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This is such a great collection with a mix of poems, short stories, and non-fiction pieces.
I tagged
My Name is Frida by Rosy Adams
Queer Love by Julia Bell
Dancing Men by Manish Chauhan
The Glass Hammer by Leon Craig
Autumn is the Queerest Season by Serge Ψ Neptune
Going West by Harry F. Rey
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You should already know that I am a big fan of Fourteen Poems, but the anthologies they are making happen just make me love them more and more – and this is such a great example of light shining in the darkness.
Bringing together Queer voices from across Latin American, and in translation bringing them to an English language audience, is pushing back against so many of the things that are toxic in the world right now.
And the poems are brilliant!!
I put tags in…
Selfie by Pablo Romero
Poetas enamoradas (Female Poets in Love) by V. Andino Diaz
Cristo Es Una Mujer (Christ is a Woman) by Ingrid Bringas
A ella (Que tambien soy yo) (To Her (Who is Also Me) by Daniel Nizcub
Mantenimiento y reparacion (Maintenance and Repair) by Edu Barreto
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Subtitled ‘An Anthology of Memory & Lament’ but this is more than an anthology, Richard Holloway sets the poems he offers us within a commentary that really opens them up.
Memory and Lament might feel like fairly depressing themes, but I found this full of hope – even when we are facing the pain of loss, it is painful because of the joy and the love that have gone before.
I think this will be a book to return to from time to time...
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Having found Tom Allen’s first book, No Shame, so powerful it was always going to be a challenge to live up to that. Just because Too Much didn’t make me cry doesn’t mean it a lesser book.
This book centres more on Tom’s family, and it reminded me a lot of Tom Cox’s writing about his Dad – how their Dads are such rich characters in their lives.
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I feel sure that I have read Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, but as I don’t seem to have blogged about it I now doubt myself.
This was a thoughtful gift, a holiday read set in Ibiza when I was heading to Ibiza on holiday.
It speaks to the possibility, and risk, of remaking your life in later life. When you are stuck in a rut and yet the rut, like old slippers, is comfortable.
I am not a big fan of fantasy – I generally find the “real” more surprising that the imagined.
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Once again Dean Atta brings us excellent work, they show the complicity of young queer lives with such skill. The characters are rounded, no cardboard cut outs, they change and grow.
This is a love story and a coming out story, and the two dance around each other.
How Kai and Matt learn to express themselves, their authentic selves, feels real – this is not a linear journey – and questions about how you are true to yourself and true to your friend / more than friend are challenging.
When is it right to compromise for the sake of another, when is it right to put self first.
Powerful and important.
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I got this from the library because I wanted to know what the fuss about Red, White & Royal Blue was all about, but they didn’t have a copy of that.
This is a story about the “Europe” I think Americans imagine – the context is this food and wine coach tour which takes you to the best artisan bakery, the little family run winery, the cheese shop that has been in the family for 14 generations – where everyone has a creative flair. It is a tour that would cost ten probably twenty thousand pounds plus – and maybe because Theo and Kit both come from very wealthy backgrounds maybe they would have booked this tour when anyone else in their early twenties would be Inter-Railing on a 50 Euros a day budget…
At some point in each chapter the story diverts from the descriptions of the fine wines to descriptions very fine sex, I am a sex positive person and maybe if I hadn’t been reading it on a plane then turning a page and finding myself emerges scenes of pegging would not have got me flustered.
It is a turn pager, but it didn’t click for me.
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There is a lot written about the “performance” of liturgy but this book turns to focus instead on the “reception” of liturgy.
Juliette J. Day draws out distinctions between what we hear and what we listen to, between the intentional sounds of the liturgy (mostly the words spoken and sung), the incidental sounds of the liturgy (the turning of the pages of the hymn book etc), and noise (the traffic roaring past outside). But within that mix we find the experience of the liturgy – to treat the liturgical experience as solely an encounter with the intentional sounds is to misunderstand it.
The is some consideration to the ways that the need for the liturgy to be heard has space practice – the use of chant helps carry the sounds through the space, the re-arrangement of Churches after the reformation to favour the spoken sermon – some of these were changes made with an understanding of the physics involved in hearing, some perhaps intuitive. How these were approached gives an insight into what people at different times and places thought was important about the liturgy.
Taking on the whole scope of Christian worship means this is very much a whistle-stop tour of the themes – a good introduction that would perhaps open doors to wider and deeper reading on the topics.
This book not only honours those that lost their lives on the SS Mendi but opens up a wider story of the role those from across the British Empire played in the First World War.
While the First World War played a key role in creating a sense of nationhood in some parts of the Empire, especially for Australia, for most places and people the contributions were marginalised, erased even, in the process of commemoration.
Books like this one play a small, slow, part in reversing that marginalisation – giving people their stories back.
And so we come to the story of the South African Native Labour Crops. The British were drawing ‘Black’ labour from the Empire to support the war effort, but reluctant to have ‘Black’ soldiers fighting in Europe against the ‘White’ Germans in case this encouraged the idea that the ‘Black’ population of the British Empire might take up arms against their ‘White’ British rulers.
And in the case of South Africa the racial policies were extreme, even against the benchmark of the injustices of the wider British Empire, the seeds of what would become the apartheid already growing. The Government of South Africa placing strict conditions on the labour it was sending to Europe, seeking segregation of its people for fear that they might experience some form of equality, that they might be treated with humanity and dignity, and return home after the War with expectation of the same.
Within these fears it seems that was an awareness that the structures of Empire were flawed – the superiority of the ‘Whites’ a fiction that needed to be cared for – that it would take but a feather to bring the house down.
That so many died when the Mendi sank was due in large part to the conversion of the cargo holds to accommodation, without provided appropriate means of access – hatches suitable for one or two crew to access and inspect the cargo, completely unsuitable as the access point and critically emergency exit for hundreds of men.
That this arrangement was allowed appears to not be solely down to the carriage of ‘Black’ labourers, there were similar arrangements on troop ships, but one is still left with the sense that there would have been greater scrutiny of the arrangements on a ship carrying ‘White’ British personnel – the lives for the British Working Class held in higher regard, even if only marginally, but the decision makers of Empire.
The book was published in 2017 to tie into the centenary of the tragedy, now the best part of a decade on and that growing distance, the First World War no longer part of living memory but firmly in the category “history”. It was part of the memories of my Grandparents’ parents in a family while has had long generations, for many there will be an extra generation or two. But the importance of continuing to tell the stories – to tell an ever fuller story – remains. These people deserve to be remembered, and we need to remember the horrors of that war to ensure we do all that do not allow history to be repeated.
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I always enjoy the richness and the myth-making of Andre Bagoo’s work – and this is another strong example.
It is a book of two halves – the first a collection of poems – gems – the second an ‘erasure’ of Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle, leaving a smattering of words on each page – this way of responding to another’s work, of creating something new with them, is skilfully done.
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I have read and enjoyed a couple of Caleb’s other books, and they a Fourteen Poems and &Change poet :-)
This book is seeped in North Wales, there is a strong sense of place, Caleb responding authentically in ways that perhaps are heightened by being from some place else yet invested, this is not the work of a tourist, it is one who is fully inhabiting where they are.
The versatility of Caleb is also at the fore in this work – and it is a delight.
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This is a great anthology, with a mix of powerful voices, including....
Ode to my Beloved’s Back by Katie Jukes
If Lazarus did not want to live by Jay Mitra
your room, everyday, all the time by Dylan James
not quite straight by Alina Burwitz
butter by Elenia Graf
The Stations of the Cross are a rich source, and handled well here.
With words and images Christ is placed in the setting of Orgreave, one of the flash points of the Miners’ Strike.
This could have been clunky, but Hershaw and McConnell don’t force a political point down your throat, it comes as much from what is not said – and in that way carries greater power.
Les McConnell’s images give us a Christ who is a working man – not the soft skinned fantasy of some many Victorians that linger too long in our collective imagination.
The words of the final station…
After Hours: Fear No More
Based on Shakespeare’s Cymbeline
Fear no more the heat o the sun – Cymbeline, Shakespeare
All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return. - Ecclesiastes 3:20
Fear no more the drop of the cage,
The crawl to the face, the din and the thrum.
Homeward you head with hard-won wage
Now your shift below is done,
When golden lads come from their shift,
To coal dust, ash, they surely drift.
Fear no more the frown of the boos,
No bully gaffer harms you now,
There is no fine, there is no loss,
Only one power to which you bow,
For wisdom, law, decree our kind,
Turns into ash, fades in the wind.
Fear no more the sudden flash,
Now the dreaded fall of stone,
Fear not the tomb door’s closing crash,
In darkness to be left alone.
All miners young, how much they graft,
Burn bright and flame then turn to ash.
But may your memory be well-known
And children learn about your days,
Your graves be green where grass is sown,
Your solidarity be praised,
May all your struggle now be past,
All souls like coal must turn to ash.
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This is a book aimed firmly are practitioners, the thinking Pinkett and Roberts are offering is looking to directly change the experiences in the classroom.
They begin by unpacking some of the stats, while White British Free School Meal Boys do have the lowest attainment of any of the groups that are tracked, they point to the attainment of all disadvantaged (defined by the standard measure of eligibility Free School Meals) groups being lower than their non-disadvantaged peers and a number of ways that current educational practices make the links between disadvantage and lower attainment a self-fulfilling prophesy.
They reject the language of Toxic masculinity – finding Tender and non-Tender masculinity which they borrow from blog post by Terra Loire
They look to overturn the myths that create low expectations of certain groups, when teachers have low expectations, pupils attainment will tend to match those expectations. To raise attainment you first need to raise the expectations.
They also debunk a lot of the crude attempts to engage boys in education – this is often as simplistic as teachers working on the assumption that “boys” like football therefore if you put an educational task in the wrapper of football, boys will suddenly engage – any engagement you achieve will be superficial – and matched by the disengagement of those boys that have no interest in football.
They equally debunk attempts to be the “cool” teacher, and the temptation for male teachers to seek to gain engagement with their lessons by being “one of the lads” – often role-modelling the exact lack of regard for the value of education they thought they were overcoming.
It is perhaps easy to point out the problems but the value of the book is that throughout it they are offering practical solutions. Some they acknowledge will take an investment of time and energy to make effective, two things that are a rare commodity for many (most) teachers in our overstretched schools. But when faced with the stats our education system is failing too too many boys, with consequences throughout their lives, so something needs to change.
I don’t normally include Joint Liturgical Studies within the scope of this blog – but I found Alice Watson’s reflections particularly enlightening.
Despite the devotion to the Mary, mother of Jesus, in some traditions, it is general within the frame of her being the Blessed Virgin Mary – making it a devotion that acts to highlight her distinction from every other mother.
The liturgy of the Churching of Women after childbirth, for all the problematic baggage around purification, was a a liturgy that was focused on the mother.
Alice Watson points out that The Church of England’s Common Worship replacement, the Thanksgiving for the Gift of a Child moves the focus from mother to child – and in her experience created a sense of marginalisation.
Given many struggle with post-natal depression and other struggles around identity and sense of self after the birth of a child the lack of any liturgical provision seems a genuine oversight (given Common Worship provides for so many many other situations…).
Alice Watson offers some suggestions about the potential content of such a liturgical response which deserve to be more widely known – maybe not for routine use but so Ministers can add them to their toolkit of pastoral responses.
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Making the link between activism and crafting is at one level to point out a practical issue – in an era before print-on demand and drop-shopping sites if you were a small activist group if you wanted a visible identity or expression of your campaign you were going to have to make it yourself.
But there is more going on here – there are choices made towards the handmade that go beyond necessity. People are still crafting their protest banners. Zine makers might rarely be physically copying and pasting their content now, but the ethos remains the same.
The reflections on the UK AIDS Quilt, draw out the connection, the investment of time in making a personal tribute. It was interesting to have read out it a week or so before going to see it on display at Tate Modern – the tenderness of it and the tragedy of it – but also the logistical demands of caring for the Quilt, the rarity of the opportunity to display it.
The creativity of many of the work discuss is part of its power – when you are denied the chance to speak you can make your voice seen instead. There is also a tendency towards the witty, which creates the potential for subversion without confrontation.
And in need for queer activism is rising again – to now is not the time to put the sewing machines and badge makers away...
The End of Art by Zara Meadows
I think Zara had a poem in Fourteen Poems and was really engaging during the IG live and there is an underlying sense of joy about her and her work.
I could have tagged every poem, Zara has an eye for seeing that little bit around the corner of reality, taking the familiar and showing it to us afresh.
(In)Habit by Hetty Cliss
There was a brightness to these poems, even when they were engaging with challenging topics, the darkness of life. A sense of reading the room and getting the tone exactly right.
& Change continues to bring me joy, and from this issue a share a poem by Kit McGuire
Intimate/Intimate
I knew it from the last
time we fucked, sweat and drool,
hitch in your throat and you got tired
of me, clumsy, blurring myself out,
desperate to cover how
desperate for the salt coating all the
inside of my mouth. Briefly.
I knew it from the last
time you kissed me. And I kissed you.
I’d ask you to break my back.
Find small change behind my teeth.
Buy time.
I knew. I close my fist around how much I loved you.
Pink my cheeks with my fingers in swift circles
nothing in my mouth but air.
If I could afford it I’d buy better timing
and uncertainty.
Bad Betty Press bring us some great work, and this anthology is a shining example.
Among them highlights were
Notes from Mykonos Beach at 4am by Toby Campion
Glitter Fists by Anna Kahn
The Visit by Kate B Hall
an untitled poem by Cat Chong
Ambition by Carl Burkitt
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This is a delight of a collection in its celebration of Polari – part of the wider project to claim our queer histories…
I found the poem “I’m sure they are talking about us” which uses a selection of Polari words that have become mainstream powerful – all of which are very much in my family’s lexicon – English is perhaps the greatest magpie of a language and steals words all over the place.
The other thing that comes through is joy – Polari is a language that existed because queer people could not speak plainly – but they took that oppression and created something that delighted in itself, playful, punful, fierce in its defiance.
Polari is one of the ways that the queer boys find each other and end up giggling in the corner – but that invites some people and also excludes others – I acknowledge that without necessarily apologising for it. You can’t force community – but you can create communities that are open ended – and you put your elbows out to create space, even if they don’t join you they have space and light to find their own people …
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I put tabs on the following poems
At Purteen Harbour by Jane Clarke
‘Avoid Direct Contact With the Skull’ by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa
Third Gender Sonnet by Kandace Siobhan Walker
My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce by Kathryn Bevis
The School of Australia by Chen Chen
Forget by Majella Kelly
SUPER KING by Victoria Kennefick
Like This (Polari Version) by Adam Lowe
Virtual Thanksgiving by Geoffrey Philip
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Adam is a Fourteen Poems poet – the poems are strong…
I put a tag in Bathhouse
Steam rises, a question in the room:
wet, dripping and mingling with sweat.
It’s hard to age a person from their genitals
alone, much less the way they yearn.
Somewhere in a darkroom, a man pulls
secrets out of another man. We men have long
held our motives for coming, this non-place
its organic edges, for meeting eyes as if through
an amoeba’s membrance. The lamps are dimmed,
we all believe, to preserve fantasy; we fear light
will reveal how gently we touch ourselves.
But other poems that I also remembered were;
The Boys Are Killing Their Sims On the Family PC
Cotton-Collared Mafiosi – because when me and a friend told our teacher we were being bullied by a kid in a lower year we were entirely gas-lit – two kids who didn’t yet know their were queer the victims of toxic masculinity from above and below!
Concrete Quarterly
After watching the amazing Invisible Boys I was keen to explore more of Holden Sheppard’s word.
The Black Flower is a short story that is gut wrenching – honest about the damage passed through generations – confronting about the destructive nature of addiction – written so well.
Also included is A Man – an even shorter story – a day, ordinary, but told with a punch that makes us pay attention.
Both examples of the greater skill is to write short stories, complete in themselves, than long stories.
Jay plays with “form” – for example the poem “Twitter Is My Deadname” is the shape of the once familiar bird logo.
Some of the images were powerful – as when the poem “The Popped Football” touched a nerve.
The third part of the collection is a collaboration piece – and Jay treatment of the experiences of others is tender and skilful.
I will start with a spoiler alert – in talking about this book I will be talking about the plot…
The literary conceit of this work is that it is David Wan’s memoir, his telling of his story, which in the final pages after David’s death becomes the task of his partner. What does this add? Not much, for the largest part it reads as a standard novel.
There are some key facts in the story, David goes to a Public School on a bursary, and the power dynamic with the family that provided that bursary, despite their kindness to David, which is toxic. David is of mixed heritage and is othered because he is seen as “non-white”, but having been brought up in England by his English Mother, he doesn’t really have a connection to the thing that causes him to be othered. David is gay. David’s mother enters a long-term relationship with another women. The son of the family that provide the bursary, Giles, is the shadow to the story, a Brexit championing politician – he lurks on the sidelines of the story but has no real part to play. David becomes a successful actor. David dies as the result of a racial and homophobic assault – even in his final moments he is defined by his “otherness”.
I think I enjoyed it as a collection of short stories, as a whole it didn’t engage – Hollinghurst work has also had a strong social / political commentary – but the two other novels of his I have read were published some years before I read them, time creates a certain detachment from the situations and the commentary – while we are still living the post-Brexit post-COVID lives that Hollinghurst is commenting on here, and maybe there is a rawness about it all that is difficult.
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Read this on the train on way to Pilgrim Cross, it is a book that has been on the pile for a while and the selection of a book about a pilgrimage to Walsingham to read on the train to my own pilgrimage to Walsingham was not intentional.
Sonia Overall writes in a way that gives you a strong sense of place, that takes you on the journey and captures that particular essence of encounter you get when walking which other modes of travel can’t provide.
That her first attempt to get to Walsingham ends in A&E touches on the physically of pilgrimage, not that you should injury yourself but that it is an embodied activity.
A couple of quotes that made me smile:
“You have heard the call. You know what you need to do: you are going to walk to Walsingham.” (p19)
“Every time I see the fens sweep out like this it gives me the same tightness in the chest, that ache of vastness. Some people get this from looking at mountains or a clear night sky. For me, it is that formidable call to the horizon: flat fields, wide open and coal black…” (p191)
On This Stretch of Queerland by Dale Booton
A rich pamphlet, and it brought me joy that 2 of the poems had previously been published in &Change – there is clearly a natural overlap between Fourteen Poems and &Change.
One of the poems (which you can hear Dale read on the Fourteen Poems Instagram)
Dining Out
you introduce me to your favourite Chinese food
double fired chicken doused in chillies
and my throat flares at the sight of them lips already crying out
for water you grin watch my face chopsticks
poised like the front legs of a praying mantis
I strike snatch up a fair amount toss it into the trembling
abyss while chewing I focus on your face
coke-glass eyes night-framed glasses nosey tongue
try to distract myself from the napalm spice
dare not look towards the oasis of water
a fork away what do you think my voice
tries to battle its way through the flames wants to tell you
that there is no taste like the taste of your names
in my mouth but instead falters at it’s nice but a bit hot for me
Pick Up Your Feelings by Christopher Lloyd
I am pleased to report there is a &change cross over in this pamphlet too, Christopher’s poems mostly focus on a candid view of contemporary “dating” - especially the sequence alt
One of the poems
catfish makes me cry
every time
like sending nudes
& being left
on read
your heart a mushroom
think with salt
massages in brine
stored up
for when you vanish
again
your mother is calling me
red flags
billow in your selfie
If I Were Erol by Kann K/Yas Necati
These are such smart poems – I really loved them – I tagged the following:
Poems to my names I
Handsome
I am not an answer
Sacimi kesebilir misin? ( Can you cut my hair?)
Sometimes I am more boy than brave
which concludes
…
i have smiled like hope before.
i have loved like hope before.
i will smile like hope again.
i will love like hope again.
Poems to my names III
Faith
Symmetric of Bone by Troy Cabida
The jewellery of Elsa Peretti is the inspiration for these poems, and the results are jewel like, precise and on occasion cutting…
I put tags in:
Pearls in a Thumbprint Bowl
Victoria Embankment Park, 2023
On Normativity, which concludes “… | Have my ashes forged into a diamond | set on a chain or a gold band, | a setting so clean | I’ll spend this next chapter of my life | flicking light at the still-living.”
Symmetric
Citrine
Bone
Elsa Peretti II, New York 1975
This collection of essays that were written as companion to exhibitions in London and Berlin offer reflections that take off the rose-tinted glasses and ask some difficult questions.
As a collection of essays it does suffer from some significant repetition – how many times did I need to have Christopher Isherwood’s time in Berlin explained?
That said, being a collection is actually its strength – different voices, giving space to women’s voices that were not heard at the time.
But it is a sad read – it was published in 2021 and it hints at echoes of the darkness falling on the 1930s – writing now in 2025 I think those echoes would be front and centre...
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I am not sure why it has taken a while for me to read Seán Hewitt 2020 debut collection Tongues of Fire, and then in the same week I also read 2024 collection Rapture’s Road.
How rich these poems are, full of images of nature, the delight in the beauty of creation. We might feel that writing about trees and flowers would be twee – but there is none of that here.
Some poems touch on events that Seán shares in All Down Darkness Wide and having the extra context from that added to the power of those poems.
From Tongues of Fire I put tabs in:
Leaf – which gave me echoes of Philip Larkin’s The Trees
Dormancy
Wild Garlic
Tongues of Fire – which concludes “… | asking over and over | | for correlation – that when all is done, | and we are laid down in the earth, we might | listen, and hear love spoken back to us.”
From Rapture’s Road I put tabs in:
So I step inside
Go to the lamplight
We Didn’t Mean to Kill Mr Flynn
Two Apparitions
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It was a Church Times review which brought this work to my attention,
What Noel Malcolm explores is fascinating and uncomfortable in equal measure.
Uncomfortable in large part because the evidence available about “male-male sexual relations” in the period (1400-1750) is overwhelmingly the records of one court or another – accounts of “queer” lives written by those prosecuting them, those often sending people to their deaths.
Uncomfortable also because Malcolm challenges those who have chosen to fill in the gaps, the massive gaps, in the documentary evidence, with some sort of queer utopia. In the context of the small populations, and the highly class differentiated societies, most of the population of “early modern Europe” were living in the smallest of small towns we know today, and in those places even 21st Century Queer life can be a struggle.
Malcolm approaches the subject be showing that there seems to have been a consistent pattern male-male sexual relations around the Mediterranean which was dominated by “pederasty”, with all its difficulties. This pattern saw boys up to the age of around 18 being passive partners, young men of 18 – 30 being active partners, and men of 30+ marrying. The explanation offered is marriage for men was defer until around 30, when a man had learnt his trade and was able to support a family.
In Northern Europe there is little or no evidence for this pattern of behaviour – but men married younger and therefore the “need” for this pattern of sexual behaviour was not present. The tiny number of cases of male-male sexual relations documented in Northern Europe are akin to the handful of cases from the Mediterranean that don’t fit the pederasty pattern.
Then suddenly in England after 1700 the Societies for the Reformation of Manners started to take action, against sexual “immorality” in general not just homosexuality, and the absence of evidence is turned on its head. This is not something that can have come from nowhere – as London grew, over decades and centuries, so the number of people with a same-sex interest will have grown – what was the tipping point when there was enough of us for “gay” spaces to emerge, for a queer subculture to exist?
The value of Noel Malcolm’s work is that he is seeking to document not to push an agenda – this allows us to see the reality without pushing it in our desire to have richer queer histories than we have been allowed.
We need to own this long, toxic, history if we are going to stand up to the challenges of today.
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With Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel just published I checked if the Library had a copy, and ended up reserving all the Hollinghurst novels they had.
I found that I encountered some of the same frustrations with The Line of Beauty as I did with The Swimming Pool Library – in part it feels needlessly long, I think you could probably cut a quarter of the text and still tell the same story (but clearly the Booker Prize judges would disagree!). It is also a tale of privilege, although Nick’s place in this world of privilege is not secure, indeed when the dramatic punch comes it comes in the form of the rug of privilege being pulled from under Nick.
The edition I read includes a short afterword from Hollinghurst, penned in 2011 seven years after the first publication of this novel. In it he reflects on how The Swimming Pool Library was set and written on the eve of the HIV/AIDS crisis but then published at its height gave it a particular but unintended reception, the reader knowing what is to come, the characters unaware and unprepared. And so in writing The Line of Beauty (his fourth novel) set in three episodes in 1983, 1986, and 1987, he felt called to address HIV/AIDS directly.
The way that he recounts not just the illness but the shame is powerful, taking us to that moment – the backlash that Nick experiences at a personal level was also played out at a societal level – as he is shunned so Section 28 is placed into statute. The person and the political are ever one.
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I had a Kings & Queens of England / the UK as a child, I still have it somewhere, and even then I was aware that the bit before William the Conqueror was a bit sketchy – the claim that William was, what we might today term, the continuity candidate was thin (far from the only point on the chart when “continuity” has been achieved through change) but I didn’t give it too much thought.
I was too busy being fascinated by monasteries, focused on my Usborne cut and stick Cathedral and its associated town and castle, with a side interest in Vikings (mainly via their habit of raiding monasteries). I also spent a lot of time thinking about the “Celts”, the proto-Welsh, with Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Trilogy rage against the coming of the Saxon’s a key lens to that.
So, while I thought about what was before, and what was after, I really didn’t pay any attention to the Saxon period, and nor I think did anyone else really. But getting under the skin of Anglo-Saxon England, Anglo-Danish England has increasingly been a topic of interest.
And Eleanor Parker provides a useful contribution to that body of work. Taking the generation of England’s elite families who were born before 1066 but came of age either at that tipping point or after it opens up some key insights to the dynamics within the ruling class pre- and post-conquest.
I had grown up with knowledge of the Danelaw, and an idea that there was some kind of iron curtain between Saxon and Danish England (growing up in the 1980s we clearly projected contemporary Cold War realities a thousand years into the past). I knew Cnut told the tides to turn back, as a lesson to his court on the limitation of Kingly power, but I was never told he was King of all England. The level of intermarriage Eleanor reveals was new information for me.
The fact that the successful defence of the throne by Harold Godwineson looked, on paper, the most likely outcome should have put 1066 in the category of turning-points in History when History didn’t turn. The scattering and shattering of the Saxon ruling class is sometime quite surprising.
Some of this transitional generation became rebels, folk heroes, some exiles – as far a Kyiv also pointing to the interconnections that existed, most people might not have gone must further than the next hill but some were global travellers. But others, mostly women, married into the new Norman elite, politically motivated marriages, which provided legitimacy by giving the Norman rulers Saxon ancestors, and providing a level of legacy to those historical families.
The Normans were clearly having to work a careful balancing act, claiming legitimacy through association with the Saxons only so far as it avoided the Saxons being able to claim they, the Saxons, should in fact be in the seats of power.
Politics and power are complicated, and that is nothing new.
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This is a fascinating window into what feels very much like a lost world. The world of Edwardian Britain, of house-parties and of decadence and entitlement.
It is an age where the political class was a breed of amateurs. No 10 is still primarily a home, a residence, not an office with a flat attached. The letters Asquith writes are extra-ordinary, as is their survival which allows them to provide the factual core around which Harris spins this tale.
It is interesting to have this perspective on Churchill and his association with the failure of Gallipoli, not the hero of the Second World War, although in many ways Harris hints that the characteristics that undid Churchill then would be the same characteristics that actually shaped his later triumph.
But I think we should focus our attention on Venetia Stanley, surrounded by a cast of powerful men, she is the one the shines off the page. She has a life of the highest privilege, and yet as a women in that era there were constraints on her – her class clearly gave her agency far greater that most women around her, but even so there were limitations on her.
Although the greatest marvel is perhaps the postal service, that they were not exchanging daily letters but multiple letters a day – almost unimaginable as letter writing fades for us as other instance modes of communication dominate and the postal service limps and whimpers in the background.
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This collection from 2012 brings together a wide selection of poems – many familiar but good to read them again…
I put tabs in:
The Hug by Thom Gunn
Hinterhof by James Fenton
Voice by Ann Sansom
Waving by Pat Boran
My Brilliant Image by Hafez
Two Cures for Love by Wendy Cope
Envying Owen Beattie by Sheenagh Pugh
The Way Things Are by Roger McGough, mainly for the line “A drowning Dadaist with not appreciate | the concrete lifebelt.”
The Trees by Philip Larkin
Count That Day Lost by George Elliot
Pushing Forty by Alison Fell
Church Going by Philip Larkin
Happiness by Raymond Carver
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At a 100 small pages of large print this has been labelled a novella, but without wishing to split hairs is more a short story, or perhaps even the sketch for something intended to be worked up into the developed version – did Bennett send it to his publisher with a note asking them what they thought of the thing he was working on and rather than providing feedback they just forwarded it to the printer.
The ensemble cast is made up of a rich mix of characters, and each gets a moment to shine. The trip to the crematorium which the residents of Hill Topp treat like a bunch of wayward school children is probably the strongest scene, and the distinctions between Hill Topp and Low Moor provide some tension. Woodruff the flasher and his gay Son provide a lot of potential that never really gets unpacked. And then the arrival of COVID seems underplayed. Which when the mystery of Jigsaw-puzzler Miss Rathbone’s past is finally revealed it doesn’t have the impact it should.
As an aside, it credits the endpapers as being “adapted from a French Petit Pois label c.1920” which is not something you see everyday, I didn’t know the Petit Pois labels were a “thing”, but a search quickly found some suggestions, of which this one was probably the referenced inspiration https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3c/a0/bd/3ca0bdf0b2d4bc021504a9c4afd37de0.jpg
