Fourteen Poems Pamphlets 2025

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The End of Art by Zara Meadows

I think Zara had a poem in Fourteen Poems and was really engaging during the IG live and there is an underlying sense of joy about her and her work.

I could have tagged every poem, Zara has an eye for seeing that little bit around the corner of reality, taking the familiar and showing it to us afresh.

(In)Habit by Hetty Cliss

There was a brightness to these poems, even when they were engaging with challenging topics, the darkness of life. A sense of reading the room and getting the tone exactly right. 

 

ecdysis: cacophony of skins by Dena Igusti

Dena’s creativity with form is really engaging, and this brings an additional layer to the power of the words.

Stiff Wrist by Ben Kline

Ben is a poet that I have really liked since he first featured in Fourteen Poems, and this is a typically delightful collection from him. There is a wittiness, and also something about being a gay of a certain (similar) age – not exactly wisdom – that gives a richness to the poems, particularly for me.

mango & starblush by Kayleigh Jayshree

Within this collection I found Elegy for Dead Chihuahua a special gem – a great example of looking at the world with that slight twist that can bring things into focus, something that is true across all the poems.

She will need a stable boy by Jamie Lock

I found the final poem, Progress, packed a really intense punch, in its simplicity it says so much, and talks of pain and compassion and tenderness, while leaving almost everything unsaid.

 

& Change Issue 10

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Another great set of poets

I particularly enjoyed:

According to Lesley by Simon Maddrell

Plantae by Neal Allen Shipley

Straight Boys by Tim Stobierski

Where the jackals howl and other stories by Amos Oz

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I brought this book back in September 2015 due some reference to the story The Way of the Wind in something else I read at the time (although even looking back through this blog not share exactly what that was). And finally got around to reading the rest of it…

These stories are full of emotional charge, exploring the complexities of relationships, the struggles around identity (although whether ‘identity’ would have been the term back in the 1960s when they were written), and the sense of place. The kibbutz setting of most of the stories brings much of this into sharp relief – it is setting where the sense of community and of purpose is strong, and so any dislocation can as a result become intense.

Do these stories have a message? It is a subtle one, about the human experience rather than a straight forwardly political one.

These are stories that linger in the mind, so well crafted that they draw you in and make you feel the emotions of the participants.

Aquarium by C. C. McKee

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Aqua’s Barbie Girl is often seen, and dismissed, as a novelty song. And so it is really good to have this book in which C. C. McKee takes it seriously, showing that Aqua were credible musicians and Barbie Girl was an expression of their craft / their art.

They set Aqua in the context of the Danish music scene and show both the influences on Aqua and the ways in that Aqua influenced others.

As well as Barbie Girl, which has renewed fame due to the Barbie movies, they also explore the other singles from the Aquarium album. Some of these are songs which I was not familiar with – and good to be introduced to them and see how the skill that created the hit Barbie Girl are also on show in the wider work. And the contrast with Turn Back Time, a song I had forgotten was by Aqua...

They also explore ideas of ‘camp’ and how through the dance remixes of their songs Aqua were linked into the gay scene – how this was a particular important part of their success in the USA – and it is again this is the validation of taking seriously of things that are often treated as disposable.

Eff-able edited by JP Seabright and George Violet Parker

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This collection of poems, brought to us by Fourteen Poems, is so fresh and powerful. To speak of the sexuality of people with “disabilities” shifts so many boundaries – and in claiming their Queer Sexual identities our poets are also claiming their personhood. Too often the de-sexualising of people with “disabilities” is a key part of their de-humanisation. Allow them sexuality and you allow them power and agency.

It is hard in such a strong collection to highlight particular poems, but I will mention these:

I love men that have it brutal but make it gorgeous by Will Darling which declares love to so many ways of being a man…

When Google returns five million four hundred eighty thousand results for fucking by Cat Chong

Choke Me With My Sunflower Lanyard by Rosamund Taylor it layers up the complexity and the simplicity of lust.

Fragments From The Dark edited by J Williams and L Guémar

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This collection was published in 2008, and I have had my copy for the best part of a decade before now reading it – but reading it now in the midst of protests outside asylum seeker accommodation made it all the more powerful.

The first thing this shows is that our nations wrestling with questions around immigration are not new, the stories in this collection show that the place we are standing now is at least two decades in the making – two decades during which our political leaders seemed unable to have an honest conversation about immigration, and as a result they seem unable to have anything but a toxic conversation.

The second thing is this is a collection of women writing in Wales – that it is women’s voices, speaking in the context of Wales, makes for a distinctive contribution. There is a belief that the people of Wales, from their own sense of marginalisation (dating from at least Henry the VIII acts of Union if not before), make them more open to welcome the marginalised from other places. This belief will be given a strong test come May if Reform become the largest party in the Senedd.

The collection speaks to the resilience of the women writing – and in this there is hope – the struggle with go on, but the spirit of these women is bigger and will endure and will overcome..

 

To The Air by Thom Gunn

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This is a slim volume, just 10 poems (if you take the parts of The Geysers as a sequence of separate poems, 6 if you treat them as a single whole), but it is rich in Thom Gunn’s style and skill.

I will highlight two poems:

The Corporal, its close observation, the interplay of the life force of the young solider and the shadow death, the young man’s purpose and his fate?

The Bath House, the final and larger part of The Geysers, its broken line form part of the move away from the formality of earlier work, given a real physically to the experience of “the hot bath, barely endurable” ending “I am | I am raw meat | I am a god”

But I should also say that my particular copy had some delightful marginalia which I shared on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1GnLMWjUhA/