Review
“Roberts’ work can be viewed as a sure-eyed quest for the scintilla, a series of light footfalls… It’s a technique that builds to achieve remarkable power."
—Anne Rouse,
Poetry London
Book Description
Winner of the Whitbread Prize, this gripping collection of poems centers around the body. Mystical, philosophical, and erotic, the bodies in these poems move between different worldslife and after-life, death and resurrectionencountering pathologists' blades, geneticists' maps, and the wounds of love and war. Equally at ease with scripture and science, these poems are a thrilling blend of modern and ancient wisdom, a profound and lyrical exploration of the mysteries of the body. Ranging effortlessly between the physical extremes of deathfrom putrefaction to purificationand lifedrought and flood, hunger and satiationthe poems in Corpus speak most movingly of living the half-life between two elements,” of what it is to be unique and luminously alive.