Hyatt suggests that sexuality of any kind is a longing for relation and a way of knowing the self. But so is writing, so is poetry, and so is any kind of social activity. For Hyatt, queer sexuality is a given, not, to adopt the language of the day, a 'social problem.' And in the bohemian enclaves of early 1960s London, he found a context in which his queerness-which along with his race and class sometimes rendered him precarious-could be nurtured and protected.-David Grundy, Harriet Books
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
Reading the poems of the once lost and now thrillingly rediscovered Mark Hyatt, I've found a poet of moving conundrum, of brutality and tenderness, who can see a lover as both 'my ruin and within me the life,' who knows the dilemma of being a poet while believing that 'the dearest of what you remember/must never be spoken even to tree boughs.' Hyatt left a music I can't stop hearing now, gratefully.-Carl Phillips
'Here's to the high explosive death bird | That troubles the vegetation on language' and about time too. At last this generous selection of Mark Hyatt's work will broadcast his full power to those who are able to take it. And Hyatt's poems are filthily sexy. If you revel in indeterminacy, up yours! - prepare for a loving punch in the gut.-John Wilkinson
Can't get the poems off my skin, like ink or mud or raw biscuit dough. I don't understand all of Mark Hyatt's poetry; I don't understand all of Emily Dickinson's either. They both wrote from unspoken interior personal experience that underpins everything in our culture. Don't miss these poems. I resisted, at first, until his words and life story tore my heart open and moved in; now nothing will get him out.-Judy Grahn