So Much for Life

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.