What Gwilym Read Next: February 2023

Sunday, 26 February 2023

I Speak Home by Keith Jarrett

Having read his Selah I clearly looked and found some more of his work – and I have just ordered another offering – this is the sign of a poet I really enjoy – a clear and exciting voice.

One poem …

On My Case

First, the instrumentals: hi-hats, dirty bass,

and a theme I lean back to on a gloomy Sunday.

Then, the book I’ll never read again: my mind too stacked

to reach for the shelf, my spine too slack to give it away:

there are endings and there are endings.

I have a big heart on one of the two Valentines cards I left

unsent. The cellophane wrap reads: blank on the inside.

I’ll leave them be, like the unspent Euros lining the pen pot

with other foreign objects: hollow pen lids; broken buttons.

I’ll leave them

like my headphones, hanging

on the end of a nod, plugged into nothing

but this Sunday and the shadows

and the phone that rings and rings

and knows I won’t pick up.

Cai explores the experience of growing up with two Mums, playing with the awkwardness – that youthful yearning to be just like everyone else, and then the turn of the page when suddenly difference is ‘cool’ - being a male in a world of women – but how much is that just the awkwardness of being a child of parents, we are all enriched by the particular ‘weridness’ of our childhood.

Don’t Panic A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Panicking by Caleb Nichols

Buy it from Abe Books

I was always going to buy a book with 'DON'T PANIC' in large, friendly letters on the cover.

But in fact Caleb Nichols does not tell us not to Panic – but not to Panic about Panicking. It you suffer from anxiety it is likely that anxiety will always be a part of your life – what you need to learn is ways of reducing anxiety and ways of not suffering from it when it does happen.

This is a long quote, but worth it …

“A former therapist of mine, who was into both mindfulness and somatic or body-oriented therapy, would talk about the zone of tolerance and the zone of stimulation, which is basically the idea that we all have set levels of how much stress and anxiety we can tolerate, and then we have upper limits, and outer limits. He said it can be effective to widen our zone of tolerance through confronting and “being with” the feelings that live outside the zone. For me, this is re-envisioning my own anxiety, not as an external threat, but as an essential part of my being. This makes it easier to sit with, and grow more comfortable with. This knowledge is an olive branch: I’m inviting anxiety into my home and asking it to stay a while. What new, bizarre things can it show me? What might it help me create next?” (p52)

This is not a glib, pull your socks up message, it does not down play the distress anxiety can bring – but to find ways to sit with it – to ride the waves, to know that it will pass, that anxiety is not failure – these are things we need to practice on our non-anxious days so that we begin to remember them on the days anxiety has become us.

Surrender dorothy by Shanay Neusum-James

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The poems black dorothy and hold me tinder capture the powerful spirit of Shanay’s work – they engage with the body, they put other’s sense of entitlement in sharp focus, they also offer a sense of delight in the midst of it all.

The poems are strong, the pamphlet has a power that is more than the sum of its parts.

A Casual Kindness by the Unbound Community with Pádraig Ó Tuama

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These are co-written poems, the Unbound Community made up of those within the criminal justice ‘system’.

They have a power coming out of the circumstance in which the writers find themselves – not sorry for themselves, but facing the wrongs they have done does not make them blind to the dysfunction of the system. Far from setting them on a path to renewal and reform it seems almost purpose designed to create a spiral of re-offending – trapped them long after imprisonment has ended.

One poem

What I Feel About What You Said About Rehabilitation

The you that I see through your words about me

exaggerates my story and it hates it.

I don’t see the you

you see in me.

I am better. I am frightened.

I am alone.

I also put tags in

“He Didn’t Show Remorse”

Prayer From A Cell

Feed the Beast by Pádraig Ó Tuama

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Pádraig has such a power to speak the insights of your deepest longing – most often he offers the cooling balm of healing on our wounds, he speaks of reconciliation – wrongs can only truly be righted when we come together.

But this work speaks with voice of anger, a voice sharp with pain – and it is challenging as a result – this is much darker than we usually get from Pádraig – but it is also comforting for that exact same reason – all his work on reconciliation comes, not from a place of indifference, but from this place of rage.

The opening poem …

The Butcher of Eden

Now God made Adam and Eve coasts of skins and dressed them – Genesis 3:21

And when he was finished,

he scraped fat

from the backs of stretched skins,

wiped the blood,

sewed the seams,

bit the thread with teeth

and said:

Dress yourselves in these.

And they said:

what is this verb?

God shoved his knife into the earth, and said:

It’s like make believe

but for your body.

They looked at all the meat

still steaming

from when it was alive.

God said: Eat.

And watched while

beast of Eden fed

on beasts of Eden.

Saturday, 25 February 2023

100 Queer Poems Edited by Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan

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Having been reading so much Queer Poetry this collection is like your ideal dinner party guests – many familiar poets, familiar poems – but also new encounters that delight – Mary and Andrew have done a very good work in bring this collection together – so many voices will be heard more widely, and so many readers will be enriched because of it…

I could probably of tagged every poem, but I put tags in -

Vintage Barbie Chest of Drawers by Matthew Haigh – which I have read before

ode to tracksuit by Peter Scalpello – which I think I had also read before

Spat by Caroline Bird – which in seven lines speaks so much about relationships

may a transsexual hear a bird? By Harry Josephine Giles

from Vitrine by Joelle Taylor

The Law Concerning Mermaids by Kei Miller

A Litany for Survival by Audre Lorde – with its bitter sweet final lines “So it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.”

Tuesday, 21 February 2023

River Kings by Cat Jarman

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Cat Jarman challenges us to look again at the Vikings, and the way we thinking about the Dark Ages / Early Medieval period more generally.

To do this they bring together the latest cutting edge scientific techniques and long known facts that prevailing historical narratives had disconnected. That the Vikings and the Rus are one and the same people seems self-evident in this telling, yet that is not the received wisdom.

Isotope analysis seems to be a real game changer for Archaeology, combined with genetic analysis – bones found in one location can now tell us where they grew up, and where their parents probably grew up – showing how mobile past populations were – when “exotic” goods are found they may have arrived from a long chain of “local” exchanges, but increasingly they may have arrived in the pocket of a single long-distance traveller.

But there is only so far we can go, and Cat Jarman acknowledges this, we can find a Buddha in Scandinavia and speak of the exchange of goods but we can’t place a Buddhist in Scandinavia – grave goods were clearly meaningful but what, exactly, that meaning was will remind hints and shadows at best. We read so heavily our own world-view onto the objects of the past all interpretations need to be held lightly.

Saturday, 18 February 2023

Villager by Tom Cox

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One of my resolutions for this year is to read my small pile of Tom Cox’s books!

This is a rich and at times confusing read – each chapter is almost a self-contained short story expect that they overlap, and you have to be paying attention to make the connection. That the moor speaks for itself is perfectly natural – one of Tom’s skills is to write fables with a realism – as I finished the book I ordered up Matt Deighton album Villager as the starting point and Will Twynham’s Album which imagines the lost work of RJ McKendree – “life” and “art” are in dynamic relationship.

A quote …

“None of us are exempt from that pain. You get a throb or an ache or an injury or an illness. Then you realise: ‘That’s absolutely part of me now, that pain. That is now an element of my unique voice, playing this familiar tune.’ So you move forward, because it’s the only choice, because getting back to the place before the pain turned up is an affront to nature...”

The Art of Christmas by Jane Williams

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With the success of that previous “The Art of ...” books this is a tried and tested format without it being formulaic – although this one lacks a clear mapping onto a “season” - it does as lot of “Advent” material, I personally would have liked a book that aligned to the liturgical calendar between Christmas and Epiphany, with reflections on Stephen, Holy Innocents, Thomas Beckett etc, so I could have engaged with Jane Williams Advent and Christmas books back to back - but I understand why SPCK are looking for a bigger market!

Switch – When Change Is Hard by Chip & Dan Heath

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I am not sure where I read about this and decided to get it out the Library – as a book on effective management / leadership it is for the most part a strong dose of common sense, but having the things you know deep down spoken clearly is still helpful.