‘The only way I could really talk about his suicide was in a poem’

When their half-brother took a fatal overdose, twins Matthew and Michael Dickman wrote a series of poems in his honour. Now, the collection is breaking taboos about suicide and inviting comparisons with America’s great poets

If you go to interview twin poets about the death of their elder brother, and the work they have made jointly in response to it, your natural expectation is that the atmosphere will be serious, even sombre. And, indeed, my conversation with American writers Matthew and Michael Dickman, whose book revolves around the suicide, a decade ago, of their half-brother Darin Hull, frequently enters inevitably painful emotional territory, and the extent to which art is ever able to chart a course through it. But the morning that we spend together is punctuated with gusts of hilarity, irreverence, playfulness and informality, the alternating rainstorms and sunshine that flood the Bloomsbury streets outside an almost too neat pathetic fallacy.

The laughs begin straight away, as we’re settling down, and Michael – the older of the 40-year-old twins by two minutes, and a shade more reserved than Matthew – is pouring us coffee. One brother – I forget which now, because they both do it – calls the other “Chancho”. What’s behind that nickname, I ask. Ah, they reply; yes, they’d better explain. “Since high school we’ve called each other pig,” says Michael, “and then versions of it in different languages, like cochon or chancho, or the diminutive in Spanish, chanchito.” “Also, piggy, or Mr Pig,” adds Matthew. “Or Piggums,” rounds off Michael. They also have pig tattoos on their arms.

'We were raised without a father, so there's part of us that, through our older brother, got some of that energy'

'The subject of suicide, at least in the US, is still one that there's a lot of shame around… people keep it quiet'

“My brother opened / thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body / until it wasn’t his body any more.”

“Once, I had a brother / who used to sit and drink his coffee black, smoke / his cigarettes and be quiet for a moment / before his brain turned its armadas against him”.