Dance on My Grave by Aidan Chambers

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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.

Witness by Jonathan Kinsman

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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.”

Straight Razor and Breakfast with Thom Gunn by Randall Mann

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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.”

Easy Meat by Rachel Trezise

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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.

The Man with Night Sweats by Thom Gunn

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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

Too Young Too Loud To Different – Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen

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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.

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender

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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.

At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop

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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.

Selected Poems by Federico García Lorca (Translated by Martin Sorrell)

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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.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Translated by Bela Shayevich)

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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?

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

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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.

The Last Witches of England by John Callow

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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.

Your Still Beating Heart by Tyler Keevil

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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.

The Seabird’s Cry by Adam Nicolson

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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.

The Passages of Joy by Thom Gunn

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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 black maria by Aracelis Girmay

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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.

The Forward Book of Poetry 2006

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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

wasted rainbow by caleb parkin

 

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.

If you should fail by Joe Moran

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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)