Boy in Various Poses
In his debut collection, Lewis Buxton offers up poems in which the elasticity of boyhood is stretched across goalposts, rainy parks, beds, messy desks and “the distance men are supposed to keep”. Boy in Various Poses is an energetic and simultaneously poised debut which unpacks “the idea of a boy” in all of its many forms and outfits. We see boys and men kicking, hitting, dancing and blooming.
One of the collection’s key preoccupations is blood, which appears nearly twenty times throughout and is an indication of how close Buxton’s writing comes to the bone. He is at his very best when he throws us an unexpected and delicious physical image, and in these moments, he is both highly original and tender. In the title poem, we find a boy who is “his dick, the sunflowers”, is “arsehole pink”, and later, a man who is “ a sink plugged full of shame” (‘A&E’). Elsewhere, a boy notices the “wrinkled bark” of his foreskin in the clever and curious poem, ‘A Boy Falls’.
As we move through the poems, we swerve past scenes of rugby, swimming, football, boxing (among others) and we glimpse into the mindsets of boys and men doing sport for pleasure, heroism, competition, routine. We also, by turns, are introduced to traits which some of the poems’ subjects share with animals, be it cuckoos, horses or beetles. The regularity of animal poems and sport poems help keep the pulse of the collection rhythmic and charged, but this rhythm risks becoming predictable at times.
In all, Boy in Various Poses is a refreshing collection that wriggles and writhes with its plethora of boy-to-man experiences. Its intimacy grows and the poems undress as we read on, leading us to the stripping boys and men of ‘Tease’ and ‘Boys Audition to be Strippers’ near the book’s end. The overarching question is laid out in the poem ‘A Boy Watches Die Hard’, which asks, “How does a boy become a man?” Buxton goes some way to revealing the many possibilities of this transformation, and he does so by looking in all the right crevices, holes and openings, the supple writer that he is.
Boy in Various Poses is published by Nine Arches Press