Three Births
K Patrick
(Granta Poetry, 2024); pbk: £12.99
Scottish writer K Patrick is having a moment. Their debut novel, Mrs S (4th Estate, 2023) earned them a place on the Observer Best Debut Novelists list as well as the Granta best Young British Novelists in 2023. 2024 sees their debut poetry collection come hot on its heels and is set to become, in the words of veteran queer poet Joelle Taylor, ‘an instant LGBT classic’.
The collection, with its cheerful typographic cover is divided into four sections, with the first poem ‘Pickup-Truck Sex’ operating as an introduction to the poet and a welcome to the reader through the pointed presence of personal pronouns within the first lines,
Awake early I Iook at this photo by Phyllis
Christopher. I wish you could see it.
So begins a potent collection that seeks an ever-evolving construction of self, mediated by flickering images of other bodies, both human and more-than-human. A pulsing tension between intimacy and detachment, self and image, provides a subtextual rhythm of desire, a stand-in for traditional metre in this free verse collection. Patrick leaps from the philosophical (‘In unison we thrive in transitory places’) to the sarcastically sexy (‘I’m not being as romantic as you think. What I’ve already said is I’d like to be fucked by myself, alone.’) within a single stanza. The effect is emotionally thrilling, culturally precise and great fun too.
Each of the four sections begin with a poem titled for each season, situating the poet’s emotional/erotic landscape in the natural world, another strong theme of the collection. The seasonal poems are short, with ‘Summer’ just a single line floating in white space: ‘Big almanac of longing!’. This aphoristic style is characteristic of Patrick’s work, as is the ability of ‘Summer’ to capture a particular queer experience with cool detachment and gut-punching insight in a single breath. Rarely does the written word quicken the pulse in a flash of recognition like this.
The titular poem is the longest of the collection, an epic of becoming stretching across more than ten pages in a considered tangle of white space. Some pages display a single, left-aligned stanza, while others play with line breaks to evoke something close to a liturgical call and answer
Will I die a man? On my knees? One of God’s men, a catastrophe of masculinity?
I want to be understood so
I so want to be understood[.]
This flirtatious bargaining with masculinity is another strong thread throughout, at its starkest in ‘Blood Comedy’, a poem about supporting someone through top surgery. This visceral, multi-layered poem beautifully evokes the chosen-family relations of care made necessary by contemporary queer life, while staying firmly within flesh and the mundane: ‘I make smoked-salmon sandwiches. You are a simple, faraway father.’
‘Blood Comedy’ is followed by an extraordinary dream-state poem where breasts become jellyfish as they leave the body. It is shockingly tender and parental; the two poems are natural twins. The more-than-human world is as much a driving force for Three Births as queer desire, with nature treated with the same sensuous power and tender reverence as a poster of George Michael.
One of the final poems, ‘David Attenborough’ echoes earlier poems such as Pick-up Truck Sex’ in its focus on the recorded image as mediator of desire and connection to bodies, both intimate and strange. One run-on stanza of short lines over four pages describes scenes from famous Attenborough documentaries; the slug sex scene, the deer sneaking through the city after last orders. It begins:
The BBC composes a soundtrack
for the interlocking penises
of two hermaphrodite slugs.
At its bloody, pulsing heart, Three Births is an exploration of desire—for an explicable self, for other bodies, for a place in a world in flux. But with the courage to admit (no, revel) in the wild ambivalence that characterises a certain kind contemporary queer experience. It is brave, sexy and unsettling, and K Patrick is a clear fresh voice worth listening out for.
Ellie Julings
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