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.