The Madness of Grief by The Reverend Richard Coles

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In sharing this memoir Richard Coles resists the desire to tidy away grief – it seems to be an ever increasing pressure to be stoic in the face of lost loved one. A discrete tear at the funeral to signal that you are not heartless, but never show the uncontrolled, snot out the nose, sobbing that speaks out how you really feel.

Richard shares his deep love for David without flinching about the ways that David was far from perfect, far from easy to live with – that honesty makes the love all the more felt.

A big part of that honesty is to re-account David’s drinking – in many ways uncomfortably familiar… Thinking about why he drank Richard reflects:

“Perhaps this is also something to do with a need to palliate pain, in which gay men, nurses, and clergy are expert? There was something of self-medication in David’s drinking. When he was stressed, or anxious, or unsure of himself, drink was effective, in the short term at any rate, accessible, and socially acceptable. At least, it was until it became uncontrollable.

I think it was not only to self-medicate that David drank. Sometimes he drank vocationally, with a curiosity, and commitment, and dedication.” (p79)

The reasons are never simple, or singular, and that is often why it can be so very hard to break a cycle of drink – you need to simultaneously resist all the reasons at once, if just one of them escapes you the bottle is open again.

Some of his reflections on the invasion of Parish life into the personal are common to any clergy household, but some are particular, or at least intensified, by being a same-sex household – reading this as a companion to engaging with the Church of England’s Living in Love and Faith process only underlines the cruelty of the Church’s current position. That they were planning to get married in retirement, once the power of the Church over their lives was diminished is a plan shared, I assume, by many of the civilly-partnered clergy.

It is also a reflection on the changing season of life – the people we become as we grow older share only a certain amount in common with the young people we once were. Sometimes it is a blessing to have left behind much of the foolishness of youth, but there is a sorrow especially when we have to face that we have grown apart from those who helped shape us. He writes “I had always felt bad about this, life choices of necessity relegating former priorities, and I missed them, not only because I loved them, but because as you live on you realise we are not so much the authors of our lives but a library of other people.” (p135)

Written in the moment of loss there is an immediacy, as life goes on grief changes but does not go away – sometimes it will stab you with the guilt that you are getting along just fine without them, because what-else is there to do?

Love the Sinner by Imogen Stirling

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Taking the list of seven deadly sins, personifying them, and setting them in a contemporary city could be a conceit very easy to get wrong, and so it is to Imogen Stirling’s great credit that this collection sings – it is really a single piece rather than a collection, a narrative of encounter.

It ends like this…

Sloth bathes in ancestral knowledge and sees that, cast from the mind of a Greek, all seven are kintsugi creations, crafted of golden scar and candid despondency. They drive their stories through a city that dangles acceptance just out of reach, like distance moons. Earnest and futile. She sees the seven stand as fallen angels with their halos at an angle. She sees them guilelessly become the story of all people. After all, this was a story of you and me. Of we. Sloth sees us laden with the weight of innocence and guilt that always has existed and understands that we are myth and we are modern. We are legend and we are human. Story and truthful. And sinful? Oh yes. Fallible and beautiful.

Complaint in the Garden by Randall Mann

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Randall Mann is one of my favourite poets, and this collection is another joy.

Part of poem Eros, about a sex club -

…

(It’s hardly my first Eros

experience: there comes an hour

when, in spite of the money,

no matter how unsafe,

I find what I need only in the dark.)

The man without a towel

removes my towel:

I fall into the arms of Eros;

that world, a underworld, dark

no matter the hour.

And it is good. And we are safe.

It is good to have more sex than money.

Written before same-sex marriage was a legal reality, but even Husband sits a little awkwardly for me, too much patriarchal baggage, so I think this poem stands still…

Pantoum

If there is a word in the lexicon of love,

it will not declare itself.

The nature of words is to fail

men who fall in love with men.

It will not declare itself,

the prefect word. Boyfriend seems ridiculous:

men who fall in love with men

deserve something a bit more formal.

The perfect word? Boyfriend? Ridiculous.

But partner is … businesslike -

we deserve something a bit less formal,

much more in love with love.

But if partner is businesslike,

then lover suggests only sex,

is too much in love with love.

There is life outside the bedroom,

and lover suggests only sex.

We are left with roommate, or friend.

There is life, but outside of the bedroom.

My friend and I rarely speak of one another.

To my left is my roommate, my friend.

If there is a word in the lexicon of love,

my friend and rarely speak it of one another.

The nature of words is to fail.

A Blood Condition by Kayo Chingonyi

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I ordered this based on the inclusion of The last night of my 20s in the 2022 Forward Poetry Collection.

The sequence Origin Myth about HIV/AIDS is beautiful, its final stanza…

For those who came before me, a libation!

I conjure you as though we sat around a hearth

when I walk it’s your shadow I’m chasing.

Next to my skin I still carry the hurt

finely woven as a cambric shirt

from before akashishi took so many:

1920, nine years before Nellie.

Dead Uncles by Ben Kline

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In exploring Uncles Ben Kline takes a look at the ways extended family impacts us – often on the fringes of our experience – things happening at the corner of your eye and yet connected to you.

There is a lot of dysfunction here, but there is usually the most fertile ground for creativity...

The Death of a Clown by Tom Bland

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As with Tom’s Camp Fear there is violence and extreme sexual imaginary – but within this we find a window on what it is to be human, what it is to have a connection with another person, perhaps more insightful than the vast majority of “love” poetry.

Some Ending by Ben Norris

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Two of the poems...

inheritance

when I miss you I think of koalas

not the cuteness of the clinging

or the slovenly chew

but the closeness the stench

the fact that many have chlamydia

but still tourists hold them

the fact their sex sounds like

distressed machinery and chiefly

that their young consume

their mother’s shit the sheer

proximity the trust that

they have eaten well enough

that whatever you put in your mouth

I will put in mine

I read the bloodaxe book of modern australian poetry

I read the bloodaxe book of modern australian poetry to try and feel closer to you but it just makes me feel furter away and like a worse poet so I pour a glass of australian wine which works a little better and look through this small window at a distinctly british field wet with genuine rain you water your grass out there you’re coming on sunday and I’m hoping you won’t mind that our sun is seldom hot enough to bake the land but the sky is kind enough to quench it and deliver me you gift wrapped in silver and sleep half a dozen films deep sent from the future -does it get any better?- I’m not proud of the things that I want but I’m not ashamed for wanting them for him to be happy elsewhere for your mother to know my name they tell us when we’re little if we dig deep enough we’ll get there I trying to train myself out of saying sort-of-girlfriend

The Forward Book of Poetry 2003

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

I put tabs on the following poems

The Basics by Stuart Pickford

Dead Cat Poem by Ann Alexander

Thinking of England by Clare Pollard

Pumkin Summer by Robert Seatter

The Witch’s Brat by Rosemary Sutcliff

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

As with the Outcast I found myself giving this story a queer reading.

The dynamic of the story comes from the encounter of Lovel and Rahere. Lovel is driven out of his village because of both his physical disability and the gifts of healing, whether intuitive or supernatural, that he inherits from his Grandmother. Rahere one-time Jongleur (or Court Jester) who became the founder of St Barts.

They are both outsiders, marked out in various way for not conforming with the expectations of masculinity – although in the context of monastic community their alternative ways of being were given a certain social validity – but those within religious communities are almost by definition “other” than society’s norms.

Although published in 1970 Sutcliff in still writing as she was a generation earlier, I would not want to get carried away, this is not radical call to liberation, but neither is it a text of heteronormative terror.

I also found the words Sutcliff puts into Rahere’s mouth to explain his move from Jester to Monk, following the sinking of the White Ship, intriguing…

“It seemed to me then, that if life was indeed a small matter, there could be no God to trouble Himself with such a trifle; and I found, somewhat to my surprise, that I could not believe there was no God. It followed then, that there was something more to life than making the King laugh after supper...”

This seems an unusual sequence of thought – many move from a sense of life being meaning to a sense of God behind that meaning – but here, instead, it is a moving from a sense of God to the awareness that life must be meaningful.