I’ve known John McCullough ever since he won the Polari Prize, in 2021, for his collection The Frost Fairs. (My pamphlet, Modern Love, was shortlisted, too.) Big love, John…!
When Issue One was in its larval stage John was one of the poets I needed to publish, quite frankly. And there is so much to admire in these five (!) poems: their wit, their oddness, their tenderness. Trauma here behaves unexpectedly, just like all the best poems in Aftershock. In To My Darkness, the shadow is not defeated but welcomed back as family. A hoverfly becomes “a levitating detective”; loneliness - a beetle; a Victorian pier drags its “old music” through the desert. There’s a surrealism that could sit down at a table and have a chat with Pascale Petit’s poems. And if the Issue had been ordered differently, they would have.
I love them.
Max
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