Young, Woke and Christian Edited by Victoria Turner

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Victoria Turner has brought together a diverse band of young Christians to respond to the charge of being Woke, to embrace and reclaim it and not run from it as a slur.

They speak into particular issues or topics, race, gender identity, climate change, poverty, and so on, and some of what they share is particular to those topics, but mostly what you get is a significant degree of commonality – the things that are “wrong” with our world and our society come from the same sources. These things might manifest in distinctive ways for particular groups of people, or in particular situations but time and again it is the same vested interests that are doing well on the flip side of the situation, it is the same motivations of capitalist greed that grease the wheels of oppression and marginalisation.

As someone that is no so young any more did I feel a generational divide – I think being at a stage in my career where I am economically secure rather than my chronological age is probably what separates my perspective the most – while I can think of some of my contemporaries for whom employment is neither secure nor especially financially rewarding, and I think they will have much closer an experience of the world as those speaking to us from these pages.

I was reflecting a while ago that there are three distinct phases in my lifetime. There was the first decade prior to the fall of the Berlin War, a world dominated by the dark certainties of the Cold War. Next came a period of great optimism, a wave that, in the UK, drove and I think crested with New Labour’s 1997 victory, but it was ebbing away from the time of 9/11 and after the 2008 financial crash the tide was firmly out. And during this third phase there is a feeling of one calamity after another, as each new challenge comes upon us we meet it with greater divisiveness (COVID in some ways being a blip of relative solidarity, at least in its early days and months). For those that have memories only of this final phase there is a mix of hopelessness and urgency – there is no light at the end of the tunnel, so we have to get on a build a fire where we are.

Wild Life by James McDermott

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I love James McDermott’s work – powerful and playful, it really gives voice to so much queer experience, there is also a rich engagement with the natural world, he is not the only queer poet that sites experience in the natural or rural a counterpoint to the narratives of us having to flea to the cities, and that we can only become our true Queer selves in urban life.

A measure of how much I liked this collection is the fact I put tags in the following:

Closet

Seed

Protect the Beautiful Landscapes

How To Care For Your Pansies

We’re Animals

Shaggy

Queer Time

Grind

Mutual

Nuts and Bolts (particularly for the final lines “...I slide back in to sleep and think how wrong | are those blokes who say men’s bodies don’t fit.”

Iguana Pink - from the Tickled Pink sequence

Outsiders

And I was rationing myself otherwise there would probably have been tags in every poem!

Flower Wars by Nico Amador

https://newfound.org/shop/nico-amador-flower-wars-print-e-book/

One of the poems

Minneapolis

If I had been a bit bolder, I would have put my head in your lap,

there on that park bench, and recited something I’d written earlier,

when you were a passing thought with no language attached to it. That summer

the wind brought down over a thousand tress, remember? Their trunks

lay open like legs in the too-hot night and didn’t make a sound. The quiet

rested on your shoulders and settled into the folds of your shirt -

there was only the nest move to worry about. On Tuesday, you wore a suit;

on Sunday, we rode the bus. In between, I scrubbed the sink and retrieved

a mouse from behind the oven, stick my head in the freezer.

I told the ceiling fan I’d wait to call, and then I started listening to music again,

before it was just he news: a ghost town hospital prepared to close,

postmodern cowboys convened a desert rendezvous. What haven’t I told you yet?

Only the parts I haven’t said to myself. I’d like it if you asked me

because then I could say, it’s easy to be a beautiful thing in the moment,

harder over time. Down at the river was where you showed me the old mills,

where the new sits among the ruins, where few things have kept their names.

Queer Ukraine by The Dvijka Collective

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Subtitled “An Anthology of LGBTQI+ Ukrainian Voices During Wartime” it draws our focus on the fact that Ukraine is being attacked by not just a generally repressive regime but a regime that is increasingly brutal in its domestic oppression of LGBTQI+ people, a complete contrast to the progressive direction of travel within the Ukraine (while we should not pretend that Ukraine was a liberal paradise for LGBTQI+ it was certainly moving in the right direction).

So the anthology explores the fear the invasion brings, the determination to defend not only Ukraine but their Queer identities on the literal front line of the war. What does that reality ask of us as Queer people in the relative comfort of the UK, and how should we be more active in defending and prompting the rights of Queer people here and around the world.

There is also an exploration of how Queer and Ukrainian identities fit together – some feel that they are forced into a choice be Ukrainian or be Queer, can any of us be simultaneously Patriotic and Queer? The length of LGBTQI+ oppression and marginalisation in our society’s past and, to varying degrees, present places a distance between a full-bodied embrace. Yet to reject our national identity can be to play into a narrative that Queerness is a recent invention – we need to clam our Queer histories within our National histories, even when that is a history of oppression.

To hear voices from beyond our own bubble is so vital, and this anthology is a precious thing – there should be more like it amplifying Queer voices from so many unheard places.

What love would smell like by SK Grout

https://vpresspoetry.blogspot.com/p/what-love-would-smell-like.html

SK Grout’s excellent The Hug was featured in issue 10 of Fourteen Poems and so I order this 2021 debut pamphlet.

From it:

To Katerina

even in another time

I will buy too many books

and you will get tattoos of

the eclipse of the moon

etched into the skin beneath

your wrist bones;

I will drink coffee, I will drink tea

and you will bathe in the

first light of the winter sun

spread across the living room floor

like an eagle cradling flight;

I will respond to all emails,

“Sorry it’s late”; and you will

collect juniper berries, periwinkle shells,

cry over oxidised lava rocks burnt black,

press cornflower petals into books

you will never read;

I will stay home, you will tree-pose;

I will listen to Chopin’s polonaises,

you will dream ferocious big,

think jazz blue,

lap in an endless pool of innovation;

someone, I tell you,

will remember us – you nod: the internet,

credit history and our names in the sand

Fossil Sunshine and Because We Could Not Dance At The Wedding by Michael McKimm

https://www.worplepress.com/fossil-sunshine/

https://www.worplepress.com/because-we-could-not-dance-at-the-wedding/

Fossil Sunshine was published in 2013 and Because We Could Not Dance At The Wedding this year, so it is interesting to encounter these two words a decade a part.

Fossil Sunshine, perhaps surprisingly for some, makes a rich poetry from geology. These are nature poems I guess, a deep rootedness in the landscapes they describe, moments in time and yet also speaking of geological time.

An example from it:

The Bindon Landslide

When the earth began to move, cracks daggering

the chalk cliff path, they thought nothing of it,

went home to their beds, the landlord’s Christmas

whisky still hot on their breath, bellies happy

with sweetmeats and pickle. They slept with deep,

dark dreams of the day, of the horse buckling

in the limestone quarry and heavy hods cutting

their shoulders, then darker dreams of sulphur

and sinkholes, dank pools of bitumen, rivers

of leachate, pipelines, convoys, midnight tankers,

and the sea roaring, agitated, an intolerable

stench that woke them, their tenements rending

and sinking, the moon in the window entirely ajar,

fissures gaping, they’d say, like the mouth of hell.

Because We Could Not Dance At The Wedding is a collection of love poems, poems written in the context of love and relationship within their, now, husband. So many love poems are written either for a lover we desire but don’t yet have or a lover we have lost but to write the love poems that capture the love of an ongoing relationship is a deeper skill.

Aubade also features in Issue 10 of Fourteen poems, and Michael read that and Daffodils in the IG Live for that.

Conversion recounts their conversion of their civil partnership into marriage – an administrative task at the registry office which takes them a little by surprise with its power:

“…

I don’t think I fully knew before

what language can do:

that the weight of our vows

is somehow writ larger now

is not something I thought I would admit.

...”

And the longest poem, Tattoo, explores the experience of giving blood for the first time after the NHS removed the ban on Gay men in 2021…

“…

I wish that anger wasn’t

needled deep

I wish our friends knew more about our anger

that we did not hold it from them

in the shrug and sleepy smile

of relative peace.

...”

Chan Says & Other Songs by Caleb Nichols

https://calebnichols.bandcamp.com/album/chan-says-other-songs 

This collection is accompanied by an EP including a selection of the poems, this creates a rich combination, being able to hear some of the work performed not only unlocks those particular poems but tunes your ear into the whole collection.

A number of the poems are paired with a “redacted” version where the few remaining words or letters from the poems become something new and complete in themselves.

One of the poems

Chan burns her Bridges

I burned one

or two in the

usual way

thoughtlessness

a cigarette

thrown out

the window

the shock

of it bursting

into this

quiet

others though

were more

precise

delicately

lining

each truss

with explosive

silently

setting

each clock

Pandemonium by Andrew McMillan

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Coming now to Andrew’s third collection it is a return to the beginning because pill-box from it was my introduction to his work due to its inclusion in the Forward Poetry collection.

Reading it out of context I had read pill-box as being about the treatment and management of physical illness, particularly HIV/AIDS which in the early days of treatment was a relentless routine of pill popping. The references to grandparents, the acceptance of the pills as a symbol of a decline in health and freedom. But reading it here in sequence it is mental rather than physical health that is the setting, and the relationship with anti-depressants is even more complex. Are the pills keeping you well or somehow stripping you of yourself?

On the opposite page untitled are three lines…

one thing the pills mean is that you rarely cum

your body pushes you to the edge

but has learnt to step back rather than jump

having been with someone who came off anti-depressants during our relationship, this is a side effect that taught me a lot about sex.

The sequence George about his stillborn nephew is beautiful in its grief, raw and tender, the line “no one is sure how we should look after | this sadness...” says so much, echoes of Pádraig Ó Tuama approach to grief and other heartbreaks.

With the sequences Swam, and Garden, and Knotweed in particular the engagement with nature is really rich – this is not some fluffy cloud tweeness, nature here is strong, and offers windows need into our own souls.

Memorial by Bryan Washington

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It might be easy to dismiss this as ‘just’ a book about issues – sexuality, race and cultural identities, domestic violence, HIV – and it is all about those things – but it is much richer than that, the exploration of those ‘issues’ flows out of an authentic telling of the relationship, the love story, of Benson and Mike.

It shines an uncomfortable light on the reality of relationships – they are messy things.

That Ben is left hosting Mike’s Mother, Mike’s frosty (homophobic?) Mother, does tilt your sympathy towards him – no relationship is ever really just about two people, we relate in the context of a hinterland of friends and family – for good and ill. But as time goes on you grow to understand Mike’s actions, even if on balance he might still be in the wrong.

There are big questions about trust, and boundaries, and desire, and truth which it inevitably doesn’t answer because they are unanswerable – we exist in the question. And while it is mostly a fairly dark book, I took an affirmation from the darkness – we are not alone in our darkness. Life is hard in a million different ways for different people – we need to hold the light and the dark for one another.

I put one tag in the book, for this quote:

“There’s this phenomenon that you’ll get sometimes – but not too often if you’re lucky – where someone you think you know says something about your gayness that your weren’t expecting at all. Ben called it a tiny earthquake. I don’t think he was wrong. You’re destabilized, is the point. How much just depends on where the quake originates, the fault lines.” (p224)

It touched a nerve because as queer people we live our lives in straight majority spaces that, if we are lucky, are trying hard to be inclusive, and I count myself as lucky that is my reality. But BBC Three’s I Kissed A Boy suddenly mainstreamed (as much as BBC Three can mainstream anything) the power of queer majority spaces. If ever there was a manifesto to get of your phone and get to your nearest gay bar I Kissed A Boy was a roundabout way of saying that.

This plays into the guilt I feel around luxuriating in our time in Gran Canaria each year – because as economically comfortable white men we have easy access to that gay space in ways that so many in the LGBTQ+ community do not. But I take that and channel it so that time is when I recharge giving me the capacity to use my privilege, to use my elbows, to make space for others in the community. Just existing in a straight world is exhausting, and it is worse than it was 10 years ago – we need to take the time to repair ourselves so the fight can go on – we will endure and we will win.