So Much for Life: Selected Poems

A long awaited collection of poems by Mark Hyatt, one of the great lost writers of mid-century British poetry.

Scarcely published in his lifetime, Hyatt’s work ­survives thanks to the intervention of poets and friends who saved his manuscripts and kept his poems in circulation. Queer in the decades before Gay Liberation; Romani; incarcerated in prisons and asylums; illiterate into adulthood: it’s tempting to read Hyatt according to the familiar script of the doomed poet, resounding with loneliness and isolation. But his poetry—“hot and tender,” funny and sad—tells another story: of love, liberatory commitment, and desire.

Mark Hyatt (1940-1972) lived at the center and the fringes of the bohemian underground in 1960s Britain. In the half-century since his death, his work has been known almost exclusively by word-of-mouth. Drawing on a full range of archival sources, So Much For Life is the first comprehensive edition of his poems.

Sam Ladkin is Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex.

Luke Roberts is a poet and writer. He works at King’s College London.