Andrew McMillan’s debut collection physical was the first ever poetry collection to win The Guardian First Book Award. The collection also won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award (2016), an Eric Gregory Award (2016) and a Northern Writers’ award (2014). It was shortlisted the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2016, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Polari First Book Prize. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2015. Most recently physical has been translated into Norwegian (Aschehoug, 2017), a bi-lingual French edition, Le Corps Des Hommes (Grasset, 2018) and is forthcoming in Galician (A Chan da Polvora, 2019). His second collection, playtime, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2018; it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2018. He is senior lecturer at the Manchester Writing School at MMU and lives in Manchester.
Events
Inter/Pretations: Poetry and the Body| 14:40 – 15:40
Launch of Redactions/Redirections & Poetry Prints 11:00-12:00 | Northern Stage, Stage 2
Emily Hasler, Phoebe Power & Andrew McMillan 14:30-15:30 | Northern Stage, Stage 2
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playtime
it will take a good ten minutes for them to stop
breathing as heavy as they are for the burning
in their lungs to dampen for the mud from the yard
to be trodden down into the hairbrown carpet
one boy clutches his chest as though trying to keep
his bones from bursting out later he will ask me
how many tattoos I have whether I have one
on my bum whether he can look to verify
my denial such innocence such freedom in asking
for the body of another I point him back
to the page there will be time for him for them all
to learn of the body’s curve into awkwardness
to find their way into the rules and the lessons
they will come to know by heart once some schoolgirls
of ten or eleven in my primary drew
red crayon down a tampon and left it hanging
half out of one of their schoolbags in the cloakroom
trying to rush themselves to adolescence
the girls in this class are huddled in the corner
having already learnt they should be suspicious
of new men their necks seem longer than the boys’
they’ve learnt to hold themselves they’ve learnt what small
words from them can do there was a storeroom
in my primary school and if we were chosen
to tidy away mats after PE lessons
me and another boy would try out wrestling moves
on each other the last time I remember it
we were both laid out on the mats after a slam
my body over his cheap shorts almost touching
and I felt a warmth nothing wet or sexual
something like light spreading across a cold surface
and a small part of the back corridor
of my mind is still lit by that moment his eyes
on mine for longer than they should have been
seeing in them the whole incident the grappling
amongst the quoits and plastic footballs the fall
onto the mats the staledinner breath the knowing
then of what it was of what it would be soon