Gustav Parker Hibbett & Mícheál McCann

In High Jump as Icarus Story, Gustav Parker Hibbett gifts us visions of flight and falling. This stunningly accomplished debut deconstructs and redefines notions of Blackness, queerness, and masculinity through the lens of myth, pop culture, and that most transcendent of sports – the high jump. Formally inventive, these poems speak in a capacious voice which can be vulnerable, fragmented, and rapturous; exhorting us to imagine and reimagine our possible selves while navigating a labyrinthine America that conjures its young into monsters. Taking us from the arroyos of New Mexico to a West Cork farm in winter, these meditations on beauty and the elusive nature of love are insightful, and hard-won. Here, the spirit triumphs, even when body falls: ‘having/ reached for sunlight,/even if I failed to hold it.’

At the heart of Mícheál McCann’s eagerly awaited first collection is ‘Keen for A— ’, a re-imagining of Eileen O’Connell’s heartrending Lament for Art O’Leary. In Devotion he transports the original tragedy in time and place. Echoing the 18th-century Irish, it lives now in contemporary Belfast where a young man’s male lover is murdered. The sequence charts from premonition, in filmic scenes, the first encounter, the news, denial, rage (and an oath of vengeance) to the funeral and A—’s family’s chilling silence afterwards. Other poems range from memories of childhood and relationships with parents to the author’s own imaginary child. There is a wry poem on animal homosexuality, others on sea swimming and the satisfactions of a shared meal, while an elegiac poem recreates the final joy of an RUC Constable in a gay bar before he’s shot by a member of the INLA. For all the solemnity of its subject matter love poems leaven its atmosphere as Mícheál McCann’s debut glows with the sense of someone who knows he has ‘discovered the name of his destination’.