5 Dec

Poetry @ the Print Room

Readings from Sinéad Morrissey, Michael Symmons Roberts and Maria Stepanova

Sinéad Morrissey

Set against a backdrop of ecological and economic instability and the chaos and turbulence of the 21st century Sinéad Morrissey’s sixth collection, On Balance, revisits some of the great feats of human engineering (including the Titanic, invention of the radio, the works of Edison and Tesla) to reveal the states of balance and imbalance that have shaped our history. She won the TS Eliot Prize  for Parralax  and The  Forward Prize for On Balance.   Morrissey is the head of the Creative Writing programme at Newcastle University and is Belfast’s inaugural Poet Laureate. 

‘One of the most gifted of yet another generation of talented Irish poets.’ (The Independent on Sunday) 

 

Michael Symmons Roberts

The poems in Michael Symmons Roberts’ seventh collection are metaphysical and lyrical. Like More’s Utopia, Mancunia  is both a no-place and an attempt at the good-place. Capacious, disturbing and shape-shifting, these are poems for our changing times. Roberts has won the Forward Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, the Whitbread Poetry Prize and Mancunia is shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.  His librettos have been performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world. Roberts is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

 These poems were completed before the attack on the Manchester Arena on 22 May 2017, but this book is dedicated to the memory of the victims, and to those Mancunians and others who came to offer help and support on that night.

“Michael Symmons Roberts’ poems are intense and sensual explorations of the moment when the soul quickens to some ice-cracking life” (Adam Thorpe for The Observer) 

“I love Michael Symmons Roberts’s poetry. He is a religious poet in a secular age. His work is about the connection between the things of the spirit and the things of the world. And his work is about transcendence.” (Jeanette Winterson)

 

Maria Stepanova

Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist, journalist and the author of ten poetry collections and two books of essays. She has been awarded several Russian and international literary awards including the Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru which explores the cultural, social and political reality of contemporary Russia, with nearly a million visitors a month. Maria will read from her most recent work, ‘The War of the Beasts and the Animals’ which deals with the current atmosphere in Russia and the conflict in Donbass and features in this Autumn’s MPT. 

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