Hotel Petroleum

Hotel Petroleum is Mark Fiddes's fourth collection, structured as a journey in three movements, Arrival, Occupancy, and Departure, through a world of expat dislocation, geopolitical emergency, and the absurdist textures of late-capitalist life in the Middle East and beyond. Fiddes works with considerable formal range, from the mock-corporate address of the title poem to the controlled rage of 'Beige', where the bureaucratic language of conflict reportage is set against the actual substance of what it effaces. Throughout, the political and the personal are held in an uneasy suspension: poems about illness, fatherhood, and loss occupy the same moral space as those addressing drone warfare and ecological collapse. Fiddes's wit is sharp and occasionally dark, drawing on reggae, Turner, Hammershøi, Deleuze, and an old Andalucian's olé with equal ease, but the comedy never insulates against consequence. Hotel Petroleum pays persistent attention to the problem of living well, or even living coherently, in a world whose crises are both everywhere and systematically obscured.