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.
About the Author :
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.
Review :
"A cigarette paper separates the life of Mark Hyatt and the poetry of Mark Hyatt. To encounter his work, presented in book form for the first time in So Much For Life, is to encounter an unapologetically precarious and bittersweet queer voice that was always at risk of being lost, even as the work was being written. . . What emerges from So Much For Life is a world of tender, furious feeling." —Andrew Spragg, The Poetry Review
"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
"A selection of Mark Hyatt’s poetry has been lovingly gathered together by editors Luke Roberts and Sam Ladkin, and the astounding claritas and candour of the lyrics have a bold range across the plainstyle spectrum. . . . 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, Blackbox Manifold
“‘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
"So Much For Life is the most extensive collection to date of the late Mark Hyatt’s flagrantly embodied, daringly vernacular poetry. . . [a] feverish, persistent voice."—Oluwaseun Olayiwola, TLS
"It seems like some kind of miracle that Nightboat Books has published a two-hundred page collection [of Hyatt’s poetry], along with Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts’s illuminating introduction, comprehensive bibliography and painstakingly detailed set of editorial notes. . . However deep the despair in this collection, Mark Hyatt finds ways to affirm, celebrate and wonder." —Ian Seed, PN Review
"2023 has been the year of Mark Hyatt: the posthumous publication of Love, Leda (Peninsula) and So Much for Life (eds. Sam Larkin & Luke Roberts, Nightboat) have changed UK and queer literature forever." —So Mayer, Lunate
"[Hyatt's] story is incredible, his poetry – standing aside from his biography, but as ever and not, informed by it – is so contemporary, so hilarious, so stark, it is hard to believe he was writing in the 60s. . . I could quote him endlessly, and I am grateful to the editors for bringing these poems properly into print." —Rachael Allen, Granta
