This pamphlet of part-rhymed and unrhymed loose sonnets, which Lewis Buxton styles ‘arias’, repurposes its venerable form for satisfyingly down-to-earth subjects, and for poems of friendship rather than romantic love. The speaker and his mates are going to the gym, the pub and the seaside; they watch films and TV, play football, drink, smoke and eat take-away. He also enjoys, with other friends, slightly less archetypal pastimes: doing crosswords, talking about novels or going birdwatching.
With its plain titling, familiar situations and everyday vocabulary, it’s a swift and easy read. The references are more commonly from TV, comic books and films (The Walking Dead, Marlon Brando in Streetcar, Christopher Walken and especially superheroes) than literature – though James Wright and Sally Rooney get a look-in. The verbal pleasures, likewise, are less about abstruse wordplay or sublime alliterations than charming and offbeat figurative language. Someone is like ‘an unexpected cup of tea’, and ‘an apple crumble and custard kind of bloke’. Obituaries are ‘the football statistics/ of truth’. Slovenly dressers are ‘bathtubs half-covered by shower curtains.’ The sea is ‘a blue duvet’. Such whimsical wit extends to the setups. In the ‘Sensitive Gentlemen’s Club’, ‘The bouncers all have trained therapy dogs’ and ‘you can pay for drinks with […] / completed mental health first aider handbooks.’ An appeal for new football team players is done like a lonely-hearts ad. There’s drolly attentive notice to quotidian moments: ‘nodding solemnly at the mention of money’ and ‘the deft mime of a signature mid-air.’
There are, nonetheless, serious issues among the conviviality. The agitations of adolescence elicit sympathy
All the ghosts came home, crow-unlucky kids
who were bullied bad (not that you can be
bullied good, that is) but come home they did:
soiled, cold and tired backpacks, acne.
When they were home, speaking was stuck zips.
What’s wrong? Mum asked, their skulls tucked into hoodies,
their tongues football boots that did not fit:
everything is luck, nobody will ever like me.
while the major motifs here, superheroes and horses (‘genitals/ open like a stallion in a field’), emblematize the culture’s impossible expectations of masculinity. ‘[L]et Lois Lane fall’ and ‘put my glasses on’ seem to be the wry recommendations in response, along with acknowledging that ‘We’ve left it too late/ […] to be prodigies’ and settling for the pleasures of the homespun and the unambitious alongside alternative images of personal development: ‘the sunflower man I could/ grow up to become’.
It feels like this review is becoming little more than snippets of things I enjoyed. And indeed, it’d be very hard to dislike this short collection; it’s the kind of pamphlet you might buy for a friend who thinks of poetry as only up-itself or overly intellectual or otherwise not for them. For instance, it’s one of those refreshing, rather rare collections that never uses the words ‘poet’, ‘poem’ or ‘poetry’. It tunes more to the wavelength of relatable experience than of the recondite. Most of all, it comes across as the nicest kind of companion in its unpretentious kindness, its unabashed mansuetude, its understanding of gender as performance, and its humorous balance of gruffness and tenderness: ‘[…] I love her/ and how we talk as if we do not also suffer’; and, ‘We grow so beautiful/ galloping into oncoming collisions’; and, ‘I judge books by their covers/ and I really like your jacket.’ It’s hard not to just keep quoting from it, which is as good a sign as any.
Guy Russell 13th August 2025
