What does it mean to be a religious poet for a secular age?

Michael Symmons Roberts has been hailed (by Jeanette Winterson) as “a religious poet for a secular age”. Lest we forget, this description was regularly applied to the late Geoffrey Hill. Getting on for 80 years ago, it was also used to garland the austere and resolutely Anglicised head of T.S. Eliot. All of which begs the two related questions: What precisely is a religious poet? And, for all the empty churches and the clamour of the professional atheists, do we really live in a secular age, or simply in one which the framers of public discourse find it convenient to label as such?

As for that poetic first principle, by this stage in a longish career, with seven full-length ­collections and the Forward, Costa and Whitbread prizes under his belt, there is a faint sense of resignation in the way that Symmons Roberts accepts his inevitable labelling as a religious, specifically Catholic, poet. “I do and I don’t,” he explains, when asked if he minds the pigeonholing that seems to be so vital to the specimen literary ­reputation, while pointing out several other affiliations, such as academia – he currently teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University – and “northern-ness” (current domicile halfway between Manchester and the Peak District).