Andrew McMillan's Physical (Cape, 2015)

Some favourite passages from this forthcoming collection:


grappling with the shifting question of each other's bodies
until the morning breaks across them and still their strength

*

taken allegorically          he is beating on himself
until the point at which the inner river of the word grace
runs past and everything lays down in calm

from "Jacob with the Angel"

they have got too close to the glass

and now they are laying

in the broken pools of their own faces

from "The Men Are Weeping in the Gym"

but the crowd goes mad and claps

of thunder thrum the valley where I sleep

and my lonelyhaircut cellist eyes the bar between us

from "If It Wasn't for the Nights"

rain      the morning's mundane idea forming

movingloopingringroad of a day

*

how much of fighting

is the need to touch another man?

from "Protest of the Physical"

you thought all men grieved like small Greek women

in black who say the bread still needs to be baked

from "How to Be a Man"

the night is not so much clouding as burying itself

last line and stanza of "Morn"

Andrew McMillan's first collection, Physical, is published by Jonathan Cape later this year.