A Poet Could Not but Be Gay: Some Legends of My Lost Youth

Moving and humorous as well as uninhibited in its homo-erotic exposures, this recounts the author's disaffections with England and subsequent experiences in Sweden and then in Spain, where he falls passionately in love with a young American man. Kirkup is a distinguished poet who has spent much of his life teaching in Japan. It is the idea of the homosexual, like the poet, seeking impossible beauty in dark places that is at the core of this funny and sometimes painful work."" - Sunday Times.