Gritty poems and prose from a fine poet

Joe Hakim is a poet, writer and performer from Hull, England. The title of this collection of stories and poems refers to a black hole into which all light vanishes and none escapes. Hull is like that, “a place without hope for so long - even for those working all hours against impossibly dangerous odds - that it has become somewhere which tolerates what would be considered as a failed life anywhere else” (Night Publishing).

We see this in his poem “at withersea”:

When I was a boy this place

felt like the other side of the

world.

I would spend hours hurling

pebbles at the tide and

overturning rocks to find

crabs hiding from the sun,

and then I would run

into the ea. The beaches

would be packed with families,

but now everything is empty.

Shops and cafes are ancient

ruins

and the kids are all on heroin.

Cracked plaster and peeling

paint

is everywhere, houses falling

into disrepair and no one cares.

Like cliffs slowly

falling into the sea, something

crumbles inside me as I watch

the

waves break sadly against the

rocks.

—

a ghost of childhood

laid to rest at last.

Joe Hakim writes gritty poems about life as the poet wanders through his days and nights, everything swathed in shades of grey and dirty black, “wine-stained towels and / sweat shop t-shirts”, moving from place to place as his circumstances change, surviving as best he can a life that has been hard on him.

Joe Hakim, like Paul Perry and Charles Bukowski, is a poet of the dark places, the disjointed life of alcohol and mind-altering drugs that advertise an “expanded reality” but leave one with a bleak sense of reality that caves in on itself just as a black hole does.

“No Light / Might Escape” is an honest book in presenting what life lived in a black hole is like, where one’s lifestyle is surviving rather than living, and where one’s outlook on life is bleak. From my own personal experience, living in that black hole is no fun because it is so terribly limiting, futile and deadly. Leaving it thirty-two years ago broadened my horizons further than I ever thought I could see.

I plan to spend more time with Joe Hakim’s work. It’s a *****.