This is a beautiful book, painstakingly crafted and honest. At times passionate, erotic, personal, angry, mysterious, mindful, it covers a wide spectrum of human experience. Siddique’s voice is confident without being strident, a voice that expresses his identity firmly but with a detachment that derives from a perspective that is almost transpersonal.

In his poem To Writing, he points out how the act of writing has helped him to transform himself, to find his own voice.

Before you came, I was an illiterate marking an X instead
of saying my name. Face down in shame. Always outcaste.

Interesting that John was first inspired to write by hearing the poem 'somewhere I have never travelled' by ee cummings in Woody Allen’s film 'Hannah and her sisters.' His poem Yes uses that life-affirming three-letter word in much the way cummings repeatedly used it, while at the same time it also sings the body electric in contemporary whitmanesque fashion.

Yes to the Martian canals that run the length of me. Yes to the frozen
lakes beneath my fields. Yes to yes. Yes to my atomic self. Yes to the
lover. Yes to the tarot card playing fool with poker face believing this
means something. Yes to stardust, I am fleshed by you. Yes to perspi-
ration, sweat, labour, working with my hands….

The erotic poems, most notably Ninety Day Theory, are genuinely sexy, but also show tenderness and vulnerability. The personal poems include touching portraits of sons and lovers and parents (Cheap Moisturiser, Neckgrip, Variola), revealing family narratives that span India, Pakistan, Ireland and England.

But for me, the gems of the collection hint at a serene and appreciative state of being (the title poem, The Prize, the Angelus poems, and the exquisite poem based on AS Lowry’s painting, The Sea). There is an egoless stillness and silence in the spaces of these poems that not only forms the heart of each of them, but also of the collection as a whole.

I want to walk until I have no name.
…
With no name, with no double life, no inner,
no outer, no explanations, I celebrate not knowing,
not having to be somebody.
from A Midday Angelus

Now I am blind
I see you.

Now I am deaf
I can hear your love.

Now that my teeth are gone,
I want to taste your meat.

Now that the daylight is short
I live in your light.
from The Prize

The sea is each breathing.
Each breath is colourless,
It moves the spine
And opens the front.

No landmasss.
No tower.
No I.

from The Sea

Norman Silver