Andrew McMillan’s candid exploration of gay adolescence is sensational
Andrew McMillan’s poetry is see-through – it lets us understand, in an uncensored way, how it was to grow up as a gay boy. His much-praised physical made his name and this new collection is another negotiation with the body – the body that, as it were, has a mind of its own.
The collection includes disturbing, unmediated bulletins from adolescence’s frontline. The poems have an anecdotal immediacy and are presented in an unpunctuated lower case. In “what 1.6% of young men know”, he writes about teenage boys who starve to acquire the perfect body and how this leads not to glory on the playing fields but to a more humiliating destination: “…they will end up in the carpark of the doctors”. One notes, in several poems, the decision to shy away from the first person, to keep things general. And the body’s elusiveness is summed up in a wonderful phrase (from “first time ‘posh’”): “the body that is only true in private”. It is McMillan’s enterprise to make the body true in public as well – there is no such thing as a taboo. This is a comprehensive coming out – in poetry.
...and the ones
who turned sixteen find the foreskin too tight
for their urges trying to breathe
in a shirt done up to the collar
when the collar is too small and how these boys must
force themselves to tell their parents then show
a doctor then a nurse how they must feel
like someone who is trying to prove the fault
with a product they are wanting to return
...this scar
that catches the cold weather holds
it deep inside reminder
of my vanity tideline
of Canute tattoo of the time
I couldn’t live with what I was becoming
…and I ran
outside and cried and for the first time ever
refused to go to class
and my phone sat vibrating
in my pocket like a heartbeat
refusing to be silent maybe
halfwanting to be discovered
