Michael Symmons Roberts' Christmas card poem
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 22 December 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There’s a tradition among poets to write a poem to put inside the Christmas cards they send. So, the BBC World Service has commissioned one specially from the poet, dramatist and novelist Michael Symmons Roberts, whose Christian faith is important to his identity and work. But his art is not a direct expression of this, and instead he follows the poet Emily Dickinson’s instruction to "tell all the truth but tell it slant".
Michael has just become a grandfather, so feels keenly the happiness of the arrival of a cherished child, creating a parallel between his own life and the Christmas story of the birth of Jesus. Julian May follows Michael’s creative process as he grapples huge spiritual and personal themes – distilling them to a length which can fit on a Christmas card: a daunting but joyful task.
The programme begins on London’s Oxford Street, where consumerism triggers preparations a full three months before Christmas, and ends with the sealing of the Christmas cards before they are popped into the post box.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Welcome to the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:12.5 | I'm Julian May, and I'm on the roof of Broadcasting House, the BBC's headquarters in the heart of London. |
| 0:19.7 | The view is amazing. The city is a light with Christmas decorations. |
| 0:24.9 | There's a host of bright angels hovering above the shops of Regent Street, and there are crowds |
| 0:30.1 | of people shopping for presents and posting their Christmas cards. The people of Britain send |
| 0:36.2 | about a billion cards every Christmas. Some of these will include |
| 0:41.1 | especially written poem because there's a bit of a tradition among poets to write a Christmas |
| 0:46.4 | card poem for their family and friends. So, I asked the poet Michael Simmons Roberts to write a Christmas card poem and let me follow its creation for In the Studio. |
| 0:59.7 | Michael Simmons Roberts has published eight collections of poems and won many awards. |
| 1:05.6 | He would, I thought, write an engaging and interesting Christmas card poem because Michael was once a staunch atheist, but is now a Christian. |
| 1:15.9 | It's only two weeks until Christmas Day, but we began this journey on the 1st of October. |
| 1:22.0 | And when we met, I asked Michael how he would approach this. |
| 1:26.6 | My poem will have to connect with the Christmas story because it's part of my life and my work |
| 1:33.8 | and all my poems in some way, I think, respond to my faith. |
| 1:38.6 | So I have an investment, a commitment and a fascination that connects me with the nativity story |
| 1:47.3 | and with the miracle of the incarnation, which is at the heart of what this is. |
| 1:53.1 | You know, God becomes one of us. |
| 1:55.8 | I cannot imagine writing a poem for a Christmas card that doesn't include that. |
| 2:05.5 | But also, it has to feel authentically contemporary as well. And that means bringing the messiness and complexity and threat and anxiety of the world that we live in, |
| 2:15.5 | the city we're in today, into the poem. |
| 2:20.9 | There have been several wonderful Christmas poems. |
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