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So Much for Life Mark Hyatt

So Much for Life By Mark Hyatt

So Much for Life by Mark Hyatt


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So Much for Life Summary

So Much for Life: Selected Poems by Mark Hyatt

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.

So Much for Life Reviews

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


About Mark Hyatt

Mark Hyatt (1940-1972) lived at the center and the fringes of the bohemian underground in 1960s Britain. In the half-century since his death, his work has been known almost exclusively by word-of-mouth. Drawing on a full range of archival sources, So Much For Life is the first comprehensive edition of his poems.

Sam Ladkin is Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex.

Luke Roberts is a poet and writer. He works at King's College London.

Additional information

NGR9781643621784
9781643621784
1643621785
So Much for Life: Selected Poems by Mark Hyatt
New
Paperback
Nightboat Books
2023-07-20
208
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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Customer Reviews - So Much for Life