Fourteen Poems Pamphlets 2024

fourteenpoems.com

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

Happy in Berlin Edited by S Evangelista & G Stedman

 

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...

Tongues of Fire and Rapture’s Road by Seán Hewitt

Buy Tongues of Fire from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers  

Buy Rapture's Road from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers  

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

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe by Noel Malcolm

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It was a Church Times review which brought this work to my attention,

https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2024/26-april/books-arts/book-reviews/book-review-forbidden-desire-in-early-modern-europe-male-male-sexual-relations-1400-1750-by-noel-malcolm

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 21^st 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.

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

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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.