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.
