Manchester Metropolitan University Professor of Poetry Michael Roberts has been nominated for another award for his latest poetry collection, Drysalter.
Michael has been shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award alongside Clive James, Helen Mort and Robin Robertson.
Drysalter has already been awarded the Forward Prize for Poetry earlier this year, and is shortlisted for the TS Eliot Award.
The winners of each category,Poetry, First Novel, Novel, Biography and Children’s Book, will be announced on January 6, with the overall Costa Book of the Year Prize given on January 28.
The Poetry category will be judged by writer John Burnside, poet and journalist Olivia Cole and Daniel Eltringham, poetry buyer for Dulwich Books.The judges said Michael “combines philosophical depth with a lightness of touch.”
Michael’s fourth book, Corpus, won the award in 2004 when it was known as the Whitbread Award.
A Drysalter was a trader in chemicals, salts and dyes.The work contains 150 poems each one 15 lines long. Michael was quoted as saying he found the poems “terrifying” to write. Like the medieval psalters echoed in its title, this collection contains both the sacred and profane. There are hymns of praise and lamentation, songs of wonder and despair, journeying effortlessly through physical and metaphysical landscapes, from financial markets and urban sprawl to deserts and dark nights of the soul.
