PHYSICAL

ANDREW MCMILLAN Jonathan Cape £ 10 – Poetry Shortlisted for the 2015 Forward Prize for Best First Collection and longlisted for The Guardian First Book Award, Andrew McMillan’s vital and passionate debut collection, described as hymns to the male body, male friendship and male love, has certainly made an impact. These poems are prone with yearning and course with visceral beauty, blood-pumping desire and the tender vulnerabilities that linger beneath the flesh. They are meditations on masculinity, its strengths and contradictions. The poems in Physical are odes to intimacy, testaments to the euphoria of being close when it feels so right, threaded together with an occasional lingering sadness. Here in these pages, along with the stunning imagery, innovation of form and the poised breathing rhythm, there is a sensitivity and honesty about gay love, longing and loss that is powerful, revealing and very beautiful.