So Much For Life
A long awaited collection of poems by Mark Hyatt, one of the great lost writers of mid-century British poetry.
Poetry
$19.95
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.
Praise
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
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Details
ISBN: 9781643621784
Paperback, 224 pages, 6 x 9 in
Publication Date: May 2023
