texasbeerguide.com ¸ 4 review
In these intimate, sometimes painfully frank poems, Andrew McMillan takes us back to childhood and early adolescence to explore the different ways we grow into our sexual selves and our adult identities. Examining our teenage rites of passage: those dilemmas and traumas that shape us eating disorders, circumcision, masturbation, loss of virginity the poet examines how we use bodies, both our own and other people’s, to chart our progress towards selfhood.McMillan’s award winning debut collection, physical, was praised for a poetry that was tight and powerful, raw and tender, and playtime expands that narrative frame and widens the gaze. Alongside poems in praise of the naivety of youth, there are those which explore the troubling intersections of violence, masculinity, class and sexuality, always taking the reader with them towards a better understanding of our own physicality. ‘isn’t this what human kind was made for’, McMillan asks in one poem, ‘telling stories learning where the skin/is most in need of touch’. These humane and vital poems are confessions, both in the spiritual and personal sense; they tell us stories that some of us, perhaps, have never found the courage to read before. Playtime
Sexy, tender, evocative writing. Superb work from Andrew, who doesn't need any lessons in how to draw in the reader. Highly recommended. 1911214373 I recognised so much of my own experience in these accessible, intimate and sexy poems. They aroused memories of my adolescence, its experimentations with sex, its confusions, the discovery of the body and its insistent desires; many chords were struck in poems about sexual encounters with men, known and anonymous. There's a visceral truth about them: a particular world is opened up in a sequence of poems about the nature of gay desire that's exhilarating and thoughtful.
Similar territory was covered in McMillan's first book, 'Physical', but this one seems less experimental, focused, assured. He's developed an intimate, almost confessional style, that (thank God) eschews obscurity or complexity, that makes effective use of spacing; and the elimination of punctuation gives the poems a wonderful transparency, a lightness on the page.
The book falls into two parts. The first deals with adolescent awakening: first orgasm, first use of a condom, first anal sex; the discovery of other's sexual being. There are many poems about the male body how its shape defines other's responses; dieting (anorexia) and a hair transplant to make it appealing. There are poems about being outed in class via a text conversation with a would be boyfriend; finding the limits of the body's endurance in the gym and the boxing ring; there's even a wonderful poem about the foreskin! The second part looks at the messier world of adult loves, sexual encounters, longings, fetishes, male beauty (often glimpsed in trains three poems on this), blood tests, penises, making love.
Interestingly, though the poems are intimate, there's very little about love here. We are still in the early days of sexual maturity, the age of experimentation, no long love affairs or settling down with one particular guy here, though a few are about breaking up maybe that's for a later volume. The wilder shores of gay sex are not traversed no saunas, back rooms, Grindr hook ups, lurid fetishes, etc, it's still quite domestic. (This is not a complaint, it just defines the territory covered). Admittedly, there are a few complex, ambiguous poems about his parents, but in them doubt seems prominent than love.
Are these poems autobiographical? Hard to say. They read as if they are, but the 'I' of any first person poem can be as much a fictional persona as an autobiographical one. They have the ring of truth, though, as they venture into areas most poets avoid.
The back of this book lists enthusiastic praise for McMillan's first book (which I had mixed feelings about). It won several prestigious prizes. Clearly, he's the current darling of the poetry establishment. I think he's over praised, but his is a refreshing, engaging voice, one which I very much welcome, partly because I respond so intimately to his subject matter, and partly because I admire his poetic skill. 1911214373 Playtime is a collection of poems about men’s relationships with their own bodies and with the bodies of others. Sometimes it’s warm, sometimes it’s a bit cold and clammy. There’s a delicate, awkward ambivalence in the poems’ intimacies – toward the self and the unwashed socks of its incarnation. The collection is both restrained and explicit; about sexuality but not sexual, intimate but not erotic, homosexual with occasional homosex but as often alone in the universal leftovers of the body. The poems are necessarily both modest and immodest, modest because they are shared, shared because they disclose the universality of being living flesh (for those who are bodied in any way, of whatever gender).
Sometimes you can smell the poems on the page, sometimes the feeling is voyeuristic and awkward and yet, at the same time, they make something sacred of a wank in a tent, reminding the reader that however they feel about these bodies and their parts – their own body and its parts – they are always subject to interpretations of the sacred and profane. All pride is swallowed in confessional and intimacy. Some poems are tentative and inescapably precise in their numbering, small dramas of saying and disclosure. Others, like Martyrdom, fall over themselves to shout but are held back by a delicate placement of words on the page that are then pressed in emphatically with a monumental monosyllabic weight and confident utterance that is somewhere between nostalgia and relief.
McMillan continues to etch out major work in queer poetry. 1911214373 I very much enjoyed this collection as I did his previous one, Physical. The poems are highly accessible and convey very evident emotion with regard to his personal and loving relationships. I also enjoyed the humour that runs through some of the collection. The poetry also assists our thinking with respect to our own sexuality and for me opened up a greater understanding of the range of sexual attractions I have. A fine poet and a rewarding collection, both emotionally and intellectually. 1911214373 Self absorbed. Bad grammar and punctuation. A pretend confession. Author must start writing proper poetry. 1911214373
