Poetry review – MATE ARIAS: Peter Daniels appreciates Lewis Buxton’s poems exploring some aspects of masculinity
Mate Arias
Lewis Buxton
Emma Press, 2025
28pp £7.99
This pamphlet is about masculinity, negotiating a way between hearty and touchy-feely, querying without being quite queer, and keeping at bay the hegemonic manosphere. The poems are all sonnets with their encapsulating virtue, not “arias” with operatic trills and high notes, but the clash of the two words in the title does embody what’s going on. Some sonnets are full rhyme, and unrhymed or partially rhymed sonnets get more rhymish, not always closing with a couplet but with the sense-making feeling that rhyme gives:
A weed is a plant in the wrong place,
A man is a child in the wrong face.
(“Gardening”)
Sometimes the density of sonnet form holds back development of meaning, for instance trying to cram too much into disjointed words:
the bully remained,
ghost in an old phone. Torture. WhatsApp. Vape teeth.
(“Bully Song”)
The main tone is wondering, about relationships between (straight) men, the meaning of football and pub-going, and attempted definitions of “Good Husbandry”. In the opening poem his gym companion concentrates on lifts
rather than find a word
for what we are to each other: Mate? Friend?
Buddy? Pal? Brother? I don’t even know.
(“Working Out”)
He finds expressions for admiration of a man, e.g. “I think you’re an apple crumble and custard kind of bloke” and the ostensibly meaningless “Alright mate” operates as non-sexual chat-up:
Do you want to come round mine, watch sports,
swig from cans, eat crisps, create memories, and y’know, talk?
(“Alright mate?”)
Sexuality is never far from these mate expressions, and closer before adulthood – childhood and growing up are always behind the masculinity questions:
before beers, or jobs, or even texts –
we are two friends not questioning the soft
popcorn touch, the hug of borrowed Premier Seats,
the off-school kiss of our smuggled sweets.
(“Cinema with Alex”)
There is appreciation of male bodies – and maybe being open to the sexual desire of it – in the metaphor of horses, from an observation that “horses will act as though they cannot swim”, but they can be taught:
O, Brian
after you have averted your eyes from every man
in the changing room, I want to lower you in a gentle
baptism at my local pool and teach you to swim.
(“Some Horses”)
There is a good joke on touchy-feelyness in a parody version of the masculine hangout: “The bouncers all have trained therapy dogs” (“Sensitive Gentlemen’s Club”). He is able to use the word love, but “the love I bear you is complicated” (“Crossword”), and marriage is a natural comparison:
Our wives watch as the sea stretches its bed
between us, a blue duvet. We argue
like a married couple.
(“Arguing with Matt”)
Brando is the role model’s role model, “how with each small gesture of a hand / he showed us how to act like a man” (“Everyone’s Got a Christopher Walken Impression, Except Christopher Walken”). The horse comes in again as an emblem of masculinity, and approaching maturity:
it can sometimes feel
as if we haven’t achieved much, so we’ve pulled open
a stallion’s stomach and got in between its ribs and guts
trying to keep warm as we turn thirty
(“We’re All in this Horse Together”)
The closing poem asks the question “Are we men” and the poet with a mentor-figure separates himself from this: “You might be, but I certainly don’t feel it”,
But when you shush me and mime
Look, there I am a child and so unstoppably human.
(“Bird Watching”)
In being human above all, Lewis Buxton’s insights can make new the regular man tropes, like football the “beautiful game”: “We grow so beautiful / galloping into oncoming collisions” (“Christmas Eve”). It is a very successful pamphlet of poems taken from experience that speak clearly and satisfyingly about men in original ways.
Aug 5 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Lewis Buxton
Poetry review – MATE ARIAS: Peter Daniels appreciates Lewis Buxton’s poems exploring some aspects of masculinity
Mate Arias
Lewis Buxton
Emma Press, 2025
28pp £7.99
This pamphlet is about masculinity, negotiating a way between hearty and touchy-feely, querying without being quite queer, and keeping at bay the hegemonic manosphere. The poems are all sonnets with their encapsulating virtue, not “arias” with operatic trills and high notes, but the clash of the two words in the title does embody what’s going on. Some sonnets are full rhyme, and unrhymed or partially rhymed sonnets get more rhymish, not always closing with a couplet but with the sense-making feeling that rhyme gives:
A weed is a plant in the wrong place,
A man is a child in the wrong face.
(“Gardening”)
Sometimes the density of sonnet form holds back development of meaning, for instance trying to cram too much into disjointed words:
the bully remained,
ghost in an old phone. Torture. WhatsApp. Vape teeth.
(“Bully Song”)
The main tone is wondering, about relationships between (straight) men, the meaning of football and pub-going, and attempted definitions of “Good Husbandry”. In the opening poem his gym companion concentrates on lifts
rather than find a word
for what we are to each other: Mate? Friend?
Buddy? Pal? Brother? I don’t even know.
(“Working Out”)
He finds expressions for admiration of a man, e.g. “I think you’re an apple crumble and custard kind of bloke” and the ostensibly meaningless “Alright mate” operates as non-sexual chat-up:
Do you want to come round mine, watch sports,
swig from cans, eat crisps, create memories, and y’know, talk?
(“Alright mate?”)
Sexuality is never far from these mate expressions, and closer before adulthood – childhood and growing up are always behind the masculinity questions:
before beers, or jobs, or even texts –
we are two friends not questioning the soft
popcorn touch, the hug of borrowed Premier Seats,
the off-school kiss of our smuggled sweets.
(“Cinema with Alex”)
There is appreciation of male bodies – and maybe being open to the sexual desire of it – in the metaphor of horses, from an observation that “horses will act as though they cannot swim”, but they can be taught:
O, Brian
after you have averted your eyes from every man
in the changing room, I want to lower you in a gentle
baptism at my local pool and teach you to swim.
(“Some Horses”)
There is a good joke on touchy-feelyness in a parody version of the masculine hangout: “The bouncers all have trained therapy dogs” (“Sensitive Gentlemen’s Club”). He is able to use the word love, but “the love I bear you is complicated” (“Crossword”), and marriage is a natural comparison:
Our wives watch as the sea stretches its bed
between us, a blue duvet. We argue
like a married couple.
(“Arguing with Matt”)
Brando is the role model’s role model, “how with each small gesture of a hand / he showed us how to act like a man” (“Everyone’s Got a Christopher Walken Impression, Except Christopher Walken”). The horse comes in again as an emblem of masculinity, and approaching maturity:
it can sometimes feel
as if we haven’t achieved much, so we’ve pulled open
a stallion’s stomach and got in between its ribs and guts
trying to keep warm as we turn thirty
(“We’re All in this Horse Together”)
The closing poem asks the question “Are we men” and the poet with a mentor-figure separates himself from this: “You might be, but I certainly don’t feel it”,
But when you shush me and mime
Look, there I am a child and so unstoppably human.
(“Bird Watching”)
In being human above all, Lewis Buxton’s insights can make new the regular man tropes, like football the “beautiful game”: “We grow so beautiful / galloping into oncoming collisions” (“Christmas Eve”). It is a very successful pamphlet of poems taken from experience that speak clearly and satisfyingly about men in original ways.