poets

Corpus (Cape Poetry)

Breath

The Half-Healed

Edgelands

Drysalter. Michael Symmons Roberts (Cape Poetry)

Deaths of the Poets