Two bodies lock together in a dim room, and J.J. Loe's "Fighters" refuses to say whether we are watching a brawl or an embrace. The poem's answer is that it is both. Its central idea is that violence can be a form of intimacy. People who strike each other are also, in a strange way, speaking to each other, and what passes between them is closer to passion than to hatred.
The opening works through repetition. "Throwing face against face" sounds like a blow, but the symmetry of the phrase also makes it a meeting of two mirrors. The next line is harder: "wall against the flesh of their negation." A wall is what we build to keep others out, and here it is hurled against flesh, as if each fighter's refusal, their "negation," were something solid to throw at the other. Yet the sentence lands on "the fighters move in embrace / and humid intuition." After all that collision, "embrace" is quietly shocking, and "humid" fills the air with sweat and warmth. The fight is driven by instinct, not calculation.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Lines run from short and clipped to long and trailing, so the poem breathes unevenly, like the fighters. What gives it shape is the punctuation. Slashes close four lines ("embrace /", "force /", "inertia /", "consciousness /") and dashes close three others. They work like the bell between rounds, or a cut in a film, a pause in which the next exchange gathers. The grammar also alternates: "now the trembling force / now again the suit in one another." The see-saw of "now… now again" suggests the roles of attacker and receiver keep trading places. "Suit" is the strangest word here. It might mean something worn, something that fits, or something pursued. The poem doesn't choose, but each reading, as I take it, has the fighters fitting themselves to one another.
The imagery moves between the body and the cosmos. Colour appears once, in "a twist of brilliant reds," which could be blood, flushed skin or coloured light. Then comes "A pessimistic reciprocity returning again / to the dust of astral inertia." The phrase "returning again" is almost redundant, and that redundancy enacts the cycle it describes. "Astral" and "dust" lift the scene to the scale of stars, and then the next line drops us into something small and specific: "shadows from the bar-lamp lights." Judging by this detail, the setting is a bar. The vocabulary pulls in two directions, with abstract nouns like negation, reciprocity, inertia and convalescence set against plain physical things like faces, walls, hands and lamps. The result is a scuffle that feels like both a local incident and a cosmic process.
The turn comes with "From this fog of violence hope communicates / the essential sum of passion." Hope is the unexpected word. "Communicates" suggests a message getting through, and "sum" suggests everything being added up and reduced to one figure. Fog implies confusion, yet something clear emerges from it. Then the poem closes on its oddest phrase: "The gestures of natural politics define / without consciousness / but abandon and ineffable convalescence." "Natural politics" is a deliberate paradox, since politics usually means calculated struggles for power and here it is instinctive. The sentence says the fighters act not with thought but with abandon, a loss of control that is also a letting go. The final word, "convalescence," belongs to hospitals and recovery. To end a poem about fighting on healing is a bold move, and it suggests the fight is a way of getting better, not just of hurting.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it doesn't moralise. It doesn't ask us to condemn the fighters or cheer for them. It asks what lies underneath the violence, and it answers with images that unsettle our usual sorting of hostile and tender. It is a demanding poem, and some phrases resist paraphrase. But the word "ineffable" suggests the poem knows that, and that the experience it describes may be one language can only circle around. For a reader, it is a good test of how abstract words and concrete images can pull against each other and still make one strange, coherent picture.