SO MUCH FOR LIFE: SELECTED POEMS BY MARK HYATT Edited by Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts
215 x 140mm, 224 pages, black and white printing, perfect bound, 2023
A long awaited collection of poems by Mark Hyatt, one of the great lost writers of mid-century British poetry.
Scarcely published in his lifetime, Hyatt’s work survives thanks to the intervention of poets and friends who saved his manuscripts and kept his poems in circulation. Queer in the decades before Gay Liberation; Romani; incarcerated in prisons and asylums; illiterate into adulthood: it’s tempting to read Hyatt according to the familiar script of the doomed poet, resounding with loneliness and isolation. But his poetry—“hot and tender,” funny and sad—tells another story: of love, liberatory commitment, and desire.
You can tell Hyatt can dance from the length of his lines. You can also feel the courtesy he extends to words in that he gives each one its space. He moves you. He has a touch of San Francisco in his grammatical manner. But he is not American, he’s an original.
– Fanny Howe.
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