The Hate Poems

Book excerpt: John Tottenham writes poetry. But don't hold that against him. It's the kind of poetry that is accessible to people who don't read poetry, i.e. everybody. This new collection, 'The Hate Poems', presents a further elaboration on the themes addressed in his two earlier volumes - 'The Inertia Variations' and 'Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment'. In elegantly-wrought laments of self-deprecation and hateful love poems, the author finds that he has more to say on already exhausted subjects, and gives voice to the kind of thoughts most people prefer not to express but will automatically relate to and be entertained by. Poets are doomed, among other fates, to repeating themselves. Another potential fate is to be consigned to a world of embittered obscurity, and this is the world that Tottenham restlessly inhabits and relentlessly explores. He has staked out a singular terrain where egotism and self-loathing meet, where futility merges with urgency, and beauty is created out of bitterness. He furnishes mesmerizing proof that a poet maudit can still, if not thrive, at least survive, alive and unwell, in this benighted age, and that the dregs can sometimes be the cream.