From Polari Press - www.polari.com
This is an omnibus edition of an online magazine born at the start of the first COVID lockdown – it is a transgressive celebration of queer life that has not been tidied away into heteronormative compatible boxes – sexual bodies are on display, are being lived in, bodies that have not been airbrushed. It is a real delight!
Having spent a lot of time over the last 18 months watching YouTube videos from people sharing their experience of autism (indeed it was from one of those I heard about this book) there probably wasn’t the impact for me of this book as there would be for those who had never really heard an autistic person share their experience in their own words.
Autism is very misunderstood, and so it is important that there is space for people to share their experience, and Bianca’s contribution is a very good one. There is a good balance between her personal experience and more general insights. When you have met one autistic person you have met one autistic person (as Robyn from 1800 Seconds says) but in meeting one person you can have your eyes opened to the diversity of experience that explodes the stereotypes.
I was pleased to find that this set of Advent reflections were not, unlike most, trying too hard to be “relevant” - there was a gentleness in the connections made that didn’t jar – Advent speaks to the injustice and troubled world without the need to contrive anything.
In one of the reflections he quotes Pope Francis speaking about migrants crossing, and drowning in, the Mediterranean “Who among us has wept for these things, and things like this?” the Pope added “We are a society that has forgotten the experience of ‘weeping with’. The globalisation of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep!”
To follow John Keble and write a Hymn for each Sunday of the year is an interesting project, and these are Hymns not “worship songs” - reading them over the last year on the appropriate Sundays some chimed more with me than others but that is probably just the case of any collection of work. There are some that probably deserve to reach a wider audience than I expect will be the case.
Matthew Haigh is one of the poets that I am delighted to have been introduced to via Fourteen Poems, I think that the strength of his references back into childhood of the 80s/90s provides a particular shared context of experience that makes his work really engaging for me.
From this collection one of the poems
I said I want to go as Catwoman for Halloween
They told me I was a boy. Pick the Penguin instead. If only we possessed
better vocabularies as children. I would have said “I will inhabit this
planet for a smudge a rind a wafer-skin of time and you’re telling me I
can’t be a BDSM vixen with an opal face and legs for days?”
This collection is violent, and uncomfortably sexualised, and yet the intensity of the human connection is the strongest thing you are hit with, and the shock value of some of the actions actually fade against that context.
It feels like it is only a marginally exaggerated version of real events, perhaps we live in an age where “fact” will almost always outpace fiction to the extremes.
But there is tenderness of a sort, for example
“The flat felt more empty
than usual as
Sophie hadn’t been home in three days.
Her food was
still in the fridge and her clothes were in her wardrobe.
To be so alone in a place she had
shaped; her presence was hovering over
the many objects she had brought
from charity shops...”
The power of presence and absence is a familiar experience to anyone that has shared a home would someone not departed.
I tagged the following poems…
Catacombs of San Callisto which reflects on the early images of Christ and the ways bodies are defined, with these lines in the midst of it
“We’re told by books old as these walls:
Filthy, our bodies, yours and mine. Not so.”
Sans Souci after reflecting on Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St. Thomas the second part of the poem is this…
“I believe in art more often than your cock.
We thought a getaway would loosen us up,
shake off our post-Freudian feelings.
We should work on us, I say. (Sorry,
I’m an ice queen.) You light a Turkish cigarette,
its smoke not so different from the incense
in the nearby church housing a saint’s
gilded hand – if not flesh, then body be gold.
Can’t you just suck me off? (I’m alive.)
Sometimes drinking beer together, chilling
the sweat on our chests, is enough.
You lean against the French door,
all the hairs of your body black and glistening.
I turn to minutiae and away from you.”
And part 5 of the same poem reflecting on an Etching of Adam and Eve
St. Sebastian’s Executioner
“…
He was not young with his belly and puffy limbs.
He was not quiet any more than he was beautiful,
tethered and beaten, but I still cannot name what
he died for. His death was many years ago.
I am the bear trudging off – bear gone; hear moving,
unmoved – to whatever men peace it knows…”
And At the Grave of Zora Neale Hurston
The Christian imagery is probably particularly powerful for me – but the seamless move between the language of Art History and the bodily is where this collection really stands out.
I put tabs on the following poems
Signal Flag K: I wish to communicate with you by Jane Routh
“Neither of us has anything to say
significant enough to break the silence.”
The Foot Thing by Jane Routh
God’s Eleventh Rule by Sophie Hannah
Two Love Poems by Geoff Hattersley
Out of Control by Dennis O’Driscoll
The bulk of this pamphlet, bookended by two short poems, is a sequence Paper Trail that unfolds selfhood, included its gendered expression, with rich imagery used playfully.
Part 1
This account of Stan and Charlie finding a friendship and then having circumstance pull them apart again is sad in the inevitability of it. “Society” said their friendship couldn’t work, and society acted to prove itself right.
Maybe many people read themselves into characters that are outsiders, do people generally overstate our own troubles or is that just my anxiety at work? It is Stan the loner that is bullied at school that connect with rather than Charlie the traveller – looking through Stan’s eyes we are attracted to the confidence of Charlie, but we see there is a troubled inner life below the surface.
I have had to take it back to the library as it is reserved by another reader before I got to Part 2 …
Part 2
As there is a decade between the parts the enforced gap in my reading is appropriate, my recall of the first part not entirely prefect in a way that would also be the case for Charlie and Stan.
Charlie is now in a phase in life which echoes that described in Easy Meat by Rachel Trezise, beyond the hopes of youth and into an adulthood that disappoints, no clear pathway in which things would get better.
There is also the worry that Stan has become a bit of dickhead hipster Uni student – there was a purity in their friendship.
There are times when we all fail to be the good friend we would wish to be – it touches on a deep sadness as we long for that better version of ourselves. Maybe this is the core theme of the whole book, everyone is seeking to be that better version.
Part 3
In order to get out of their rut Charlie and Kate are heading to Ireland, and in this exchange Charlie captures that little glimmer of hope ...
“Charlie nodded. ‘Good,’ he said.
‘Is it?’ said Stan then.
And Charlie’s face broke into what looked like the first real grin Stan had seen from him in a while, even if it did have a kind of desolate edge. ‘I don’t know, mate, but it’s what we’ve got,’ he said.” (p350)
… things might not get better when you take that risk, make that change, “but it’s what we’ve got” - you have got to live the life that is in front of you – not the Photoshopped fantasy you see on social media.
There is a concluding moment of drama, in which we see our cast of characters being the better version of themselves – but it is not a fairy-tale happy ever after – a battle won, perhaps, but by no means the war.
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Published in 1982 this story of two gay, or bi, teenagers is hard to fit into context – it treats their sexuality in such a fuss free manner which is a real surprise – there are different things shaping this, it is written just before the era of AIDS, it is written several years before Section 28 (it is partly books such as this that those behind Section 28 worried about) which might help explain the relaxed approach, but on the flip side it is written when the age of consent was still 21 therefore the sex was illegal.
The things that date the novel include the use of typewriters (younger readers please Google to find out what these devices were used for!) and more significantly the narrowness of the opportunity for post-16 education – only a handful, of invited, pupils get to stay on into Sixth Form – there is an echo of the History Boys.
Although it is a story that feels fresh and liberating, even reading it 40 years on, but of course it is not completely hope-filled. For all the joy that we share in Hal and Barry’s relationship it is finite – it is hardly a spoiler to note that the Grave in the title is Barry’s – a star that shone brightly but tragically briefly. We are left to wonder what the next chapter of Hal’s life will be like – just a few years younger than the gang in It’s a Sin, the 1980s were a tough time to be young and gay…
Towards the end he reflects…
“Three days to write Bit 24! But I learned something.
I have become my own character.
I as I was, not I as I am now.
Put another way: Because of writing this story, I am no longer now what I was when it all happened.
Writing the story is what has changed me; not having lived through the story…
You become your own raw material...” (p221)
This relationship to story is a theme that Pádraig Ó Tuama often draws out – we are the stories we tell of our lives – the story shapes us as much as, probably more than, we shape the story.
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From the poem matthew
“…
it begins outside, under the orange glow of a
lamp post while god smokes like he’s been doing it
since fifteen. Your ted baker suit a black stain in
a crowd of charity shop jumpers and hand-me-down
boots. they’re saying what, him?
and god says yeah, him.”
From the poem philip that plays the feeding of the five thousand into contemporary foodbanks
“…
and you watch, astounded,
yet knowing that the problem with maths
is it just keeps going
just like he does, exhausted, mumbling his mantra:
i’ll feed them,
i’ll feed them.”
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Randall offers that mix of sexy Californian sun-shine and earthy, embodied, reality that is part of the power and charm of Armistead Maupin.
From Breakfast with Thom Gunn I tagged:
Night: A Fragment
Ovid in San Francisco
Stranded
“I nibble a melancholy quiche Lorriane”
Monday
“… It isn’t
beautiful, of course, this life. It is.”
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Recounting this single day in Caleb life is a tale of disappointment, a man at that point in life when hope is fading, the young have the promise of a bright future held up in front of them – but you get to an age when either the promise has come true or it is time to accept that “this” is as good as it is going to get.
There is a strength in the writing that gives Caleb a deep credibility, it makes his hurts hauntingly real.
That the day in question is Brexit Referendum day adds an edge – avoiding the party political Trezise offers an uncomfortable insight into the outcome of the Referendum.
Remain tried to tell people like Caleb that they had never had it so good, Leave told them that Brexit equalled a better life.
If life was little more than a daily grind to keep your head above water, you didn’t have to be an idiot to vote Leave. You could be well aware that Leave were selling snake oil and yet still vote with them. If the current, bleak, reality was really the best you could hope for, there was nothing really to lose on the risk, however unlikely, that the snake oil might just work.
That same sense of disconnection and hopelessness is common in many places, and it means sensible people will continue to make “bad” political choices – if you live in a dark squalid shed then it is easy for you to become the Turkey that votes for Christmas.
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I put tags in the following…
The Hug
“It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine...”
Meat
‘All Do Not All Things Well’
Terminal
Words for Some Ash
(I might have this at my funeral?)
Memory Unsettled
“…
‘Remember me,’ you said.
We will remember you.
...”
The J Car
“…
Unready, disappointed, unachieved,
He knew...”
A Blank
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This is a Prayer by Anne Enith Cooper repeats the line:
“This is a Prayer for the dispossessed, for the fallen and we’ve all fallen sometimes, for the children...” listing situations of struggle and signs of hope.
My Headstone Read ‘Beloved Daughter’ by Fikayo Balogun talks of sexual violence and ends:
“The world asked me to speak, but words cannot
describe the injustice that has been dealt to my soul.
Words would buy you justice, they said.
I told them, what has been taken from me is my life
with my soul ripped from its root. I have disappeared
into oblivion, words cannot bring me back.”
Route by Sundra Lawrence
The news charcoals my fingers.
Syria is closed, I tell my daughter,
of course, she wants to know why:
The country is hurting itself -
people want to find safety.
She sketches a map on paper
from her toy globe
then colours in the countries,
she draws a route from Damascus to London:
It’s so they can find us.
If they wear good shoes
can the Syrians walk through Turkey
and catch a boat to Greece?
I say it’s a good plan
but crossing the water is costly.
Are there beds? Will their mummies tuck them in?
Families hold each other for the journey, I say,
I pull the cover up to her chin.
Her breath is all that remains of the day;
guiding the cheap rafts through rough seas.
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I found this a slow burn of a book, the setting of 17 year olds at a New York art school living a seemingly impossibly grown up life that was a universe away from 17 year old me rattling around Baldock took a lot for me to form a connection.
But what I enjoyed was the layering of the serious and the playful – as Felix explores their identity there are moments that are deep and dark, but equally moments that are joyful and even silly. These don’t have to exist separately, indeed it is the playful that very often the validation to the serious, the joy that illuminates the dark.
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There is a layering of brutal reality of war and the mystical connections between people that tortures.
In longing for his dead friend and companion Alfa loses himself – and somehow in the final few chapters Mademba and Alfa become one being, Mademba experiencing the world via Alfa’s body.
Is this real or is this dream? And does that actually make much difference anyway?
Amidst the piles of books written about the First World War it is rarely to find a new insight, and it is to David Diop’s great credit that they have done so.
Landscape without Song
Blue sky.
Yellow field.
Blue mountain.
Yellow field.
Across the scorched plain
an olive tree drifts.
One lone
olive
tree.
Song of the Dry Orange Tree
to Carmen Morales
Woodsman,
chop down my shadow.
Free me from the torture
of not bearing fruit.
Why was I born among mirrors?
Around me day dances
and night copies me
onto her stars.
I want to live blind to myself.
And I’ll dream
that ants and burrs
are my leaves and my birds.
Woodsman,
chop down my shadow.
Free me from the torture
of not bearing fruit.
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Reading this we find it is not just an inspiration for Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in many ways the later is a rip off on Zamyatin.
Do we need to give spoiler alerts for such classics? If so, you are warned…
The world that rationalises happiness entirely in terms of the absence of desire. Doing so it becomes logical to remove the imagination because without imagination you can not picture a better world that the one you currently encounter, and without that picture you can not desire and so instead you will be content, happy, with your current lot. It is a caricature that we find easy to ridicule but maybe we need to be more careful that the seeds of this logic aren’t around us.
The spaceship, the Integral, felt like an unresolved part of the plot – I was never sure what the role of this was or, indeed, how the rebels were going to use it against the regime – it could have been entirely removed from the plot without seeming to diminish the narrative at all.
The point of greatest affinity between We and Nineteen Eighty-Four is the ending – there is no “happy” ending – the State prevails – and the central character betrays themselves and those they love. This is the deeply uncomfortable truth in both books – the weakness and lack of human courage on display are a mirror held a little to close. In the face of this what is the value of resistance? Are these books of hope or despair?
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For some reason it has taken a while to get around to reading this, despite it regularly being referenced in other books I have been reading – is there something about such a classic that makes you shy away from it, that warning about not meeting your heroes perhaps?
What difference does reading this have in 2021 compared with those encountering it when first published a decade before decriminalisation in the UK. There is a sense of the lives within it being constrained and a little sordid, but 60 years ago the fact that such lives could even exist would have been a liberation.
Form this I come to the question of whether any of them are likable? But then again there is no need for them to be likeable ...
Various things I have been reading that mention Giovanni’s Room make a significant point that Baldwin is writing about White people – but I was left wondering why we assume David is White, does it actually say that, I don’t recall it doing so - or is it the case that because it isn't mentioned we just assume? If David was Black you would have to say so? Does reading David as Black or White impact the narrative, if it does how? And why?
One of the drivers of the narrative is the fact that Hella is so desperate to get married, it is the entry point to adult life, especially for her as a women, in a way that I don’t think is true any more. She can only find a valid identity as an adult women by becoming someone's wife. This is why the cut of David’s betrayal of her goes so deep.
It seems to me that it is not the sex but the moment when Giovanni is crying that is the biggest challenge to masculinity – and despite so much in society having moved on from the world of the late 1950s one thing that is still toxicly true is that “real” men don’t cry.
That Giovanni has run away from his wife and still born child is a complicated back story – that is a trauma from which we can be sympathetic to his desire to flea – but what must be the situation for his wife, in the grief for their child she is abandoned by him – whatever struggles Giovanni is facing it feels that she will be facing tougher ones.
Finally, I will admit that I in my mind I picture him as Giovanni from Strictly – but I don’t think he would be a bad fit for casting.
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In telling the story of Temperance Lloyd, Susanna Edwards, and Mary Trembles – the last three people to be hanged as Witches in England – John Callow gives these women their dignity and humanity back. We encounter them as rounded personalities, marginalised but not entirely without agency.
Callow also explores the complexity of the belief in the power of Witches – the case of the Bideford Witches sits right on the tipping point after which the “respectable” educated elite would not, at least not publicly, subscribe to the superstitions which conspired with fatal consequences for these women.
While we now, generally, see the idea of Witches having temporal power as erroneous part of the insight Callow offers is the way in which the belief was supported by nascent scientific method. In some of the cases it was doctors that “diagnosed” witch-craft as the cause of aliments – perhaps a catch all for times when they had no other explanation at hand (like our contemporary visits to the GP when we are diagnosed with “probably a virus” which is code for “I have no idea”?). As we moved into the eighteenth century the enlightenment and disenchantment of the world advanced rapidly.
But while the legal system turned its back on the idea of Witches the forces that marginalised poor women, especially as they aged, remained – indeed largely remain to this day – the multifaceted stigma of being poor, old, and female is still toxic, at times fatal, even without the courtroom drama the Bideford women faced.
The fact that the accusers were mostly themselves women does not diminish the gendered nature of the situation - “respectable” women policing the division between themselves and the, literally, unwashed is absolutely an instrument of patriarchy.
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For me the main question raised by this novel is whether there is a need for the central character to be likable because I never warmed to Eira – even when she is putting herself a risk for others there just felt like an emptiness at the core of her.
Maybe this is due to the third person narrator, the story is told by someone that was not actually there, the one telling us the tale is fictionalising around the basic facts that they know – it is a fiction within a fiction.
It is the drama and tension in the story that keeps you engaged.
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This is a lyrical celebration of seabirds, with Nicolson luxuriating in their long form descriptions, rich in metaphors which heap images one upon another.
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As Expected is a sad poem – how expectations trap people into being less than their potential
San Francisco Streets looks honestly at the way the Castro is not a perfect paradise
Donahue’s Sister looks drink hard in the eye
part 3 of Talbot Road he writes “I forgave myself for having had a youth”
The power of the themes, particular the death of those crossing the sea in search of life, are matched by the power of the poems. It is a collection that troubles in the right sort of a way.
I put tabs on the following poems
Effects by Alan Jenkins
Heritage by Alan Jenkins
Don’t You by Alan Gillis
Coventry by Conor O’Callaghan
The Bereavement of the Lion Keeper by Sheenagh Pugh
The Wood Turner of Jauberite by Carole Satyamurti
There is the humour and pathos of the images caleb deploys – it is perhaps a particularly queer experience to hold both together as valid?
From the poem The Smoking Cabinet they write:
… To be men among
other men, preserved in the lasers of dancefloors.
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A fairly light-weight book which gives the sense that it believes it is more profound than it really is.
But there were a scattering of clever gobbits
“The radical therapist David Smail used the term ‘magical voluntarism’ to desire this fallacy that we can stop a dysfunctional world causing us distress purely through our own efforts. In magical voluntarism, the miserable must acclimatize themselves to the system that is making them miserable.” (p63) – this sounds a lot like masking?
“Most of life is admin. Young adults waste hulking portions of their lives looking for place to live … applying for and moving between jobs…’ etc (p126)
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The sharing that Gail McConnell offers of the grief of seeing, as a child, her father shot dead in front of their raw feels very precious and intimate.
Running over a little over 100 pages you can encounter it as a whole, but each page can also be a poem in itself – there is both/and within the form as there are many layers of dichotomy within the content.
It resists simplistic interpretations, and it resists a reduction of her father’s life to the moment or manner of his death.
This is a powerful and punchy collection that refreshes our imagination about a great selection of women, some historical some mythical.
Jack
Before man/woman legal boundary
double-speak, she sat about shabby grass,
tuck skirts into drawers, drew imaginary sword,
surveyed man’s world and judged it
lacking. Before man/woman legal
boundary double-speak said no, she watched
boys/girls courting, rutting, disgust
in her tears and bones. Before man/woman
legal boundary double-speak cried sin, she
fell in love and love and love with girls
who looked like her in line and curve
and mind, and judged them fair. Before man/
woman legal boundary double-speak
thrust and stabbed through realms
of fabric, she watched the life she knew;
knew in young, sad bones she’d have to tear
the boundary designed to keep her our,
rebuild the world.
Consent
On the raido it wasn’t tyranny
she just said
all the men that have assaulted me in my life
have been nice guys
in a voice that made me think of when your finger
pushes through the cellophane and touches cool meat
FLESH you think with your flesh
I was cooking dinner like a citizen
The interviewer was like woah
I put the chicken down and walked outside
The lawn the herbs the ornamental tree
What a sharp and unexpected boredom
Have I Have I given my consent O lazy
girl if you don’tburn down suburbia
where can you go with a pretty mouth Who
will you bury in ankle-length yesses and pearls
Mum arises in the backdraft of my cigarettes
though so long into the dark herself she has
poor working syntax and is flat-out knackered
Kid she spells on the threshold Even the wind
that cannot read or bone a chicken knows its own mind
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Song of the Retail Park Tree
All day, the sun umbrellas outside Caffe Nero
mimic me. I am brought
en masse from a gardening supply store
in the Midlands and will be paid for
in 36 easy instalments. My watering shedule
is outlined in the staff handbook. My roots
do not go deep. Somewhere, in an office in the city,
there is a version of me
in blueprint. Here, a gull harvests
french fires from a McDonalds carton
on the pavement in front of me
and cries. Nobody will ever carve a heart
into my truck, my bark. No one will ever
pick fruit from me, in this, in any weather.
All day, that awning outside Subway flutters
its eyelashes at me. I am background,
atmosphere. I am freezing
my tits off. The kid who plays
peek-a-boo behind me
is called off by his mother towards
Iceland. Somewhere, in an office in the city,
a slightly greener version of me
flickers on a screen. Sometimes,
the wind runs a hand through my hair, but mostly
tired people sit on the bench in front of me
and smoke. I shade
no lovers. No birds will ever build
a nest in me. Nobody will ever call me home.
James brings together some “found poems” and creates others by playfully redacting words from other texts, texts of oppression – for example blotting out the “not” in Section 28, so it reads that local authorities shall promote the acceptability of homosexuality. Doing so in highlighter pink acts to the power of turning these texts of terror into texts of joy.
Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk
I put tabs on the following poems
Jairus by Michael Symmons Roberts
Conversation by Mario Susko
Oh by C. K. Williams, in particular these lines:
“...gone, truly gone, and isn’t it unforgivable, vile,
to stop loving someone, or to stop being loved; we don’t mean to lose friends,
but someone drifts off, and we let them, or they renounce us, or we them, or we’re hurt,
like flowers, for god’s sake, when really we’re prideful brutes, as blunt as icebergs.”
Check Book Finder for the best place to get a copy
This is a strong collection of poems, with a range of images opening up views on the complexity of masculinity and the constraints that it surrounds so many with.
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In projecting forward to a near future in which the UK has become a totalitarian state Hussey reminds us that progress is not a one way street – an ever-growing sphere of liberty, justice, and equality is not an inevitability. Rights won can be lost again. This might be an unwelcome and sobering reminder, but it does us good – putting us on notice to defend our liberty from those selling the snake-oil of easy fixes to society’s challenges.
The strength of that idea almost excuses the moments when the plot is a little thin – when victory comes it probably comes too easily – those with power and privilege don’t left go without a fight, this would perhaps have been better framed as the first part of a trilogy, in which Eric and Gabriel win a battle but not yet the war.
Part 1
This account of Stan and Charlie finding a friendship and then having circumstance pull them apart again is sad in the inevitability of it. “Society” said their friendship couldn’t work, and society acted to prove itself right.
Maybe many people read themselves into characters that are outsiders, do people generally overstate our own troubles or is that just my anxiety at work? It is Stan the loner that is bullied at school that connect with rather than Charlie the traveller – looking through Stan’s eyes we are attracted to the confidence of Charlie, but we see there is a troubled inner life below the surface.
I have had to take it back to the library as it is reserved by anyone reader before I got to Part 2 ...
Writing in the period between the fall of France and the Blitz Kennedy gives a particular view on the Second World War, from that moment when Allied Victory was not just uncertain but unlikely.
She talks about the way BBC news reports mix the news of the war in with other items so that the bad news does not come at you full in the face, until …
“But the day of reckoning came at last.
Ever-increasing gravity. Anybody could understand that. Forty million people gasped and woke up.” (p13)
Comparing UK and USA she reflects that “The explanation, I suppose, lies deep in history. On our side we think of liberty as something which, in theory, we have always had. Our whole progress has been to… build constitutional walls around it which will enable us better to cultivate it. On their side they think of it as something whole and indivisible which was won at one stroke, and which dwells in their Constitution.” (p118) Our laws protect rather than create our liberty.
Slightly in pasting in a discussion of Nanny’s somewhat jingoistic views Kennedy notes that even Nanny “said herself that we must try to get a United States of Europe” (p158) – it is interesting to find this phrase in use in 1940 when tend to think of it as a more recent coinage by those wishing to attack the EU project.
Kennedy, for all of her progressive views writes from a secure position of privilege – when they go down from London she is pleased to be without maids, but still has Nanny with her, and the family take lunch each day in Hotel, this simpler existence is not entirely simple. And some of her views are problematic, down-right offensive, she talks of gypsies in the manner that has got Enid Blyton black-listed by many, and then thinking about potential for Nazi invasion on neutral Ireland in attempt to encircle the UK she is extreme “...we shan’t be one little bit sorry for the Irish. A taste of the Nazis would open their eyes, after all the song and dance they have made about English oppression.” (p101) Like so many writers we have to handle their complete work with some care, and not simply airbrush bits we dislike.
Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk
These witty retellings of Bible stories help you to look again at what actually is within the text and what is received as an interpretation handed down alongside the text.
Adam and Eve is probably the strongest, maybe because it is perhaps the most familiar tale and so the playfulness resonates most easily, but also perhaps because the Biblical account is slight – there is the most room for the imaginative – both for Goldstein and indeed for “tradition”.
This collection of prose and poetry is rich, with COVID in the background but shaping the work.
I found Rachael Llewellyn’s Rebecca Left Her Body particularly affecting as Marcus comes to terms with the death of his sister, the pain of loss and the pain of having to face the darkness that lead to someone taking their own life.
My Anxiety Lives as an Acorn in My Stomach by Thomas Stewart is powerful in its personification of anxiety - “A cold, almost silent, whisper. Saying that it will always be there.” and captures the sense when asks...
“Do you ever have that feeling
where everything is really good and therefore
you feel terrified?”
Thinking more directly on COVID David Woodhead in Fortunate to Survive “But some of us – in fact, many in my social circle, myself included – have lived thought a pandemic before. In truth, we are living through a pandemic still. HIV/AIDS took hold of our friends and lovers and killed them, brutally, violently. That pandemic changed our identities and our politics as gay men, our relationships and aspirations. The mothers who lost their sons and the men who lost their lovers still bear its consequences, day in, day out.” When treatment has removed the power of HIV to be a death sentence, so I have friends living with HIV not dying from AIDS, and PREP proves effective prevention – a liberation but also with each pill a reminder that the pandemic is contained not eliminated.
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This is a collection of deep intensity…
Extract of The Boy
…
What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk
down a sidewalk without looking back,
I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was.
calling and calling his name.
Extract of The Cold Outside
…
Soon I will die, he said, and then
what everyone has been so afraid of for so long will have finally happened.
and then everyone can rest.
What the Living Do
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
And the most beautifully painful of them all – in a state of grief we don’t understand just like that silly Buddy.
Buddy
Andy sees us to the door, and Buddy is suddenly all over him,
leaping
and barking because Andy said: walk. Are you going to
walk home? he said.
To me. And Buddy thinks him and now, and he’s wrong. He
doesn’t
understand the difference between sign and symbol like
we do–the thing
and the word for the thing, how we can talk about something
when it’s not
even there, without it actually happening–the
way I talk about John.
Andy meant: soon. He meant me. As for Buddy, Andy meant: later.
When he
was good and ready, he said. Buddy doesn’t understand.
He’s in a state
of agitation and grief, scratching at the door. If one of us
said, Andy,
when Andy wasn’t there, that silly Buddy would
probably jump up barking
and begin looking for him.
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There is a lot going on in this book, and I am not sure if it all holds together – it is an enjoyable read if perhaps you avoid pushing the narrative too hard – for example Marty suffers from anxiety and yet does all these things with an ease that 17 I certainly wouldn’t have found, also there are some layers of the back story that never get unpacked - like what is the real issue behind Marty’s Mum’s seeming rejection of the UK - these are left hanging in the air and for me this resulted in a lack of a properly rounded sense of the people and events.
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Telling this tale through the eyes and voice of Richard, who had lived most of his life in GDR, and overnight seen the Berlin Wall and then GDR itself disappear, shows us, without being bombastic, that borders and nations are inherently fictions – and the decisions about who is allow to cross them therefore arbitrary.
I read this alongside Borders & Belonging by Pádraig Ó Tuama & Glenn Jordan – which explores the Book of Ruth and one of the prayers they include at the back begins
God of bodies,
if it is true that the earth is yours
and all within it,
then yours are the rocks and grasses
on every side
of every border…
The consequences of this for our treatment of asylum seekers, and migrants of all kinds, should be profoundly different from the current attitude of the UK and most other countries.
Richard reflects at one point that “The Africans probably had no idea who Hitler was, but even so: only if they survived Germany now would Hitler truly have lost the war.” (p50) And we can say the same about the UK.
These echoes of Germany’s past give a particular punch – but it is one we should not pretend we can side step.
Seeing an excessive police presence outside the place the refugees are staying, for Richard it “is already clear to him – the newspaper will report on the high cost of this deployment, and this country of bookkeepers will be aghast and blame the objects of the transport for the expense, as used to happen in other periods of German history, with regards to other transports.” (p209) Clearly we also blame the migrants for the costs we create for ourselves because of our lack of hospitality.
“...it occurs to Richard – it’s occurred to him many times now – that all the men he’s gotten to know here (these ‘dead men on holiday’) could just as easily be lying at the bottom of the Mediterranean. And conversely all the Germans who were murdered during the so-called Third Reich still inhabit Germany as ghosts, sometimes he even imagines that all these missing people along with their unborn children and the children of their children are walking beside him on the street, on their way to work or to visit friends, they sit invisibly in the cafes, take walks, go shopping, visit parks and the theater. Go, went, gone. The line dividing ghosts and people has always seemed to him thin, he’s not sure why, maybe because as an infant, he himself come so close to going astray in the mayhem of war and slipping down into the realm of the dead.” (p222)
The happen-stance of life and death, or being born a citizen or born a migrant, are so much the roll of the dice – we need to really on check our sense of entitlement, the congratulations we give ourselves on our essentially undeserved passport.
There are also reflections on Richard’s own grief, and the childless Richard thinking on beyond his own death “The old farmhouse cupboard missing a piece of its crown molding [sic] surely won’t share a household after his death with the cup in which he always makes his Turkish coffee in the afternoon…” (p9) our lives are a collection of meanings, memories, and things pieced together as a unique jigsaw – even if some of the pieces endure they will never be fitted together the same way again.
There are questions about what we actually mean by a “free” society - “Is the only freedom the fall of the Berlin wall brought him the freedom to go places he’s afraid of?” (p25) “One morning, he himself became the object of these tearful welcomes: the East Berliner who’d lived on this street that had been cut in half for twenty-nine years, crossing over on his way to freedom. But he hadn’t been on his way to freedom that morning, he was only trying to get to the University, punctually taking advantage of the S-Bahn station at the western end of his newly opened street. Unemotional and in a hurry, he-d used his elbows to fight his way through this weeping crowd – one of the disappointed liberators shouted an insult at his back – but for the very first time, Richard got to school in under twenty minutes.” (p33)
Richard is no saint, and that is part of the power, it is a slow process of befriending that opens him up, and there is some deep pain in his own life as well as the men that he tries to help. Richard says I realized “that the things I can endure are only just the surface of what I can’t possibly endure.” (p283) It is sometimes in dealing with one trauma that we bury an other more deeper pain.
Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk
The phrase that came to mind reading this collection was “exhaustingly brilliant” - it is so so good, the intensity, so many of the poems felt like they were giving voice to my own feelings, my own life …
From Scintilla, Star, which seems to speak of taking control of the terms of your exclusion.
…
I found it was better,
if I could not be no one,
to be someone. Small, but
particular. Specified, which was
an apprenticeship for special.
Cold, another word for cool.
The Last Analysis; or, I Woke Up begins “and it was political.” and lists a range of ordinary things, which are, or can be, deemed “political” acts – living an ordinary life as a queer person can become a subversive political act, and that can be tiring…
Short Essay on the Lyric-Conceptual Divide talks about addiction – and it made me cry.
How to Feel Good is a witty look at some of the advice you get for combatting depression, and I especially love the line:
“ I tried exercising
but I liked not exercising too much.”
A Poem for Pulse contains the line
“Love can’t block a bullet
but neither can it be shot down,
and love is, for the most part, what makes us.”
Craigslist Ode reminds me that sex does not have to be “true love” for it not to be shameful, despite so much else that tells us that it is a binary choice.
