Feather, Leaf, Bark & Stone by Jackie Morris

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This is a visually beautiful book – rich with golds and silvers – the text sparingly placed, a handful of short lines on a page – with some much space for the words to breathe.

It is no surprise that Jackie Morris evokes a deep connection to the natural world, an enchantment of it. It provides a grounding in the turbulence of life.

One extract as an example…

Things to do:

Take a stone for a walk.

Take leaves of gold up hill,

release into the wild.

Take leaves of gold to stream,

place in water, watch light,

bring home, dry.

Find the silence in which to

catch the shape of words.

Breathe, and in between, peace.

The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst

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The Swimming-Pool Library was published at the height of the AIDS crisis and the same year as Section 28, but is set on the eve of that storm, and through Charles throws you back even further in time. It is an unapologetic account of gay men living sexual lives – for a mainstream novel to tell that story, especially at the moment in time, was powerful and radical. But how it was received in that moment may not be how we (I) receive it now.

It is a story told by privileged white men – they fuck their way through life at Winchester College, life at Oxford, in Charles’ case life as a Colonial administrator, in William’s life a young man with no need of a job. It is a story told by white men about their black lovers. A story told by rich men about their working class lovers. All novels are a story told – we need to acknowledge the status of the story teller – but that is not a reason to “cancel” Hollinghurst – this story is valid but we need to be alert to hear the stories of black men about their lovers, of working class men about their lovers – because those stories are also valid and should also be being heard. We can’t blame Hollinghurt that they are not.

I started to read this on the plane home from Gran Canaria – and the sexual liberation of the early 80s recalled in the book, in the context of PREP and U=U, now feels much more familiar than the context in which it was published. The power of the book is reduced because it is now holding a candle in the light rather than the dark. What seems easy now seemed impossible then. Across the LGBT+ community there is still a need for manifestos of liberation – it is just that rich white men should no longer be the focus of attention.

Club Q by James Davis

 

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I ordered this collection back in October after James was featured in Fourteen Poems, and it arrived while we were away in Gran Canaria. We got home a few days after the shooting at Club Q and this was amongst the post waiting for me. To hear of the shooting while we were within the gay bubble of the Yumbo added to my sense of connection – I had been reflecting on the delight of being within the safe, gay majority, space – the empowerment and contentment it gave – to hear of the violation of another safe space brings all spaces into question – there is that tiny traitorous bit of your brain that think maybe hanging out in such a visible gay space might not be a great plan.

I feel it is really hard to encounter this collection so strongly within the context of the shooting – it should not be defined by someone else’s violence.

Yet the poem titled Club Q begins …

“I stand for quest, which is to say mission,

as in ‘our mission is to provide

a safe space for you to be yourself,’

which is to say ‘it is not always safe

for you to be yourself.’...”

And one of the closing stanzas of the final poem, Between Home and Sexual, is …

“It’s easy to forget

hatred never stops coming for any of us.

But hatred never stops coming for any of us.”

So the themes James engages with speak to the acts of violence that LGBT+ people experience – alive to the hostile world in which we live.

Other poems I particularly connected with were

Bi

part of a sequence responding to the two letter words allowed in Scrabble

Ta

part of the same sequence which in James writes

“Ta, God

for existing and not existing

for being non-binary that way: real and fake, a quantum

for being cooler than religion

for being way cooler than church

...”

Magnavox Opus

about if grandfather’s video tapes – and yet about so much more than that.

The Undiscovered Country by Andre Bagoo

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Andre Bagoo is an excellent poet, he writes great short stories, and as an essayist – oh my goodness…

This collection ranges far and wide in terms of subject matter – but always insightful.

To quote one of them …

But let’s say Twain is right and all we do is conform. Can’t conforming still be a form of resistance? Can’t it trigger rebellion? Be it’s own sign of an independent assertion of values?

When Rosa Parks got onto the bus at Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, she didn’t disobey any rules. She conformed to them. The prevailing laws divided the bus into white and black sections. Parks sat in the black section. When the white section filled up, the bus driver attempted to expand the section for whites-only. The law called for “equal but separate accommodations”. It didn’t permit this practice of shifting the goalpost, a practice that had apparently developed over time. Parks stayed in the section designated for her under the law… It was by conforming to a racist law that she asserted her individuality...”(p33)

We all know the story of Rosa Parks – except I had never heard this story of Rosa – and it is so powerful, it is a turning of the oppressors rules against them – you take their power away by playing by their rules.

Later in the collection the long essay The Free Colony asks a really profound question in this paragraph…

Motivating the so-called independence movement of the 1960s and the granting of independence was not the idea of freedom, but of race. Colonial subjects were citizens of the British Empire. They could (and I will argue should) have been fully integrated into Great Britain and given the right to name Her Majesty’s prime minister at the polls. But the idea of black, brown, or yellow bodies from overseas taking root at Westminster; the idea of a society in which a pale class is no longer wholly in control of power had to be avoided at all costs, as remains the case today in Britain, with the fear of the foreign, of the fear, for instance, of Turkey joining the European Union. (p118)

This is the route that France has taken with its overseas departments – but it has not overcome racism in France. Bagoo holds a mirror up to us Brits, and what we see in it is awful. I am not accountable for all the wrongs the British state has done, and yet my comfortable life is in part, possibly in large part, a result of that history.

On the death of Jews by Nadine Fresco

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Nadine Fresco is telling the story of a collection of photographs and most importantly the story of the picture seen in those photographs.

These eight photographs show a group of Jews in the moments before and after their murders, on the shore near the city of Liepaja, part of the Holocaust.

This therefore is a story of the mass murder of the Holocaust, but also of the individual murders of the Holocaust. We need to tell both those stories.

That there are photographs of such a shocking event is a window into minds of those carrying out the killings – we now live in an age of constant image making, the 1940s were not like that. Yet the fact that the Nazis repeatedly issued order prohibiting the photographing of these acts of extermination points to a reality that those involved somehow couldn’t resist recording the events. In at least one of this group of photographs the women are posed, moments before they are killing, moments in which they clearly knew their fate, they are made to stand in line, in underwear, a moment of utter humiliation and yet there they stand with a certain dignity.

The photographs, after the war, were used by various people in their retelling of the Holocaust, but often they were attributed to the wrong location – they became an archetype rather than a record of a specific event. And Nadine Fresco explores how this dynamic of dislocation is troubling. It acts as another layer of the stripping of the humanity and individuality of those capture in the photos, those shot on that beach.

A key part of the book is therefore the reclaiming of the specificity of the event show – even if it is not possible to put names to the faces shown it is possible to give an account to that group of Jews, killed over 3 days in December 1941.

In naming the victims of the Holocaust there is a reclaiming of their humanity. And this is such an important thing, especially as we get further and further away and the last of the direct witnesses are no longer with us – we need to hold the reality, the particularity, of this crime sharp in our minds – keep the fact that the systematic killing of millions of people could be so easily normalised as the warning against all those that peddle the idea that “truth” is subjective...

All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt

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This is an exceptional work which is touches you deeply through the honesty and openness Seán offers us.

I read it as I was finishing reading the Alcuin Club book about Dean Dwelly of Liverpool and so the open scene of Seán cruising in the grounds of Liverpool Cathedral created an interesting connection.

Within the account of his relationship with Elias and with Elias depression he unpacks the particular mental health burden that so many LGBT+ people carry as a result of living is a hostile straight world.

He reflects early on about visit to sexual health clinic, and the sharing of sexual history “I was anxious, full of shame, always expecting the worst… [but] in that strip-lit hospital room, my history was not mine at all. Like a river, spreading through its bends and tributaries… seeping from one man into the warm body of another, then being carried off into the daily life of the world, barely noticed.” (p9) There is something in this connectivity, found often in brief and anonymous encounters that can be validating, especially when so much else in life invalidates you.

Talking about Gerard Manley Hopkins, and how he turned to his poetry after learning of the loss of friend Jack, despite the century of so between them he sees that there is still “this procession of men, walking beside me, people I knew and loved being added to it, and, one by one, their lights were being put out. In their midst, I felt my own light flickering, too.” (p31) This undertone of sadness builds.

As he becomes estranged for the Catholic Church reflects that “I felt a deep schism opening between myself and the people and institutions I had loved. But as the rift widened over time, I began to feel more free. The ties between myself and my world, the ones that had held me down, were being cut. My body and my queerness and my life became inseparable. Through that splitting away, I felt myself becoming irrevocably and radically whole.” (p130) That leaving the Church is a life enriching experience is such a sad thing – one I wish wasn’t true but all too often is.

I found his description of a time when he was struggling, “My mind was knotted and unclear. I couldn’t tell whether it was an absence of thoughts, or too many thoughts at once.” (p153) really resonated with my own experience.

And then turning more directly to the impact of growing up gay in a straight, and largely unwelcoming world he touches so many nerves – he says “Lying is something I had become good at with practice. Before I came out, it was so deeply integral to the way I lived my life that it was hard, afterwards, to unpick which parts of myself were armour and which parts of myself were real.” (p184) I think this is also something that can link to neurodiversity – you spend so much time masking that you no longer know what the unmasked “you” is actually like.

I really identified with the experience that “At that time there were no other gay people (that I knew of) in my school of over 2,000 students. Clearly, there were…” but he could see past their carefully constructed facades. (p189) – a few via Facebook contact etc I now know are gay, were gay, but that lack of visibility is something I hope has changed in many places since our days at school.

And of course one of the big changes that allowed that to happen is the repeal of Section 28 - Seán addresses the impact of the silence on LGBT+ issues it created saying “What I was left with was this unsettling feeling that we didn’t exist, or there were so few of us I’d never find another person like me. I knew I didn’t exist alone – there were the men I met, after all – but I existed alone among the people I knew, the people I loved.” (p198)

There is a sense of the loneliness of growing up gay that I identified with – the ways that this becomes internalised and then jumps out at you in later life when you are not expecting to be ambushed is a real challenge. Although this is a very different book from Tom Allen’s No Shame there is at the core of both the same constriction on young gay/LGBT+ people – things are better now, but better doesn’t always mean good – being less bad is progress but not a success.

Overall it renewed my sense of commitment to living visibly, to doing all I can to ensure those growing up today have positive role models, that they know whether you are you are not alone.

Selah by Keith Jarrett

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From this collection I tagged…

A Gay Poem,

and

Playing His Music on Shuffle (Or How Friend A Describes That Causal Encounter)

the last stanza of which is

I hope one day he uncovers the praise song in his bed frame.

I hope that day he learns to dance away his shame, with

a man who fears neither worship nor repentance.

That poem, and the collection as a whole, speaks of being Gay and being either a person of faith or someone surrounded by Christian teaching – the very next poem is titled Highlights of the Old Testament and concludes “I reread Leviticus. Guiltless.” My delight came from the queer encounter with faith. And so I find it a little odd that that blurb on the back talks of Keith’s “black British identity” and “Caribbean roots” but does not mention the two parts of his identity (I assume given the content of the poems) that were most exciting to me. Courageous poems, cowardly marketing?

Between Worlds A Queer Boy From the Valleys by Jeffrey Weeks

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This is a highly readable account of someone who, I sense, was an accidental radical – Jeffrey happened to come of age at a moment when, despite everything, there was an opportunity to live openly and fully as a gay man in a way that hadn’t existed before. That he embraced that opportunity to the max is a token of his character and to be congratulated.

The accounts of the radical organising for gay / LGBT liberation provides the core interest – the vagaries of his academic career are a valid part of the story, even if workplace politics is not so exciting.

There is lots that is made easier by social media – but it is tempting to look back on simpler times and wish for the hand crafted movement Jeffery first encountered.

He is, unsurprisingly, insightful on his own experience and the experience of “the community”.

He is honest about the challenge of the fractious nature of the claim to community – he reflects that “There was no natural unity based on a given orientation. For me, how you saw yourself and described yourself was a preference, not a given orientation, a choice rather than a destiny. People could make their identities and ways of life to fit different desires, even if their sexual needs seemed fixed...” (p114) What you do in bed and your identity are not unrelated but they are not co-determinate – your desire/need to have sex with men is not going to go away, your decision to live as a Gay Man is not fixed (if it was then the closet could not exist).

Part of the importance of books like this is the making visible of role models – as Jeffrey puts it “In my early days as a gay man, I had no way of linking to a living past, a possible present or a hopeful future because I had no ease of access to memories of people like me. I had to find and make those connections for myself.” (p251) To make those links, and support people by avoiding the need to constantly reinvent the wheel – whilst also creating an openness to new patterns – will have a massive positive impact on the mental well being of so many LGBT people.

Linked to this is his reflection of the diversification of expressions of LGBT identify “Others have recently come out in their sixties, seventies or even eighties. For me it represents what the LGBT community has become: a density of identities, desires and needs, experiences, problems, possibilities and hopes… LGBT experiences have gone global.” (p240)

I was pondering this in the Yumbo Centre – gone are the days of the clones – there is such a range of shapes and styles visible there, even within its overwhelmingly white cis gay male population. That there is diversity but also narrowness in the Yumbo is a hard question – but I think I need to make other blog posts about that.

Jeffery’s concluding paragraph is …

“Yet it is difficult too not to listen to the memories of the people, peoples, I identify with, often across difference, who have made me, without a stirring of hope. Writing this memoir has allowed me to piece together a mosaic of struggles, endurance, aspirations, care, friendship and love that convinces me the waters do not, cannot, entirely cover our heads: not drowning, still waving. It remains possible, indeed necessary, to straddle different worlds and find a viable sense of belonging, all the way home.” (p253)

The Invalid’s Valet by Julian Gray

This is a Victorian comic about Percy and Jacob – how they, eventually, find a way to express their feeling for each other.

It talks about power and vulnerability – and has a sweetness about it. Love can’t fix physical illness but it can still be a balm for life.

The Gentleman Ladybird by Lexy Connul

I picked this up at October Book as I clearly couldn’t resist a book about a Ladybird.

This is a charming story of the gender diverse Gentleman Ladybird and how they recover their self confidence from the kind words of some of those around them – sharing a message of kindness and respect for each other. 

 

BTW Not including a link as I seem to only be able to find it online at Amazon :-(

The Woodcutter and the Snow Prince by Ian Eagleton

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It seems that I didn’t include the charming Nen and the Lonely Fisherman in this blog, which is remiss of me.

This follow up captures the same spirit – a more magical world perhaps (a comment that reveals I clearly believe more confidently in Mermen that Snow Princes…) - my fear is that in response to such a wonderfully queer story some will assume that they were “just good friends”!

Constellations by Sam Scott

 

As his first move from song writing to the page this is an encouraging start – it opens up a conversation about loss, the passing of a parent – it is a generous response to the pain so many people experience. I hope it is only the beginning ...

Prunus Gerasus by Becca Fang

I think this is the first solo volume from the6ress and it is a good one

I tagged

Log Lady Interlude

Many of the things we deem worthy of loving are also

flammable. That is the trouble with loving.

…

Does that mean we shouldn’t bother loving?

No. I think not.

Green Apple Red by James McDermott

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James is one of the poets that is giving voice to the Queer experience beyond the “urban” we so long have found ourselves confined within – with poems such as My Queer Mind Goes For A Walk he plays with and problematises the being Queer in rural settings and it is delightful

There is (still) love here by Dean Atta

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Dean Atta has such a clear voice this collection is (unsurprisingly) a joy.

It opens with

On Days When

you feel like a wilting garden,

gather yourself, roll up your lawn,

bouquet your flowers,

embrace your weeds.

You are a wild thing playing

at being tame.

You are rich with life beneath

the surface.

You don’t have to show leaf

and petal to be living.

You are soil and insect and root.

I also tagged …

Pulse 3. Sanctuary

Circassian Circle

Broken Bench (which I think will seem increasingly odd as we forget the restrictions COVID placed on us in early lockdowns).

Sin The Art of Transgression by The National Gallery

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Published to accompany the 2020 exhibition which I assume lockdown prevented anyone actually seeing …

The exhibition wanders through the Western art canon playing on the adage that the Devil has all the best tunes, and maybe all the best pictures too.

Despite the talk of transgression it is a pretty safe experience.

Commemorative Modernisms Women Writers, Death and the First World War by Alice Kelly

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Alice Kelly shines a light on Women writing about the First World War and using that light to explore how the experiences, especially the experience of mass death, shaped the development of literary modernism.

The selection of women Kelly engages with include professional writers, in their published and “private” voices, and those writing in a purely private capacity – predominately letter and journal writing nurses.

There is a different voice from the male “war writers” - the whole experience of “the war” is encountered differently – this was still a society that sharply policed the roles of men and women – even if there was some opening up of opportunities for women in workplaces due to the absence of men sent to the front.

Some of the trends Kelly draws out were evident before the war but they clearly get turbo-charged but the intensity of experience the war years provided.

It is an academic work but the dryness that can result from that is relieved by the richness of the personalities of the women under consideration.

Tryweryn: A Nation Awakes by Owain Williams

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There was a moment in the 1960s when it seemed that the Welsh Nationalist struggle would become a violent one – there were a number of bombs placed but with the Investiture in 1969 the wave broke and the Welsh Nationalist movement has largely distanced itself from violent action since.

Owain, as someone involved in the bombings, expresses a frustration about that domination of non-violence – associating it with a lack of backbone to truly stand up for the Welsh Nation – talks of “true patriots” in contrast to the vast majority of the Nationalist movement.

To hear his own account of his involvement in direct, violent, Nationalist action and the consequential encounters with the British Security Services is of great value – yes there are some aspects that you might want to take with a pinch of salt. Owain is a great story teller and, to borrow a phrase from Maupin’s The Night Listener, great story tellers can resist the occasional bejewelled elephant. But equally many of the other accounts of these events will have been told with political agendas of varying shades which will have caused them to be free with the “truth” - so to hear Owain’s side of the story can only add to the balance of our understanding of this period.

The core drama of the tale is his time on the run in Ireland – on the run from essentially trumped up charges. I have a sense that Owain may be a little coy with us about what he was up to directly prior to that round of charges, but he is very clear that he was not doing the things that he was charged with.

Owain is pretty damming of the “mainstream” Welsh Nationalist, and as we compare the recent position of the SNP with Plaid it is difficult to really argue with him – somehow Welsh Nationalists end up falling over themselves, consistently turning key assets into achilles heals. But is the commitment to non-violence the source of these failings – SNP success is built entirely within the law? There is something deeper going on – Michael Sheen’s 2017 Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture did much to unpack this tendency to stumble.

We are enriched by men and women of passion like Owain – but we need to take care at times their voices are sirens calling up onto the rocks.

The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh

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To have written a first novel in 2002 that is so unapologetically queer would have been brave.

The seedy world that Welsh brings to life is richly believable, the twists and turns keep you on edge – the characters not especially likeable and yet entirely captivating. It is a dark damp sort of a world, and you find yourself just wanting to wallow in it ...

My only criticism is that on page 152 Rilke provides a public information bulletin on anal sex – it is a paragraph that doesn’t fit, it is not Rilke’s voice – for a moment you are snapped out of the world Welsh has created.

The Dreaming by Andre Bagoo

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This collection of short stories takes many of the themes from his poems and gives them a little more room. The quality of writing is a delight, characters fully developed even in this short form.

Exploring the lives of Trinidandian men, especially gay men, Bagoo combines much humour with a sadness that carries deep authenticity. When it is funny, you are laughing with the characters not at them – it is generous to them.

The story MS. about a writer whose work is mistaken for autobiography had a strong echo to The Night Listener that I had just read but also makes us very aware of how much we might be assuming that Bagoo’s accounts of the experiences of gay Trinidandian men were his own experiences. The idea that there is nothing autobiographical in this collection is silly, but how much, and which bits, that we can not say.

Trick Vessels by Andre Bagoo

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Another great collection

From it …

Floating Vessels

Are stained white.

Black ink declared

All men to be equal but

Spines, rigged like chains,

Choked other limbs:

Feathered men

Replaced.

These vessels have knowledge

Where the sea ends.

Drains in Port of Spain

Flow where blue blood

Opens worlds.

I also tagged Golden Grove

Short Stories by Jesus by Amy-Jill Levine

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Amy-Jill helps us to see (or hear) the Parables with fresh eyes (or ears) and shows that much of the traditional interpretations of the Parables sit on shaky footings.

Central to this is highlighting that the “Christian” interpretations rely on making a contrast between a caricature of resistive Jewish practice and a liberation proclaimed by Jesus. The Jewish practices seen in these interpretations would not be recognised by any first century Jew – some relate to later developments, but most are simply figments of zealous Christian imaginations.

We also find that many interpretations somehow simultaneously complicate the meanings whilst also flattening them – the sheep might just be sheep, the mustard seed just a seed – not everything is an allegory.

Amy-Jill also suggests that the Gospel writers were the first to gloss the Parables and began the process of misinterpretation – and a lot of her arguments in this respect make sense but this touches a nerve about how we understand scripture. The Gospel writers put a particular spin on the Parables – is that the authentic meaning or is there some discoverable prior meaning? Amy-Jill is confident that we can step behind the text and hear the voice of Jesus, I am not so sure. I don’t dispute that there is a gap between the words and meanings Jesus spoke and the text of the Gospels we have received – but I doubt we can say anything much about what came before the inherited texts.

Timberdark by Darren Charlton

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It is a great pleasure to find that Charlton successfully lives up to the massive expectations he created with Wranglestone. The characters, the sense of place, and the drama are all as strong as ever.

You have such care for Peter and Cooper as they wrestle with the challenges of love I found myself aching with the desire to see things come right for them – this is the core captivating drive of the novel. That love and loss seem ever intertwined is hard.

This is a more explicitly political story – it clearly questions whether the return to “normal” after the period of exile in the wilderness is desirable, with the suggestion that the stupefying nature of consumer culture might have been the real cause of the first collapse of society. To read this in the midst of our “post-Covid” return to normal back this a timely challenge. But is a turning of your back on 21^st Century life really the only cure – this is a dark conclusion.

The Edge of the Plain by James Crawford

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In the globe trotting book James gives us something of a greatest hits of difficult geopolitical issues – but one wonders if, in terms of intended readership, he is largely preaching to the choir.

We discover that Trump’s wall is a bad idea, Israel's wall is a bad idea, fortress Europe is not great, climate change certainly sub-optimal. But it is possible we already knew all that…

James writes well and even when telling familiar stories does so with a freshness that is engaging.

But we are left with the “so what?” question – this is reportage, it is not a manifesto for better future – that is work we are left to do ourselves.

My Love Is a Beast: Confessions by Alexander Cheves

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I expect there would be many that would be uncomfortable reading Alexander’s reflections on his life – talking honestly about drug use and about fisting, although the title is “confessions” these are not things Alexander is repenting.

He talks about “the yelp” of a bottom during sex (p96) – a moment when pleasure and pain coexist – giving a language and voice to the experience of the bottom is empowering. He goes on to say that “when every pig in the city was playing, I was curled on my friend’s sofa, asleep. What comes back to me now when I think about most of my sexual adventures and discoveries are not the intensities or boundaries crossed, but the rests, the points of warmth, the feeling of a blanket after a breeding, morning light after a fist.” (p100) That tenderness and extreme sex can be found together is an important fact that is often underplayed – you don’t automatically find both, but the idea that extreme sex inherently denies the possibility of tenderness needs to be rejected.

He writes about the attack on Pulse in Orlando – and since I read it we have faced Club Q killings, as well as all the toxicity around the World Cup in Qatar – he says “I didn’t know how to react. It felt like a sickening indoctrination into an antiquated concept of life as a faggot. This was something that happened in decades past, not now. I was a millennial; my generation was hope.” (p142) I really recognised that confusion.

As Gay White Cis Men we fooled ourselves into believing the work of liberation was over, we could quit with the protest and focus on the party – but the work was never done, and in the last few years progress is rolling backward – that attacks may be focused on Trans people, on people of colour, but the lack of back bone on display from so many at the World Cup is a reminder to all of us of how quickly many people will abandon all of us.

Playtime by Andrew McMillan

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The second collection certainly lives up to his debut

I tagged

To The Circumcised

Making Love

Workman – which reminded my of Steve Mack the plumber

Priest - “...your tight back shirt a public prayer | to the beauty of creation...”

Fighting Terms by Thom Gunn

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Published in 1954 these poems are less explicitly queer than many that come later

Round and Round captures the melancholy of the lighthouse keeper

La Prisonniere is a dark articulation of obsession

Looking Glass uses the image of garden and the gardener

Silly Me and Silly Us by Ruby Elliot

 

These two books are published by Pound Project – Rachel’s cartoons look with a dry humour on modern life – she clearly has a keen eye to be able to express so much in a few seemingly simple lines and a handful of words.

Waking Light by Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Mícheál McCann, Michelle Moloney, and Éilís Murphy

This is a small handbound edition of poetry and images

from everything was

In the winter I was pregnant, and I watched

                                                a Christmas star, above

                                                    my first garden, the longest

                                                                                night of the year.

        Everything was soft as it is after the making of things:

                                bread, love, peace.

        Everything was silent as it is after the breaking of things:

                                bread, love, peace.

The Forward Book of Poetry 2000

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I put tabs on the following poems

Whang Editorial Policy by Mark Halliday

Late by David Hart

Sam Sax

Sad Boy / Detective (2015)

Each poem is titled “the boy detective ...” which has the effect of turning things around, like a jewel glinting in different lights, with a common threat pulling through them all.

All the Rage (2016)

“Sex + Love Addiction” is a powerful and hard poem – facing the insults and shame pushed on gay man full in the face.

“The Italian Root of Quarantine is” seems to be a echo backward from so much we have felt during COVID.

 

Madness (2017)

Each selection begins with an extract from the 1952 DSM-I which lists Homosexuality among the disorders and end with a different poem titled On PREP or On Prayer – it is taking troubling themes and opening them up – giving voice to pain that many hold so deep they don’t see it any more 

Bury It (2018)

I tagged…

BILDUNGSROMAN which begins “i never wanted to grow up to be anything horrible | as a man. ...”

EASSY ON CRYING IN PUBLIC

BUTTHOLE

KADDISH, one segment of which is these haunting lines

please

 

tell

me

how

am

i

supposed

to

go

on

knowing

you

are

[ ]

A Smell of Fish by Matthew Sweeney

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Featured in A Forward Poetry Prize collection

I had tagged Incident In Exeter Station in the Forward collection – a poem in such an ordinary setting but with an almost surreal twist to it.

The other poem I tagged is also set in a station…

the final stanza of Guardian of the Women’s Loo in Waterloo

I tell you, I want out from time to time.

The Eurostar’s just across the platform,

I could go to Paris and not come back,

lose myself in Montmartre, as artist’s flat

overlooking the steps, but who’d take over, who’d be

guardian of the women’s loo in Waterloo,

with all the tact, let live, let go by, that’s needed?

10p entrance? That’s half of it. The skill’s in the rest.

& Change issue No.1 September 2022

www. Andchangepoetry.com

A strong collection published in USA

From it Baltimore by Joshua Garcia

We are at a restaurant you chose, somewhere near

your apartment, when I decide not to sleep with you.

You read one of my poems in a magazine & ask if

it was about our last time. Two seasons have passed.

Two men. This morning I groomed my body,

trimmed the hair under my arms, held a blade

to my scrotum, to the quiet sacral dimple.

We order tempranillo, eat plantains with bacon,

lick a ginger-tamarind glaze from our fingers.

You translate a Spanish lyric I won’t remember.

There isn’t a moment, just a confluence of thought.

None of these details matter. It is a mercy.

The Drift by Alan Jenkins

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Again Alan Jenkins featured in the Forward Poetry Prize collection (or technically before, as this is from the 2001 collection and the other one was 2006 but I am reading my way backwards through them)

His reflections on his Mother ageing are powerful – looking with an honest gaze

from House-Clearing

… the legs that, as a girl, she was famous for

have started to give her hell, and she must leave her house

which we both call home, as in “Are you coming home

for Christmas?”, and I can’t believe her house

holds so must of her...

On Connection by Kae Tempest

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Having heard Kae, from a distance, at Greenbelt and being honest not enjoyed the experience I then brought this in the book tent as there was clearly something going on that I had totally missed.

It is a poetic book, richly written, dense in a luxurious way.

From it just a few points that touched me

They quote Erving Goffman who suggests that all social interaction is make-believe, we are all always playing a role – and society gets on find it you stick to a defined role - “Nobody interrupting the drama, everybody comfortable in their role in the exchange.” and here we can see why society finds non-binary identities a challenge – it is a rejection of neat boxes and that is disruptive. It is a failing of society that it is too lazy to engage with the person and want to stick with just identity-kit roles.

“But sometimes I need something radical to snap me out of the lonely daze. Something ancient and more human than everything we’ve built to keep us safe and quiet and nice and routine; all the convenient distractions of goal-orientated life, the numbness that holds up the curtain, the covering that takes the edge off the violence of our distant and not so distance past.” Which is for me part of the reason why we need to keep liturgy “weird” - for it to be other from the normal modes of interaction – to be a place in which our minds can shift out of ourselves.

“No one really cares about what you said or how you said it. They are all too busy agonising over what they said or how they said it. Even if they’re online ripping the shit out of you for what you said or how you said it, it’s really themselves they’re angry at and besides, other people’s opinions do not define you.”

The Architecture of Public Service edited by Elain Harwood and Alan Powers

 Twentieth Century Society 

The mid twentieth century saw significant numbers of public buildings of all sorts created providing the opportunity for this study to draw out themes from them.

Firstly they tell us of the confidence of the local authorities that where creating them – they had resources to invest and improve their communities, and were doing so in an unapologetic way that now be very difficult to achieve.

Second, there was a shift from architecture that spoke of the past, perhaps with an emphasis on rootedness, to the embrace on modernism – communicating that municipal administration was efficient and helping drive forward progress. Another area of confidence that as probably faltered.

Part of the reason for the Twentieth Century Society wanting to give focus to these buildings is their vulnerability.

Bespoke buildings designed closely around a particular purpose and function are often hard to adapt to the changing needs and uses. Cash strapped authorities look towards disposal and either cheap new build replacements, or often simply the curtailment of the whole function that required the building in the first place.

But as buildings created as part of a self-conscious programme of place making there loss from the build environment of a town or neighbourhood is a particularly acute one.

Dean Dwelly of Liverpool

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It has taken me a while to get around to this 2015 Alcuin Club Collection.

 

As a study in that mid twentieth century shift in the role and status of Cathedrals within the Church of England it provides useful insights. Engagement with those beyond the Church via the medium of performance and pageantry of the liturgy is deeply out of fashion within the Church today – but there is, in my mind, little real evidence that it would be any less effective today as it was under Dean Dwelly.

But this is also an over long fan letter to Dwelly and despite Peter Kennerley repeatedly referring to a lack of space to go into detail on this or that matter it is a somewhat flabby text and a firm editorial hand could have been a benefit.

In The Time Of PREP by Jacques J. Rancourt

This collection has a similar spirit to Randall Mann’s work – speaking honestly of the sex gay men have – the joy and the toxicity it can bring.

From the poem Near The Sheep Gate the lines “… / But had we been / born twenty years / back, we might be / counted among / the dead…” certainly ring too true to me.

The poem I Don’t Go To Gay Bars Anymore speaks of the loss of queer majority spaces, and also touches on the ways that queer life have been coded as being an exclusively urban experience, these are big themes that come up increasing. It is something to celebrate that we can live lives openly beyond the queer spaces of the past but the move from majority spaces to inclusive spaces does bring a loss with it – and there is a link to that second idea about the urban, to claim the right to be queer in a rural setting is important – but even if fully accepted being the only gay in the village is different from living with your tribe around you.

Writing Your Name On The Glass by Jim Whiteside

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The title poem of this collection is a sequence that captures the complex power of longing and how sex and love coexist but at not co determinate.

The whole collection is beautiful.

The Forward Book of Poetry 2001

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I put tabs on the following poems

Incident in Exeter Station by Matthew Sweeney

Out with the Muse by Joanne Limburg

Saturday Night by Thom Gunn

The road Less Travelled by Alan Jenkins

The 6ress – Issue Three – Noitativni Ot Evol

 I put tabs in

Topless by James McDermott

An Ode To Longing by Maggie McLamb

Airways by Emma Griffiths

Love All Conquering by David Thomas

What Is Love? Corinna Board

Male Tears by Benjamin Myers

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This is an astonishing collection – which has a consistent quality and intensity throughout, a very rare thing, especially as the stories take in such a range of eras and settings. They also range in length, from 60 pages down to The Astronaut which is barely more than a page, and yet nevertheless complete – a whole story not a fragment.

The opener A Thousand Acres of English Soil is perhaps the more horrific, a tragedy in the Greek sense – I was left so deeply affected by it, having read it at the start of a train journey I just had to sit shell shocked for the remainder of the journey.

Ending with Snorri & Frosti, which echoes Chatwin’s On Black Hill, again there was a palpable sense of grief for them – that desire to somehow make the outcome something other than the inevitable.

It is a deep collection, but honest in that, and not playing for cheap emotions but speaking of the authentic harshness of so many lives, the loneliness of so many men.

It is not often that I read anything as good as this.

Introduction to Eastern Christian Liturgies by S. Alexopoulos and M. E. Johnson

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As an Alcuin Club Collection this really needs no introduction – it is, as you expect, an excellent study that opens up the topic to general and scholarly readers alike.

That we increasingly understand that the diversity of the Eastern Liturgies is a token of their long authenticity and not a sign of later corruption or imperfection means they are of deep interest as we seek to understand our own worshipping practice.

The comparative approach here is also really valuable, as the differences between the liturgies throw light on the evolution and motivations. That the liturgies have been dynamic over time was a new insight for me – as was the level of potential liturgical reform that might come to the Eastern Churches in the near future.

Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde

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I think there is a great sadness when you read how insightfully Lorde, writing 40 years ago, speaks to some many contemporary issues – the struggles seem the same, have we really made so little progress?

She writes a lot about the impact of intersectionality, before the term was coined, particularly from the experience of being Black, queer, and female. And about the ways that for example within the feminist movement non-White experience was being rendered invisible, often under the false belief that strength and unity of a movement would be put at risk if diversity was acknowledged.

It is an inspirational collection – you are left with a renewed sense of passion to be active in breaking down the barriers and the structures that hold so many lives back.

Heaven by Paula Gooder

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I read this on flight between Toronto and Calgary while I was really not feeling very well, so maybe I was not receptive to it and therefore judge it a little harshly.

But it feels like a reasonable introduction to the ideas of Heaven for those that have never thought about them at all before – but the fact that the main messages are that “popular” beliefs about Heaven and the afterlife are loosely, at best, related to the Biblical accounts, and those Biblical accounts themselves are complex, multifaceted, and evolve significantly, really didn’t feel like news. As a result it is hard to imagine who the intended reader really is.

Only on the Weekends by Dean Atta

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Following the masterpiece that is The Black Flamingo was always going to be a tough gig – Only on the Weekends is presented in a much more conventional narrative form, and reading it directly after Jay’s Gay Agenda it sits much more closely as a companion to that novel than it does to The Black Flamingo.

We need these stories of queer teen loves, and we should rejoice that they seem to be being published thick and fast at the moment – it is a great blessing to the generation that are living their first loves that these stories reassure them that they are not alone.

Jay’s Gay Agenda by Jason June

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This is an unexceptional coming of age teen romance – and it is brilliant for that very reason – it makes being a gay teenager unexceptional – and for that we should be very grateful to Jason June.

The 6ress – Issue Two – Crooked Jukebox

 I put tabs in

Saturday Night, Central London by Karan Chambers

ode to the women in the bar bathrooms by Amy Kay – which explores the power of single-sex spaces, something that is contested and complex within current discourse

disappointed puffin by Serpico Snelling written from the view point of the puffin

This Brutal House by Niven Govinden

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This is a lyrical book, dense, at times holding you at arms length. The Mothers exist only as collective never as individuals. The conflict between the world they create and the world beyond is never settled – a darker vision that the similar home making of Mrs Madrigal.

It is a hypnotic world – which delights as much as it fills you with sorrow – a refusal to accept that the conventional wisdom of how to be is all that is possible.

Within Teddy’s side of the story there is this interesting reflection on going into Church

“He goes not to pray but to acknowledge his good fortune, knowing it is the sancity of space he wishes to commune with, rather than a higher being. Where else can he give thanks but there? Where else will he find the space; this peace? The noise from the Mothers’ apartments dill him, even when they are at their most argumentative, he is happy there, flooded with life and sound, but the peace he finds there is in snatches…

The attraction of church is that its silence is a constant. He doesn’t care about God, but understands how it’s possible for people to make their weekly appointments here… What he gets from a hard church seat is pared down even further, down to his elements.

He does not come to church to pray, more searching for ways to escape...” (p68)

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

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As well as queerness in the early part of the book there is a strong sense of Mungo being neurodiverse, but it is a bit patchy and it is latter identified as Tourette's, which seemed an incomplete explanation. But those characteristics actually seems to fade from sight as the drama of the plot takes hold which is one of the reasons that I perhaps didn’t enjoy this as much as I had hoped. It is tricky when a book comes with such high expectations it is very easy to ended feeling a little disappointed.

I also had a sense of there being too many stories going on, the plot is very crowded, and peopled with one too many easy archetypes, it might have been better for Stuart to strip it back a bit, allow more room for the richness of Mungo’s story. There is a tension between creating a vivid world and throwing the kitchen sink at a novel and for me, on this occasion, my sense is less would have been more.

At the end of the story Mungo and James escape from the city into rural Scotland, and this was an interesting move – for queer people the dominant narrative is one of liberation coming from moves in the opposite direction – such that queer identities are almost unimaginable beyond the city backdrop. This myth is increasingly being challenged – a lot of the queer poetry that is currently being written is exploring queerness in various rural contexts for example.

This Is Not A Rescue by Emily Blewitt

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I put tab in Not Lost

Mum tells me she’ll walk into the woods.

When the come comes, she’ll unhook her mac,

leave the door on the latch and not come back

just like old Tom, who disappeared one day

and the next we found him stretched out in the sun

of next door’s greenhouse, fur still warm and fading

from glossy black to Saharan dirt.

I tell Mum of where the big cats stalk, eyes full

of fire for bison, buffalo, the antelope leaping skywards…

how the Maasi lay their dead out in the open bush

with a single pair of sandals and a stick, to ascend to the heavens,

become great herders of the burning stars.