The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan
Marina Keegan’s star was on the rise when she graduated from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. As her family, friends and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her unforgettable last essay for the Yale Daily News, ‘The Opposite of Loneliness’, went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. She had struck a chord. Even though she was just 22 when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty and possibility of her generation. The Opposite of Loneliness is an assemblage of Marina’s essays and stories that articulates the universal struggle we all face as we work out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world.
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 be a man and interrogate the very idea of masculinity. This is poetry where every instance of human connection, from the casual encounter to the intimate relationship, becomes redeemable and revelatory.Dispensing with conventional punctuation, the poet is attentive and alert to the quality of breathing, giving the work an extraordinary sense of being vividly poised and present – drawing lines that are deft, lyrical and perfectly pitched from a world of urban dereliction. An elegant stylist and unfashionably honest poet, McMillan’s eye and ear are tuned, exactly, to both the mechanics of the body and the miracles of the heart.
I do enjoy poetry but I don’t pretend to know anything about it. I’m lucky if I read a poetry book ever 3 years since school as I don’t know where to star. However one of my old friends I was in a theatre group with as a young teenager has gone on to become a fantastic poet and this is a book of his. I loved his use (or lack thereof) of punctuation and found the pacing throughout to be very well created. I’m not going to pretend I know anything about poetry but what I do know is that I really enjoy this and some phrases and extracts I found particularly striking and beautiful while still being controversial at times and thoroughly modern.
I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan by Alan Partage
I, Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan is the memoir of Alan Partridge, the nation’s favourite broadcaster. It is a work of heart-breaking majesty.Genuinely one of the best books of the last, what, fifteen to twenty years, I, Partridge charts the highs, lows and middle bits in the life of one of Europe’s most revered inquisitors.
October Reads 2015
The Death of the Poet: Review and Giveaway
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