Mancunia by Michael Symmons Roberts. Cape Poetry (London 2017). Pbk. 75 pages. £10.
When terrorists attacked the Manchester Arena they could hardly have expected to be answered by poetry. Yet it was Tony Walsh’s poem which stirred the remembrance vigil. ‘We won’t take defeat’, it said ‘and we don’t want your pity’ because the Manchester spirit has shaped the world from science to the suffragette movement: ‘we make something happen / we can’t seem to help it’.
Mancunia was completed before that attack but dedicated to the victims and helpers. It is no simple paean. Michael Symmons Roberts is a complex writer whose work is many-layered and never straightforwardly celebratory or consolatory. The title is a name sometimes used fondly by Mancunians but it suggests a partly fictional city, a place of phantasmagoria, both Utopia and Armageddon, but always with ‘man’ at its centre.
The poet encompasses the city in its generality and detail homing in from above in ‘Great Northern Diver’ with the perspective of a bird. Manchester once represented a daring experiment in living and in ‘A Mancunian Diorama’ a double page prose poem is used to represent a vitrine display accommodating the whole history of Manchester, from its base sandstone mound to Roman fort, through Engels, Peterloo, Gaskell, Lowry, George Best and the Arndale bombing: ‘the weight of it can be too much to bear’.
Michael Symmons Roberts has seven previous poetry collections and has won many of the top prizes in poetry, his last book Drysalter, modelled on the psalms, being particularly admired. He has also worked with musicians and commissions for the BBC, including a work to commemorate the victims of 9/11. Drysalter was dedicated to the composer James MacMillan who named Symmons Roberts’ Selected Poems as his Desert Island book for the way writing which appears secular ‘opens the door to other parts’. Liturgical forms pervade Mancunia but so do secular ones. Many of the poems have a filmic quality and T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ is never far away. There are allusions to Coleridge, Elizabeth Bishop, Frost and Yeats but the poet’s wrestle with language, God and the self also suggests Hopkins’s ‘dark’ sonnets and the metaphysical poets.
‘Tightrope Song’ uses the model of the anonymous ‘Dream of the Rood’, the speaking bearer of human burdens. Where the cross tells the story of the crucifixion, here a tightrope tells of the artist, the ‘prince of the air’ who walked along it. The poem hovers suggestively between the two settings of Manchester and Galilee. Such liminarity and parallelism is characteristic and demonstrates the way in which humanity and the divine are poignantly intertwined. Tenderness and compassion run through the book and extend to the poet’s own fragilities. ‘In Paradisum’, with its repeated phrase ‘three thousand refugee children’, focuses on our conceptualising of migrants as collective, surreal entities as much as individuals. In ‘The Fall of Utopia’ the poet tries to heal the rift between his own body and soul, resolving, ‘like a harbour pilot’ to steer ‘this vessel made of grief / through latticework of rocks and reefs’.
Prayer exemplifies the relationship between humanity and divinity. In ‘A Mancunian Miserere’ the poet asks for mercy for all his shortcomings, from ‘the wide berth I gave to that man-cocoon asleep on the steps’ to ‘the days that I have sacked, abandoned, / given up for the price of a light… thinking you would waste your breath on me’. As poet he asks forgiveness for the things he has missed seeing, ‘for my constancy of inattention’ and he begs God ‘let the streets dry out / and flood instead the cambers, ventricles, capillaries of me, / prise my teeth apart O God that I may learn to praise’.
Praise is both a poetic and a human imperative for Michael Symmons Roberts and it depends on a certain quality of attention. The reader, too, must cultivate this in reading his poetry, entering into his search for meaning and faith through the particularity and resonance of the things around him. In the lovely ‘Miss Molasses’ the poet searches for an elusive mermaid lass, the spirit of the old Salford Docks, now Media City. This shy chimera has a rich voice and a salty lament. She wants to ‘bear witness’ but to hear her requires effort: she deserves all your attention. So does this poetry.
Kathryn Southworth is the former Vice Principal of Newman University College, Birmingham. She now lives in London. Her poems have been published in magazines and anthologies and her collection Someone was Here is forthcoming from Indigo Dreams in 2018.