To have settled in the fraternal space between play and fight.To have, along the river, heard their names hovering in the head like an intellect of loss.To have bequeathed each name to a seabird posturing in the black water they sprung from: his name for the coot,his for the moorhen, his, the cormorant, the mute swan at last lifting off its majesty as if the riverwere not its birthplace, were not where it watched you rununevenly, run as if the mind could be abandoned behind. Like ambition: to have existed, to have loved, to have beenin your existing, your loving, rare the way a bone deep in the riverbed is still a partof the assembling landscape as you step far above on the shore in the sand into a beige never-thereness—All my beloveds. Somehow, it is like they were never there—
Night on the Thames Path
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“Night on the Thames Path” from STRANGE BEACH: by Oluwaseun Olayiwola.
Published by Soft Skull Press on January 21, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Oluwaseun Olayiwola.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Oluwaseun (Seun) Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer and performer based in London. His creative and critical work has been published in The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Telegraph, the TLSand elsewhere. His choreographic work has been presented at the V&A, The Place, The Central School of Ballet, and Studio Voltaire. He’s been commissioned by RSL, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Southwark Council, and Studio 3 Arts. Seun has an MFA in Choreography from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where he was a Fulbright Scholar in 2018-2019. His debut collection was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Soft Skull Press (US). Since publication, Strange Beach has won an Eric Gregory Award and was Poetry Book Society Winter 2025 Special Commendation. Seun is an inaugural member of the Rose Choreographic School at Sadlers Wells East. He is a lecturer in dance in the Kingston School of Art and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
A debut poetry collection wrangling the various selves we hold and perform—across oceans and within relationships—told through a queer, Nigerian-American lens
At times surreal, at times philosophical, the poems of Strange Beach demarcate a fiercely interior voice inside of queer Black masculinity. Oluwaseun’s speakers—usually, but not specified, as two men—move between watery landscapes, snowy terrains, and domestic conflicts. Each poem proceeds by way of music and melody, allowing themes of masculinity, sex, parental relations, death, and love to conspire within a voice that prioritizes intimate address.
In announcing their acquisition of the UK edition, after a three-way auction, Strange Beach was described as “a wrangling of the various selves we hold and perform – across oceans and within relationships – through a highly patterned and textual lyrical play: it is a deeply moving and philosophical tapestry.”
Strange Beach often eschews meaning, preferring, in its deluge of images and emotions, to transmute messages straight to the mind to the reader. Oluwaseun’s poetic influences are clear: Claudia Rankine, Jorie Graham, Louise Gluck, Carl Phillips, Kevin Young, Hannah Sullivan, John Ashberry, and Ocean Vuong. Strange Beach is a searching collection where land and water, body and mind, image and abstraction, are in productive tension, leading to third ways of considering intimacy, selfhood, and desire.
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