So Much for Life

Mark Hyatt (ed. Sam Ladkin & Luke Roberts)

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.

'Extraordinary, visionary, wildly clever, words can’t quite cover what these ‘infinite stunning’ poems do with their meanings, across such a bewildering range. - Adam Piette