13 February 2014, The Tablet

Master of metaphor

by Sue Gaisford

The Tablet Interview

 
Once an avowed atheist, the award-winning poet Michael Symmons Roberts is now a Catholic. But as he picks up another prize for his latest collection, he tells Sue Gaisford that his work is still a constant dialogue between faith and doubt The poet Michael Symmons Roberts is the Meryl Streep of his trade. He has been awarded pretty well every prize there is, some of them twice. His latest, sixth collection of poems, Drysalter, has just won the Costa poetry award. And you feel that he deserves them all.He is a tall, unassuming and seriously articu­late man, with a young face, steady blue eyes and a fashionably semi-shaven gingery head and beard. Born in Preston in 1963, he spent much of his childhood in Berkshire, where, in the heady days before the constraints of the national curricul
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