Soft Keys

Have just finished Soft Keys by Michael Symmons Roberts and it's marvelous. This was his first collection - he has since published four more and two books of prose - and has recently been reissued by Jonathan Cape. It is a very fine book and as a first collection is breath-taking; I don't know if Roberts had published much before this in the way of pamphlets and individual poems but the poems are so highly accomplished technically and show such seriousness of thought that it is clear a large amount of preparation and hard work had gone into this. This ain't your typical first collection. Sure there are some poems that read a bit like writing exercises; "Replica" or "To Skin a Tree" will probably not make it into his Selected Poems. But there are equally pieces that show a great maturity and seem to have burst forth Athenalike and fully formed. "Messiaen in Görlitz" is a beautiful, serious poem and treats ambitious subject matter (remember Roberts was only thirty at the time this book came out) with the musicality and grace which, when properly handled, allows poetry to broach topics that song or philosophy might otherwise fight shy of. "Hosea Thomas in the Realm of Miracles" is another fine example of Roberts' religious sensibility and technical mastery and reads like something out of Tom Waits or Flannery O'Connor.

But even when he bites off smaller chunks of material the result is rarely bland; so the potentially treacherous territory of an old man talking about his allotment which one imagines 999 out of 1000 poets would turn into something cringe-worthy becomes in Roberts' hands a meditation on the terrifying power of the earth indiscriminately to recycle whatever we put into it.

This is the open, naked girl
ripped from a magazine left
on the allotments. My digging
was delayed by rain, I watched her
mouth fill up with water,
and her legs, funnelling.
She held a look of ecstasy
as I spaded her into the mud

...

This is the child who was
beaten lifeless, left in a quiet river,
washed up on to the edge of the soil.
I had seen her running away
with the man whose cold hands
were printed on her neck when I found her.
Within a day she was part of my soil.
Her crop was young, fresh and green.

The ending of this poem - "I am the man who can tame the earth,/can make it rise through/my little patch of ground" - makes it clear that he is talking too about his own craft; about the greedy, omnivorous appetite of the poet and of the mess, the ugliness and the horror that goes into creating the "smokeless fuel for the quiet man's night".

There were only two false notes for me in this collection: the long, final poem "The Hookses" (one wonders if this was a filler insisted on by his editor; at any rate it seems slight and over-narrative and stylistically the use of white space and thin lines seem more like experiments with the tab and return keys than intrinsic parts of the poem) and the first section of "Simone and the Unknown Friend" where Roberts imagines the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil playing arcade games in Torquay. The tone here is silly and one wishes he had started with section two as the rest of this poem is first rate. There is something slightly patronising too, I find, in the supposition that British readers will need to have a foreign figure stuck in a British landscape if they are to recognize her. In Roberts' defense, when this book was written in 1993 there was no Google and virtually no internet so perhaps he was worried that readers would not know who Weil was and would skip over what is an important part of the collection. But there were surely less goofy ways to introduce her than this.

These few quibbles aside this is an excellent book and confirms the opinion I had after reading the magisterial Corpus (and which had wavered slightly after reading the good but not stunning Burning Babylon and The Half Healed) that Michael Symons Roberts is one of the finest poets currently working in the British Isles.