An extraordinary debut from a 26-year-old poet.
Raw and urgent, these poems are hymns to the male body -- to male friendship and male love -- muscular, sometimes shocking, but always deeply moving. We are witness here to an almost religious celebration of the flesh: a flesh vital with the vulnerability of love and loss, to desire and its departure. In an extraordinary blend of McMillan's own colloquial Yorkshire rhythms with a sinewy, Metaphysical music and Thom Gunn's torque and speed -- 'your kiss was deep enough to stand in' -- the poems in this first collection confront what it is to...