McCarthys poems are intelligent and musical, unsentimental and gritty yet utterly, gloriously romantic. There is a freshness to Portrait, a kind of fluid clarity washing through like an eye bath; even its melancholy and theres plenty of it feels salutary. A beautiful logbook of life in the present moment. -- Kate Camp Portrait begins with an interest in disembodied voices neurotic fathers, sentient programme notes, boys in bedrooms that finely balances charm, eroticism, frankness, and beauty. But its final thrust brings us into a glittering, heavy lyricism of an almost metaphysical curiosity: why, in a world of shocking violence, do we sing these songs of loss at all? This is a dizzying and serious debut in which McCarthy stakes out his position as one of the finest lyricists of my generation. -- Cadence Chung Jackson McCarthy is an extraordinary talent whose poetry is at once absolutely of its time and knowingly part of a long tradition of lyric poetry. Vulnerability, beauty, and emotional intensity are time-honoured lyric qualities, as are the equally contemporary obsessions with death, nostalgia, memory, and the body but no other poet brings all these aspects of the lyric together with quite the combination of control and passion, reverence and originality, seriousness and irony that McCarthy achieves in this quietly spectacular collection. -- Anna Jackson Jackson McCarthy reflects on how we create and revise our own personal histories, while questioning the reliability of memory and art to represent the past. Strange and riveting, Portrait is a sophisticated and impressive debut infused with nostalgia and longing that establishes McCarthy as one of the most promising poets of his generation. -- Chris Tse
