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Mancunia

Roberts, Michael Symmons
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Random House Children’s Publishers UK (Jonathan Cape Ltd)
Published: August 3, 2017
ISBN: 9781911214298
80 pages

£10.00

Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot PrizeLonglisted 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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