Sunshine

"Yes, I really enjoy Melissa’s work – or perhaps “enjoy” isn’t quite the right word, it’s like Ocean Vuong’s book – because her themes are appropriately unsettling, and the poems can be difficult to read sometimes, in the best possible way. I’ve liked her work for years, particularly the way she writes about women’s bodies. Her new book feels really distilled and achieved and it’s the one I’ve enjoyed most out of her work. It’s shortlisted for the Costa Prize for next year. The poems are really raw but also very controlled. This new book has an epigraph from Sarah Kane at the start, from 4.48 Psychosis , and Kane is another writer who I really, really admire – and I think there’s something of Kane’s writing in this book. There’s a sense that you’re always teetering right on the edge of something but Melissa pushes you a little bit further than most writers would. And yet the writing always feels very controlled. There’s a great poem called “I Am Very Precious” and it’s almost deliberately pornographic, but also quite tender; she’s really – I don’t want to use the word “bold” because it sounds a bit patronizing and a bit trite, and it’s not really what I mean…. I think she’s a very brave writer – again, that sounds patronizing. Neither of those words! She’s even got a poem where she talks about this, there’s a description of a poetry reading and in it she talks about people using words and talking about things that are quite dark but, really, how invested in it are they? And the subtext to that poem is that you know that this is a person who really is invested in what they’re writing about and, as I said, she takes you just a bit further than many writers would. She writes really well about loneliness, and gender and loneliness. It’s very personal – I wouldn’t like to call it “confessional”, because I don’t think that’s a useful term; I prefer what Sharon Olds says about the apparently personal in poetry rather than the personal – but there’s a sense of that: some of the work deliberately mimics a stream of consciousness so you feel like you’re really inside somebody’s head. It’s quite different from the other books I’ve picked, in that way, and, again, it’s something that I really admire. It’s something that I just don’t think I could do in my own work."