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Tuesday, January 19, 2016

So good it does your head in

A gift to myself arrived from England a few days ago.  Today I got round to reading Andrew McMillan's first collection of poems, physical, which won the Guardian First Book Award 2015.  It's not difficult to see why it was a contender.  

I read the short collection in one sitting; read it aloud because poetry like this benefits from being read out loud.  The absence of punctuation wasn't a hindrance.  The rhythm of the poems takes you through the text.  Almost without conscious thought you learn quite quickly, perhaps intuitively, that two spaces between words signifies a comma, three tells you where a full stop might be.  And the lines seem to fit with the simple but profound idea that where you need to take a pause for breath the text requires a break as well.

There are echoes (for me at least) of Marianne Moore in the tightly structured verse (I thought of The Steeplejack and Poetry when I read protest of the physical, a magnificent longer poem).  I heard the whisper of T S Eliot in WHEN LOUD THE STORM AND FURIOUS IS THE GALE. There is even a bit of Billy Collins in THE FACT WE ALMOST KILLED A BADGER IS INCIDENTAL. Best of all though, this a collection from a unique and confident voice. A true poet.