Mancunia
Aug 2017 · Random House
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About this ebook
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.
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.
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About the author
Michael Symmons Roberts was born in Preston, Lancashire in 1963. His books of poetry have won many awards including the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Award for Drysalter (2013) and the Whitbread Poetry Prize for Corpus (2004). His Selected Poems was published by Cape in 2016. As a librettist, his work with composers has been performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world. The Sacrifice (for Welsh National Opera) with composer James MacMillan, won an RPS Award, and choral works Elliptics (for BBC Philharmonic) and The Anvil (for Manchester International Festival) with composer Emily Howard, were both nominated for Ivor Novello Awards. His non-fiction book Edgelands (with Paul Farley, 2011) won the Foyles Book of Ideas Award and the Jerwood Prize. He is an award-winning broadcaster and dramatist, Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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