In a collection that constantly defies expectation, the British poet offers a strikingly imaginative portrait of the Manchester in which he lives
There are many ways of occupying a city and Michael Symmons Roberts, in his superb, substantial and intricately varied seventh volume, reminds us it is a complicated business: we live in cities imaginatively as well as actually. Sometimes, we are painfully adjacent, shallow-rooted, trying to take hold.
This book offers only a notional portrait of the Manchester in which Symmons Roberts lives. It has become Mancunia, the city as it exists in his mind. This is his first collection since the masterly Drysalter, which won the Forward prize and Costa poetry award, and was, you might have reasonably supposed, an impossible act to follow.
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