Fourteen Poems Pamphlets 2025

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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. 

 

ecdysis: cacophony of skins by Dena Igusti

Dena’s creativity with form is really engaging, and this brings an additional layer to the power of the words.

Stiff Wrist by Ben Kline

Ben is a poet that I have really liked since he first featured in Fourteen Poems, and this is a typically delightful collection from him. There is a wittiness, and also something about being a gay of a certain (similar) age – not exactly wisdom – that gives a richness to the poems, particularly for me.

mango & starblush by Kayleigh Jayshree

Within this collection I found Elegy for Dead Chihuahua a special gem – a great example of looking at the world with that slight twist that can bring things into focus, something that is true across all the poems.

She will need a stable boy by Jamie Lock

I found the final poem, Progress, packed a really intense punch, in its simplicity it says so much, and talks of pain and compassion and tenderness, while leaving almost everything unsaid.

 

& Change Issue 10

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Another great set of poets

I particularly enjoyed:

According to Lesley by Simon Maddrell

Plantae by Neal Allen Shipley

Straight Boys by Tim Stobierski

Where the jackals howl and other stories by Amos Oz

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I brought this book back in September 2015 due some reference to the story The Way of the Wind in something else I read at the time (although even looking back through this blog not share exactly what that was). And finally got around to reading the rest of it…

These stories are full of emotional charge, exploring the complexities of relationships, the struggles around identity (although whether ‘identity’ would have been the term back in the 1960s when they were written), and the sense of place. The kibbutz setting of most of the stories brings much of this into sharp relief – it is setting where the sense of community and of purpose is strong, and so any dislocation can as a result become intense.

Do these stories have a message? It is a subtle one, about the human experience rather than a straight forwardly political one.

These are stories that linger in the mind, so well crafted that they draw you in and make you feel the emotions of the participants.

Aquarium by C. C. McKee

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Aqua’s Barbie Girl is often seen, and dismissed, as a novelty song. And so it is really good to have this book in which C. C. McKee takes it seriously, showing that Aqua were credible musicians and Barbie Girl was an expression of their craft / their art.

They set Aqua in the context of the Danish music scene and show both the influences on Aqua and the ways in that Aqua influenced others.

As well as Barbie Girl, which has renewed fame due to the Barbie movies, they also explore the other singles from the Aquarium album. Some of these are songs which I was not familiar with – and good to be introduced to them and see how the skill that created the hit Barbie Girl are also on show in the wider work. And the contrast with Turn Back Time, a song I had forgotten was by Aqua...

They also explore ideas of ‘camp’ and how through the dance remixes of their songs Aqua were linked into the gay scene – how this was a particular important part of their success in the USA – and it is again this is the validation of taking seriously of things that are often treated as disposable.

Eff-able edited by JP Seabright and George Violet Parker

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This collection of poems, brought to us by Fourteen Poems, is so fresh and powerful. To speak of the sexuality of people with “disabilities” shifts so many boundaries – and in claiming their Queer Sexual identities our poets are also claiming their personhood. Too often the de-sexualising of people with “disabilities” is a key part of their de-humanisation. Allow them sexuality and you allow them power and agency.

It is hard in such a strong collection to highlight particular poems, but I will mention these:

I love men that have it brutal but make it gorgeous by Will Darling which declares love to so many ways of being a man…

When Google returns five million four hundred eighty thousand results for fucking by Cat Chong

Choke Me With My Sunflower Lanyard by Rosamund Taylor it layers up the complexity and the simplicity of lust.

Fragments From The Dark edited by J Williams and L Guémar

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This collection was published in 2008, and I have had my copy for the best part of a decade before now reading it – but reading it now in the midst of protests outside asylum seeker accommodation made it all the more powerful.

The first thing this shows is that our nations wrestling with questions around immigration are not new, the stories in this collection show that the place we are standing now is at least two decades in the making – two decades during which our political leaders seemed unable to have an honest conversation about immigration, and as a result they seem unable to have anything but a toxic conversation.

The second thing is this is a collection of women writing in Wales – that it is women’s voices, speaking in the context of Wales, makes for a distinctive contribution. There is a belief that the people of Wales, from their own sense of marginalisation (dating from at least Henry the VIII acts of Union if not before), make them more open to welcome the marginalised from other places. This belief will be given a strong test come May if Reform become the largest party in the Senedd.

The collection speaks to the resilience of the women writing – and in this there is hope – the struggle with go on, but the spirit of these women is bigger and will endure and will overcome..

 

To The Air by Thom Gunn

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This is a slim volume, just 10 poems (if you take the parts of The Geysers as a sequence of separate poems, 6 if you treat them as a single whole), but it is rich in Thom Gunn’s style and skill.

I will highlight two poems:

The Corporal, its close observation, the interplay of the life force of the young solider and the shadow death, the young man’s purpose and his fate?

The Bath House, the final and larger part of The Geysers, its broken line form part of the move away from the formality of earlier work, given a real physically to the experience of “the hot bath, barely endurable” ending “I am | I am raw meat | I am a god”

But I should also say that my particular copy had some delightful marginalia which I shared on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1GnLMWjUhA/

POST, SENTENCES, and (analog) CRUISING by Leo Herrera

Check out Leo Herrera's online shop at https://iftheylived.myshopify.com/ 

 

Leo Herrera is one of those people that I follow on Instagram but I am not sure exactly where I first encountered them, was it just the algorithm pushing them into my feed – if it was, all I can say is, the algorithm sometimes gets things right!

POST is made up of the text of Instagram posts Leo made between June 2020 and November 2023, a period shaped by COVID, HIV and Mpox, and BLM, seen through the Mexican eyes Leo in the USA.

A couple of the posts

10.18.22

To study Queer history is to scavenge for pieces of us. To compensate for the lack of records by finding crack where Queer light might come in. To read between the lines, to find irregularities. What we lack in historical date we have to make up in imagination. We’re in there somewhere.

An extract from 10.28.23

Home, is not a static place, but a goal.

Many LGBTQ folks leave our birthplace and chase cheap rents and physical safety. The Queer experience is an immigrant one. What does ‘home’ mean to you and how has it changed as you get older?

SENTENCES rewords some of the material from POST and I tagged so many pages as as it is so strong in it message LGBTQ empowerment.

From it ...

Prayer

Queer people

are not taught to think about our future.

We spend so much of our lives

digging up our history,

focused on the legal and sexual economy

of our present.

Queer people

are not taught to think about our spirituality.

We spend so much of our lives

banished from religions

and focused on our bodies.

In this time of plague,

climate and economic crisis,

when making plans feels futile

and overwhelming

remember this:

Imagining your Queer future

is a form of prayer.

(analog) CRUISING is something different. It is a reaction to the rise of hook-up app like Grindr and the loss of Queer physical spaces. It is a celebration of cruising, of casual, even anonymous, sexual encounters between men (who may or may not identify as Gay/Bi/Queer or anything other than Straight). It is a how to guide, with some very practical tips, the dos and the don’ts of cruising in a range of different settings.

In a sauna (or bathhouse) Leo catches sight of himself in a mirror. And for a moment doesn’t recognise himself, “lithe and alert, stoic and simian”, because “I’d never seen myself hold my body like this. In the outside world, I hunched over and shrunk in front of other boys… here, I carried myself differently. I felt relaxed, patient, grown… It would take me years to understand that it was not some secret, extra version of myself, but the real one.” I have found that same sense of liberation and empowerment in a mix of different Gay/Queer sexual setting.

There is also a line I just want to share because I think it could have been the opening of a song by Bright Light Bright Light “Nature is not always fair or kind, but she’s delicate, random, and beautiful.”

 

Father Myself by James McDermott

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This collection is incredibly honest and open about the complexities of grief – it is not sugar coating anything, it speaks with a tenderness – a living with the reality of situations, even when they are far from perfect. It is an exemplar of the kind of open hearted / broken hearted approach to life (and death) that we found in Andrew Flewitt’s Do You Believe in Life After Loss.

Two of the poems…

Shauny Bubble

I clock you in Nivea pink lather

as I soup your granddaughter’s little limbs

like you scrubbed mine when I was muddy knees

I clock you in seafoam on Weybourne beach

strolls we never did together I clock

you rise in lager pints we never shared

I clock you erupt in boiling water

as I stir two a.m. tea in your Best

Dad mug I clock you trapped in a spirit

level still reminding me I’m not straight

I never asked you why Shauny Bubble

was you life-long nickname maybe Bubble

was your first word your first teddy maybe

everybody knew you’d float briefly burst

James

age six James means Bond cars guns but I am

silver Space Girls Heelies pink nails I say

my name already knowing it’s a punch

line I’m sixteen my father is boiling

a kettle by closed window when I tell

him I’m gay he turns his back on me

as if I am the past I’m twenty-six

in the living room drunk on New Year’s Dad

queries if I’m dating someone my heart

full hot kettle I grill if he recalls

turning his back on me and then he spills

he had a brother named James who was bi

in eighties Manchester my father was

the only man James told before he took

his life James comes from Hebrew name Jacob

which means to supplant to take the place of

 

Do You Believe in Life After Loss by Andrew Flewitt

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The collection is made up of interviews between Andrew and a selection of people that have experience of loss in different aspects of life.

Although these are all Queer people, in most cases their Queerness is not central to the experience of loss, but at times it had the potential to add to / or intensify the experience when one consequence of their Queerness was a dislocation from some traditional support networks (e.g. family).

In some cases that same dislocation became a source of resilience, they had overcome the loss of that support network and that provided a pattern for their experience of whatever new loss it was they were currently encountering – they had already shown to themselves they were not ultimately defined by a situation of loss.

Their experiences also show that loss is not a linear thing – often in the moment there is a busyness to it – when a loved one died there are funeral arrangement to make, piles of admin to attend to – during a major health issue there are hospital appointments, tests and treatments – it is often only later, sometimes years later, when the dust has finally settled that the true experience of the loss comes home to you.

Each chapter concludes with a reflection on its theme from psychotherapist Silva Neves.

I think this, extend quote, from the chapter when Andrew interviews his husband, Theo, about their separation. These are Theo’s words…

“Something that has occurred to me… is that there is no difference between an open heart and a broken heart, and to walk through life in an open-hearted way is to keep company with pain.

… our lives and relationships with other people, they are going to wound us at times, but the alternative is to close down out of fear and not risk that pain and then shut people out.

What we need, in order to be able to walk through the world with the brokenness of an open heart, is courage. This need for control is a response to fear. We’re afraid of loss, of uncertainty, and we’re afraid of the truth that we all really know in our hearts, which is that we’re not in control of anything and that life can change at any time. …

The best thing that we can do is learn to cultivate the courage to face the truth, and to face the inevitable pain and heartaches that will come through life. I’d rather spend the rest of my life increasingly cultivating that courage to open my heart rather than retreating in the illusion of control.” (p183)

Lives Reclaimed by Mark Roseman

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This account of “the Bund” is fascinating on many different levels.

This group had a very 1920s mix of spirituality, health and exercise, hippy-ish but also very disciplined – but as the 1930s brought the rise of the Nazis the group became intentional in their resistance to the regime.

However the impact and legacy of the resistance has been contested – it was a resistance that did not actively attack the regime, a resistance of continued existence, a resistance to the totalitarian state by retaining a life beyond the reach of the regime. Do we view the act of taking flowers to a Jewish couple the morning after Kristallnacht as inconsequential or as radically profound? I think Roseman might suggest that it can perhaps be both.

It is enlightening how much freedom the Bund managed to maintain throughout the Nazi and war years – it shows that the Nazi grip on the lives of German people was not as complete as we tend to believe – and here is one of the tensions – the Bund kept that freedom by being below the radar, if their resistance had been more confrontational it is likely they would have been eliminated – so what is the better outcome?

That the Bund helped safe a number of Jews from the Holocaust is accepted, but as some of the Bund were Jewish the official scheme of recognition has excluded them, as its terms of reference are the recognition of the “self-less” actions of non-Jews – under these terms the Bund is deemed to have acted in self interest.

Is the Bund a template for us in our increasingly dark times? Not in a straight-forward way, but I think essentially yes – we are to live true to ourselves, to be clear about the reasons we resist ( the Bund had 17 points critique of the Nazis), we need to find those we can trust and bind ourselves together, we need to endure, we also need to live as if we are free (the Bund’s walks in nature continued)...

For the Dying Calves by Durs Grünbein

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This reflection on the ways in which the Nazi regime presented itself, and the ways in which we remember and relate to it – the silence in the early German post-war years, the ways the increasing distance can reveal more but the risks that this is now moving beyond “living” memory. How do we continue to witness to the horror now?

In the continued paragraphs Durs writes

“Even if they are dreamers, the poets, the only thing they do not doubt is that the words and deeds of our predecessors will catch up with us. In this respect they are sensitive, specialists, constantly in radio contact with the dead.

… No one can jump out of their historical time, no one escapes being formed by history. Once perhaps in the unimaginable times of myth and fairy tale. But today, impossible. …

There is no question of a flight from time, nor a flight inwards – for even there history will catch up with everyone. Instead, history as a history of violence passes though time and imprints itself with all its dates on our bodies. …”

These are uncomfortable conclusions, we would rather be able to stand apart for history, to close the door on it dark chapters and act is if they were nothing to do with us – but we have to live with our history, bring it into the light so that we can be honest in relation to it.

1983 by Tom Cox

If you want this book contact Tom https://www.tom-cox.com/contact/ and buy it direct from him. 

This begins in familiar semi-autobiographical territory – his eye for detail, those little absurd moments of everyday life – and then you start encountering aliens and alpaca and it is not clear how to relate to those chapters – looking at on-line reviews most people seem to have taken them as either irrelevant or as surrealist whimsy – but I just read them with the same semi-autobiographical lens as Benji’s chapters.

This creates interesting thoughts about the relationship between what is in the authors head, what actually appears on the page, and what that results in within the reader’s head – at each stage of translation / reception a lot can be lost and a lot found.

I am a Tom Cox fan, but I will be honest this book didn’t grab me as much as others have, however that is not because of the alpaca and aliens, it is despite of them

For and Against a United Ireland by Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride

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We it feels like live in an increasingly politically polarised world, and perhaps the division of the island of Ireland between the Republic and the United Kingdom is a subject with a longer and more violent history of polarisation than any other “domestic” issue within Britain and Ireland.

Therefore the task O’Toole and McBride have given themselves, to write dispassionately at turns on either side of the argument is a brave one.

It runs the risks of becoming platitudinous and dim, but they remain insight and engaging.

They both, separately, make the case For and Against – they are not arguing with each other, not even with themselves. They put forward sound reasoning in favour of unification of the island of Ireland in a single state and sound reasoning in favour of Northern Ireland remaining a part of the United Kingdom. They do offer uncomfortable truths to the advocates of either outcome, but they find no insurmountable reasons against either outcome.

What they perhaps show, and what I guess those of us that have lived from the Scottish independent and the EU Exit referendums should really already know, is that these big constitutional questions can not be reduced to Benthamite calculus – they will always be decided more by the heart than the mind.

Does that make the thinking they have don’t irrelevant, not at all – just because you are going to let your heart lead you doesn’t mean you should thought seriously about the practicalities...

Grace is not faceless by Ann Loades

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One of the insights of a collection such as this, drawing together essays written over many years, is the ways in which someone’s thought can develop and yet remain consistent over time.

It is not the case that Ann Loades had one thought on the subject of Mary and repeated it time any again, she seems about to come it freshly on each occasion.

She takes Mary seriously as a focus of study, Mary as Mary, not Mary merely in relation to others. She guides between those that have venerated Mary to the point at which the person is lost and those that (often in reaction to the former) has evicted Mary from their Church and their lives.

When she quotes Karen O’Donnell she sums so much of this up “learning to love Mary’s body meant ‘not relegateing her to a walk-on part in the nativity or the role of silent, weeping mother at the Cross.” Rather it meant learning to love her ‘in the fullness of her embodied experience’, and the bodies all women, as women in the fullness of their embodied experience, all ‘made possible by and as a response to the love of God.” (p110)

Lively Oracles of God Edited by G Jones and B Nichols

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This is the Alcuin Club’s 2022 book – one of my resolutions for 2026 is to try and catch up on reading these – there are some older than this one on the “to be read” pile.

The thing this collection of essays draws attention to is the fact that most liturgical scholarship is people looking as words on a page, mostly studying past texts, sometimes contemporary prayer books, but rarely thinking about the primary experience of liturgy “heard”.

But as a collection of essays it suffers from repetition – they always do – each chapter provides the context as if unaware that you have just read others on the same theme.

Equally the basic argument of the collection is a simple one, what the people hear is not the same as what the Priest says, let alone what the Priest intends to say.

The study of liturgical text is often done as if the exist in a vacuum – forgetting that during Evensong at Southwark Cathedral the trains rumbling past the window are as loud as the choir.

As a footnote and an aside, there was mention that Justin Welby, while ABC, in the early 2010s felt that those under 35 found the CofE’s resistance to equal marriage not only “incomprehensible” but “wicked” – assuming those people have not had a homophobic epiphany in the meantime those 35yos are now 50

The Solitary Self, Darwin and the Selfish Gene by Mary Midgley

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Mary Midgley offers a critique of the way that Darwin and theory of evolution has been used as an explanation for human interactions – showing that Darwin himself would not have recognised, and would have been very unlikely to put his name to, the “social-Darwinism” or “neo-Darwinism” of Dawkins and others.

Midgley was able to provide me with fresh understanding about the theory of evolution, particularly that “survival of the fitness” is not really evidenced in terms of competition or conflict within species – it is not actually a dog eat dog world (it is a wolf eat lamb world but that is a very different thing…).

This matters because the credibility of much of what Dawkins wants us to believe rests on he linking it to the accolade of Darwin “the scientist”. Take that away and it may not be fatal to Dawkins-ism but it needs to find a new set of foundations.

The other thing that Midgley shows is the concept of the “selfish gene” is flawed, and actually even Dawkins has occasionally expressed regret about that being the characterisation of his theory. The selfish gene was coined as a term at a point when genes were seen as a the answer to everything. We have moved on, genes are now know not to be as deterministic as first thought, and also genes are not the smallest building blocks. Just as at one point atoms were seen as the answer, and now our thinking is all about sub-atomic particles, so interest is pasting towards those things that make up genes. But “neo-Darwinism” has got stuck on genes as the defining feature.

This is a slim volume, a work of “popular” science, not an academic tomb, and so I am sure there are plenty of simplifications that others would pull apart. And just as Midgley critiques Dawkins for killing straw-men of his own making, I am sure Dawkins would defend himself by saying Midgley has attacked not him but a straw-man caricature of him.

Finding Wales by Peter Daniels

  

As a follow up to his book In Search of Welshness I found this a less compelling work, there was some interest in the individual stories of those moving back to Wales after lives lived in England but they didn’t seem to tell a story bigger than the sum of their parts.

That most, like Peter, were moving back in the context of retirement – having moved to England as young adults decades ago in search of (white collar) career opportunities not found in Wales.

Questions of whether the Wales Government and other mostly Cardiff based employers now provide those opportunities is unclear, and does a move from north or rural south Wales to Cardiff actually differ much in term of cultural shifts compared with a move from those places to London are not really explored.

That some might have held their Welshness more strongly as “expats” living in England than they ever would if they had remained in Wales is noted, but what that means upon return, the possibility that they are “too Welsh” or cardboard cut-out in the eyes of the “locals”, is again hinted at but not unpacked.

It felt there was a much more interesting version of this book just beyond reach...

Masculinity: an anthology of modern voices Edited by R Dove, A Kent, and S McPherson

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At 300 pages this is a expansive anthology, giving voice to a rich and wide set of voices.

There is a strong queering of the masculine – owning it not apologetic

I tagged the following:

spit & Sawdust by Simon Alderwick

Sports Bar by Matt Alton

Bestiary of the River of Doubt by Andre Bagoo

Fitter Happier by Ben Banyard

The Last Time by Lewis Wyn Davies

I’m Fine Daragh Fleming

Not to be published poem 2 by Charlie Hounsell

At the Buffalo Irish Center for St. Patrick’s Day by Justin Karcher

Steam Room by James McDermott

Instructions on how to assemble a man by Antony Owen

Losing Love by Sandeep Sandhu

Hey! How are you? By Jack Solloway

This Man by Erich von Hungen

Night Terror by Mick Wood

Kitchen Hymns by Pádraig Ó Tuama

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Pádraig speaks of the darkness and complexity of life in ways that somehow lean into hope, he affirms that life is not easy, and in that affirmation you can face the world

This is an uncomfortable collection – and all the better for that …

I tagged these poems:

In The Name of the Bee

Mother Brendan’s Opening Words at Ash Wednesday Mass

Do You Believe in God? (page 8)

Do You Believe in God? (page 22)

In a Garden by a Gate

A Sword Shall Pierce Your Heart

the words on page 71

The Forward Book of Poetry 2025

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I put tabs on the following poems

The Hebridean Crab Apple by Marjorie Lotfi

ghazal, screaming by Toby Campion

Dear John Berger by Leyla Josephine

What Grief Feels Like to Me by Michael Pedersen

I wanted to show you a donkey in the field or I want to show you the donkey in a field by Lisa Kelly

Dance on My Grave by Amy Acre

An Empty Barn in the Midlands by Eva Bourke

You Wouldn’t Last five Minutes as a Woman by Madailín Burnhope

Snowman by Katie Donovan

The Blood, Oh the Blood by Carrie Etter

Them! By Harry Josephine Giles

We didn’t mean to kill Mr Flynn by Seán Hewitt

Love Poem with Typos by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

The Wild Swans at The Wetlands Centre by Victoria Kennefick

Keeper by Mícheál McCann

The Grief of Creatures by Paula Meehan

Noah’s Ark by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Proofs by Peter Sirr

Ardently Love by Eric Yip

Queer Life, Queer Love Edited by M Bates, G Nour, S & K Beal

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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

Hemisferio Cuir Selected and translated by Leo Boix

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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

The Heart of Things by Richard Holloway

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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...

Too Much by Tom Allen

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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.

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

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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.

I Can’t Even Think Straight by Dean Atta

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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.

The Pairing by Casey McQuiston

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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.

Hearing Our Prayers An Exploration of Liturgical Listening by Juliette J. Day

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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.

We Die Like Brothers, the Sinking of the SS Mendi by John Gribble and Graham Scott

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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.

Midnight Bestiaries by Andre Bagoo

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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.

One for Sorrow, Two for Joy by Caleb Nichols

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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.

Queer Icons Edited by Day Mattar and Brendan Curtis

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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 Orgreave Stations Poems by William Hershaw and Images by Les McConnell

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.

Boys Don’t Try? Rethinking Masculinity in Schools by Matt Pinkett and Mark Roberts

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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.

The (Re) Ritualisation of the Transition to Motherhood within the Church of England by Alice Watson

Joint Liturgical Studies 

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.

Crafted with Pride Edited by Daniel Fountain

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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...

& Change Issue 8

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& 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.

Alter Egos Edited by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall

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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

Bold in The Life by Jeremy Dixon

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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 …