Mark Ward’s long-awaited first collection Nightlight is a journey through a city and a reaching towards whatever light can be found; be that in a sex club, with a board game, a new friendship or a changing relationship. Throughout this journey, Ward feels his way back to touchstones of queer history as well as trying to make himself at home in his surroundings and his increasingly rebellious brain. These poems, deeply attuned to craft and form, mark the arrival of a fearless new voice in Irish poetry addressing sexuality, mental health, and the intricacies of relationships with a fresh eye and fierce command
“Nightlight shows Mark Ward confronting the dark with panache. The defiance of the speakers at the start of this collection, however, is hard-won. The self here is under relentless attack, both from subtle prejudice and the winds that threaten all our most intimate connections. A librarian learns a new friend is desperate to die, a loving mother and son face a future as 'two ellipses, scattered into full stops.' Accessible and authentic, these poems glow with feeling.”
John McCullough
“In Nightlight, Mark Ward gives us poems that are closely attuned to the body, to physical encounter, to the way history exists inside and beyond us. Ward’s poems sing from the testimony of memory, decipher its evidences, and trace its passage, both as it enters us and as it leaves. These lyrics are unashamed and visceral.”
Seán Hewitt
"In one poem, Mark Ward writes “body parts should become agents of commotion”, at another point he writes “Each touch is a spotlight”. In this powerful, energetic collection, the reader is asked to witness the performances, loving, erotic, fearful, which the body must endure."
Andrew McMillan
Mark Ward is the author of the collection Nightlight (Salmon Poetry, 2023) and the pamphlets Faultlines (voidspace, 2024), HIKE (Bear Creek, 2022), Carcass (7KP, 2020 and Circumference (FLP, 2018). He is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, an international journal of LGBTQ+ poetry. You can read more at his website astintinyourspotlight.wordpress.com
Local
A knot of desiccated shopfronts
A festival comprised of four floats
A souvenir shop spills its unsold stock
out onto the street
This town is a drive-thru
Its residents siphoned off into veins,
bled into the outdoors
space to oneself
The hill could be a mountain,
or a little up-and-over, a detour
of desire lines worn into earth;
the history of exploration, escape
plans. To meet the horizon,
one must become a cloud, a lance,
a microcosm, a vista, a picture
postcard to the folks without
trails laid out. The locals don’t walk
here, they rescind their sky, allow
meaning to disappear
behind daytripped days and eyes and
we imagine life in its confines, the splinter
between the pub and post office, home;
a winter whose length you can walk
without ever leaving
Trick
I laugh at boys that need to kiss
to cum, that hit and miss
brush of lips,
that slobbering mess subtle as a fisting
your tongue as tender as kindling
the moment dwindling
to a regret at not saving all of this
for love, or for some lips
that don’t feel amiss
I curdle my mouth for those insisting
on access despite being fleeting
flesh designed for sweating
The rules explained about lips and nips
about expectations, grips and flips
about temporary eclipse
Our selfishness bartered tit for tit
a transaction fulfilled bit by bit
by bite, by spit, by grit
Until we give in to the seizure of bliss
the mess of momentary happiness
the mutual breathlessness
And when I can move, I start to dress
aware that you seem to expect
something more direct,
something you’re not getting, my lips
mutter goodbye, thanks, let’s do this
again, the same old script
trotted out once more for another trick
I head home, face flush, with a wish
for a boy whose lips I want to kiss
The Imaginary Friend
pinches inside the centre of my chest
like an axial graph folded and ripped,
an extradimensional shift to shit,
cinched with the rented smile of a guest
he suspects that his greatest achievement
is unravelling the probable
cause travelling without effect
leaving life only with the introspect
the what-ifs your standard issue rejects
he perfects his wind-tunnel soft whisper
appearing almost apologetic
at his fissures dotted around reality;
each idle thought an enemy, each slit
quickening the tangled nerves around it,
each brush becomes a thicket drowning
my vision and the waterline, revising
life into a supine circle of salt
