Praying the Stations of the Cross by Margaret Adams Parker and Katherine Sonderegger

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This is a powerful collection of woodcut stations, and there is something about the medium that seems fitting to meditations on the Cross – placing wood at the centre of the image making, and that it is in cutting that the image is made possible.

The meditations take us beyond the images and engage with themes of social justice – that one can not look on the pain of the Cross in love and turn a blind eye to the struggling within our communities is a point we sadly need to be reminded of often.

Using these one a day over a fortnight I felt soaked in them – I think they need some space around them, and if you took them in a single sitting they would only touch your surface – so take them slowly.

The Forward Book of Poetry 2014

Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk 

I seem to have tagged a lot of poems in this one…

The Foreword “Poetry is the bomb and the safe exploding of the bomb. … We live with an increasing sense of unreality. The Poem is real. ...”

The Anagram Kid by Marianne Burton

A seedy narrative or moments of lyrical stillness by Rosie Shepperd

At the Garage by Tara Bergin

Lois in the Sunny Tree by Mark Halliday

Ghost by Matthew Sweeny

The Tree Position by Lucy Anne Watt

The Forward Book of Poetry 2015

Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk   

From this collection I would particularly commend Devonport by Fiona Benson which concludes “Would that the old wars were done with. | The sea is still a torpedo-path, | an Amageddon Road.”, Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth by Ruth Patel and The White Valentine by Mary Woodward.

The Forward Book of Poetry 2013

 Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk 

From this collection I would particularly commend Joy by Ruth Bidgood about the death of an old sheepdog ending “… never again would Joy’s | ineffable dreariness lend | a dark spice to the blandest of days.” and This is the Poem in Which I Have Not Left You by Julia Copus a melancholic layering of images.

Straight Jacket by Matthew Todd

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Having heard Matthew Todd talk on the theme of Gay Shame at an LGBT+ History Month event I got this book out the library.

It is a raw book, in which Matthew talks about his own struggles with mental health and shares lots of example of other gay men, including a tragic number of those that have taken their own lives. It is therefore a book that comes with a massive trigger warning. I found that I could only read it in small doses as the issues were so close to home.

He focuses on issues around gay men, as that is his lived experience – there is much that would be common to lesbians, bi, and trans experience but we also should not confuse LGBT+ solidarity with a homogenising of particular pinch points that those with different identities within that experience.

One of the key insights he brings is that we spend so much time on the defensive fighting old stereotypes about being gay being inherently disordered that we can’t admit that there is a massive mental health issue going on. The cause is not homosexuality but society’s homophobia (the legacy of past, but also the current reality). “for the gay community this subject has been taboo because it seems to play to a homophobic agenda and, more significantly, because it might collapse our house of cards. Year ago, when … asked by our drunken boss if we were ‘really happy being gay’, we could barely spit the words out quickly enough to reassure him how happy we were...” (p28)

Even those of us who grew up in families that are affirming of who we are will still have been impacted by wider society “I did not have magical earplugs. I was listening and reading, as were all my generation.” (p42) we “have had to develop some kind of shield against prejudice, an understanding that some people are stupid… though many of us move to hubs where it is safer, we accept that homophobia is always a possibility.” (p43)

As we celebrate the progress that has been made within the UK we can overlook how far from equality we still remain – as Matthew puts it “I like to think that those men and women who lived before 1967, when male homosexuality was a crime, would be overwhelmed by the progress we’ve made. But I’m certain they’d want us to live our lives to their greatest potential and not throw away what they could never dream of: the opportunity to like and love not only each other but, ultimately, ourselves.” (p14)

We also have to acknowledge that the problem is not just straight people – Matthew is pretty clear about his dislike of Grindr as only manifestation of how cruel gay men can be to people other, of the toxicity of body image, and racism. In a week when there have been resignations around London Pride this is in really sharp relief – we have to get to a point where we can acknowledge that gay people are not prefect, that we have no superiority, but the failures of individual gay people, even the failures of lots on individual gay people, does not make being gay a problem.

The second half of the book is a self-help guide, working through the strategies for different addictions some of which can become repetitive, but it is justified by the importance and value of putting that help out there for those in need of it.

Swimming in the Dark by Tomask Jedrowski

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THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS

 

 

This is a powerful narrative, a felt the weight of the unreconciled relationships within it, although only a little over two hundred pages I found I had to read it over a number of days to prevent the sorrow it brought up within me becoming overwhelming, it left me punch drunk.

Set in 1980s Poland the context of a creaking Communist regime heightens some of the challenges of finding an identity as a gay man, but within the particularity of this story there are many themes that were all too familiar.

What Jedrowski writes about Giovanni’s Room can also be said of his own work “If felt as if the words and the thoughts of the narrator – despite their agony, despite their pain – healed some of my agony and my pain, simply by existing.” (p51)

Ludwik as narrator addresses his recollections to “you”, Janusz, and this had the effect of drawing me as reader into the heart of it. For much of the Janusz is not a sympathetic character, Ludwik is hurting and it is Janusz’s actions (and inactions) that are the, immediate, cause of that pain so it is uncomfortable to find yourself, as reader, cast in that role.

As they negotiate their relationship…

...The water pipes churned with a low thud, and I felt a heaviness settle over me.

“And you want to live like that, Janusz, in fear?”

You laughed, your confidence in place again. “I’m not afraid. We just need to mind our own business. Avoid risks, be smart. As long as we do that, we’ll be fine. Don’t you think?”

I shrugged, feeling defeated. (p108)

It is a theme that was in Proud of Me by Sarah Hagger-Holt – we move from holding our sexuality as a secret to holding it privately yet we are still not really living openly – at different levels we edit our lives for public consumption, this is not a uniquely LGBT+ exercise by any means – but I caught myself just this week talking to a colleague at work without giving the gender of my partner, I have a “coffee roulette” in a couple of weeks with someone from another part of the organisation and I don’t know if I will “come out” to them. It is an oppressive drip-drip-drip, that place at the back of your mind that is held ready to deal with a negative reaction.

The power of the state to discriminate is expressed in chilling terms “One day your country is yours, and the next it isn’t.” (p81) – anytime we allow a division between those that have rights and those that do not have rights we open the door to oppression – it becomes the moment we look upon two human beings and strip one of dignity.

The passage towards the end of the book (p203) when Ludwik has applied for a passport and is pressured to disclosure names of other homosexuals is so corrosive – someone else has given his name – do we see that as an act of betrayal, Ludwik doesn’t appear to blame the individual – it is not the individual but the system that has betrayed him, but there must be some role for personal responsibility and moral courage in the face of oppression even if we chose to judge kindly those faced with impossible decisions.

Janusz compromises with the state, and society, and marries Hania, meanwhile Ludwik leaves for America but needs Hania’s party connection to get his passport. It is a bitter moment, feels like Winston Smith giving in to Big Brother – whatever liberty Ludwik finds in America it is at the gift of the Party that he is escaping.

While earlier in the novel you are tempted to make lazy moral judgement between Janusz and Ludwik you can not do so by the end. So, Ludwik thinks kindly of Janusz “… the odds had been stacked against us from the start: we had no manual, no one to show us the way. Not one example of a happy couple made up of boys. How were we supposed to know what to do? Did we even believe that we deserved to get away with happiness?” (p227)

That final question seems to be running through so much at the moment (I am half way through Matthew Todd’s Straight Jacket and it could so easily be a quote from him too) – it is the flip side of coin from “Its a Sin” which reminded us that too many gay men internalise a narrative that they deserved AIDS.

Outcast by Rosemary Sutcliff

Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk 

I requested a couple of Rosemary Sutcliff books from the library after reading an article in British Archaeology that explored historical fiction.

This story dating from 1955 had a freshness that was perhaps surprising, and the way that Beric’s identity shapes the narrative, born a Roman brought up a Celt and then in “exile” back into the Roman world where via various struggles he comes to a point of reconciliation with his past.

Within this I was particularly intrigued by the relationship between Beric and Jason, they are slaves on galley – for two years they have been side by side during which “It was very seldom that they could speak to each other. That brief, wordless contact of hand against hand on the oar-loom had to do instead; and it had come to do well enough.” - there is a real tenderness between them, and I found myself really wondering how much should I read into this. Could it be that Rosemary Sutcliff, writing in the mid-50s, was intentionally writing of an intimacy between two men that goes beyond the platonic or is it just my 21^st Century eyes seeing things?

This book certainly stands up to still being read and not just as a quaint historical example – a shame that although the library have a copy it is in storage so you have to proactively seek it and the causal browser (once COVID passes and they are allowed again) would never encounter it.