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Thursday 3 October 2013

Dealing with faith and with secularism is difficult but necessary now

Interesting to note that Michael Symmons Roberts' Drysalter which has just won the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection is being praised by the Forward judges for its powerful spirituality.

“We need to be able to talk of matters of faith and the soul, and how the soul intersects with the heart. What Symmons Roberts does is difficult but necessary now – it addresses a fissure in the human psyche: how we deal with faith and with secularism, how we find a life .. It is an outstanding winner,” said Jeanette Winterson, chairman of the 2013 Forward judges. She praised Symmons Roberts, an atheist who converted to Catholicism at university, for challenging the “fundamentalism” of militant atheists like Richard Dawkins.

The press release from the Forward Arts Foundation specifically notes that Symmons Roberts was a thorough-going atheist as a teenager, who chose to study Theology and Philosophy at Oxford University in order to “talk believers out of their faith”. The ploy backfired. "As university went on I got deeply into philosophy — and the philosophy completely undermined my atheism, by making me realize that there was no overarching objectivity, no Dawkinsian bedrock of common sense if you strip everything away.”

Symmons Roberts has publicly asked the question of whether it is possible to write religious poetry that communicates widely in an increasingly secular language, noting that "T. S. Eliot warned against a religious poetry that “leaves out what men and women consider their major passions, and thereby confesses to an ignorance of them”, but argued instead for “the whole subject of poetry” to be treated in “a religious spirit”. Symmons Roberts pointed then to the work of John Berryman as being one affirmative answer to that question. The response of the Forward judges to Drysalter indicates that his own work also genuinely answers that same question in the affirmative.

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Michael Symmons Roberts - The Vows.

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