Simon Maddrell is such an accomplished poet with an assured voice, it’s hard to believe this is his debut collection. He writes about growing up as a gay man on the Isle of Man, drawing from its natural landscape for his themes: "even a stone has a soft spot / a worn through hole after years / of attrition, a heart whose emptiness / is its strength." He refers also to the hag stones in Derek Jarman’s famous Dungeness garden; both Jarman and his garden provide a motif for Maddrell’s exploration of his own journey through the devastating losses of the AIDS epidemic and the added shame of being diagnosed HIV positive. Maddrell uses the analogy of wild rabbits as his central theme, successfully exploring the queer body in nature: whether feral, wild, hunted or ravaged by myxomatosis, it is easy to draw parallels.
Maddrell plays skilfully with form, offering cleave poems and a redacted form using [ ] with only a scatter of words. He does not shrink from subverting an iconic biblical passage in his rewrite of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. In "1 Queerinthians 13," he takes the verses and applies them to queer men, drawing a counterpoint between love and shame, thus completing the sentiment with its shadow: "three things remained: love, hope, shame, these three. / The greatest of these was shame. // Shame is a darkness with no darker shadow / it does not envy, does not puff up, is not proud."
The genre of "queer poetry" is about disruption of form and subversion of poetic expectations. Maddrell is a poet who does this again and again, without falling into the trap of flippancy. His voice springs from a history of shame, struggle and painful loss and he emerges courageously and unapologetically himself.
Rachael Clyne is a retired psychotherapist. Her prizewinning collection, Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams 2014), concerns eco-issues. Her latest (Seren 2023) is You’ll Never Anyone Else, which explores identity, migrant heritage, LGBTQ+ and relationships. She is on Bluesky @rachaelclyne.bsky.social and on Substack here.
