The Forward Book of Poetry 2021

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Three Poems that were highlights for me…

Sue Hyon Bae’s After the Threesome, They Both Take You Home provides a powerfully tender and honest account of the ordinariness that can sit alongside sex.

You can see it online at page 63 of https://issuu.com/apeironreview/docs/issue_12_final

Don Paterson’s Death is playful with a figure that haunts us, make you fellow sorry for the Grim Reaper!

Phoebe Stuckes’s Fox captures a young restless feeling “I am doing my best / with bad nights and bad love. / Honey it’s difficult.”

Living in Love & Faith Book

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This book sits within a wider process and it is difficult to separate one from the other, indeed it is probably unhelpful even to try to do so.

That process is not easy to engage with, but we need to hold onto the bigger picture, captured in this quote from p171 - “Eventually, in God’s time, there will only be love. Love is the only thing that lasts forever (1 Corinthians 13). We will find a love untainted by selfishness, unlimited by death and unsullied by unworthy wants and needs. Beyond the last day, when sorrow and sighing and pain are no more and God dwells among humankind, that love, finally and fully answering God’s love, will abide. Love will never pass away.”

In broad terms I think the book delivers on the task set for it, (which might not be the task some would have liked – it is not, and was never intended to be, a manifesto for change), the main message it provides is that you can via a set of reasonable, Anglican, assumptions about the nature of God, Scripture, and the World etc arrive at two opposing conclusions on human sexuality and gender identity. It rules out of court a few of the more extreme positions at either end but it sets a wide field on which the discernment of what is not only reasonable but also correct can play out. It also sets the scene for putting in place some arrangements for “two integrities” such as exist around women’s ordination.

The way it works through how positions are arrived at, essentially why we might believe, and do, what we do probably makes it a useful textbook for anyone wanting to understand the nature of belief across an wider gambit, the issues at hand can be taken as merely useful case studies for a methodology of unpack the different sources and the historical and contemporary influences on belief and practice.

But to say a little on the actual content, one of the challenges that the book shines a light on, and then side steps, is the complicated legacy of the Church’s evolving position on divorce.

This paragraph talking about the current position on remarriage after divorce can only explain that position by deploying a bit of a tongue twister

"The Church of England - where the conditions are right - allow clergy - where their consciences allow them - to solemnize the marriage of those who choose, with due regard to the past and full responsibility to the future, to marry again, and for their bishops to support them, praying to the God who is 'rich in mercy' (Ephesians 2.4): "Pour out your blessings upon [them] that may be joined in mutual love and companionship, in holiness and commitment to each other". In this way, the church seeks to witness to the biblical call for marriage to reflect God's 'covenant of life and well-being' (Malachi 2.5), to the challenges of human life known so well to the biblical writers, and to the God who, 'rich in mercy', is always ready to redeem and make new."

We maintain that marriage is a life-long and indissoluble union whilst dealing with the reality that it isn't. 

This is typical Anglican fudge, it allows the Bishops to maintain that there has been not change in doctrine, while at the same time accommodating pastoral practices that runs counter to that doctrine – and I assume this is sort of thing the Bishops hope they will be able to get away with as template for same-sex.

This twin track of logic goes all the way back to 1937 when the Bishops accepted that civil marriage and Church of England’s understanding were not co-determinant, but the consequence of being a National and Established Church left that view unresolved in practice – we are left wondering how many of the letters required between 1957 and 1982 to provide Parish Priests with explicit written permission before the baptism, confirmation, or admission to communion of those in a civil marriage with a former partner still living their Bishops actually wrote?

This provides a context where “pastoral practice” and “official position” have been at divergence for generations.

Thinking about letters leads me on to the requirement in the 2005 House of Bishops statement for clergy in Civil Partnerships to provide assurance of their celibacy, how many have actually been asked, and how many Bishops in effect told their clergy “I will assume your relationship conforms with Issues of Human Sexuality unless you do or say anything that absolutely forces me to acknowledge reality”.

And this made me reflect that there is something missing for the picture painted in the book, a that is the true extent that pastoral practice for LGBT+ people has in many parishes been at divergence from the official position – up and down the country LGBT+ people are busy within their churches, their relationships welcomed and affirmed, often without a second thought (by no means everywhere, but I think welcome is much more wide spread than rejection). The range of blessings on offer to same-sex couples are often difficult to distinguish from a marriage service, (and Bishops have seen and consented to such liturgies). And even in terms of ordination, same-sex relationships are much less of a barrier to ordination that the book might leave you thinking (I am not saying it is easy, it is complicated and compromising, but it is happening nevertheless – and despite their cowardice to speak publicly it is happening with the Bishops blessing).

It is a few weeks now since I read the book, and my unease about this absence is growing, because if the task of the book is to baseline the debate its failure to map the current landscape fully risks limiting the debate.

The book is accompanied by online “resources” which I have not listened to / watched in full but I am aware that there is a range of voices and experience included, and it may be felt that this covers these aspects I feel are missing, but if so that perhaps worries me more, if those experiences were identified for the online resources why didn’t they get into the book?

Finally, turning of another point, perhaps a bit of an aside, in part two during the review of the range of types of relationships they look at friendship, and say “...friendships can be picked up and let go of...” really? That feels like a rather impoverished understanding of friendship, I might say this of an acquaintance but not any friendship worth having, if someone can be “let go of” easily that would suggest they were never really a friend in the first place.

Kingdom Calling by The Faith and Order Commission

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This Report begins by recalling the various other reports and initiatives that the Church of England has published and undertaken, roughly every 10-15 years, since “Towards the Conversion of England” in 1945 and yet the challenge remains essentially the same, namely that in order for the Church to be effective it needs the whole People of God to be active in God’s Mission.

This is not really about enabling lay ministry within the Church – although there are plenty of internal benefits from doing that and we should continue to build on the progress that has been made in that direction – it is about the laity being equipped to live all aspects of their lives beyond the Church as instruments of Mission.

Therefore while the Faith and Order Commission has produced a perfectly good report the earlier reports were also more that adequate – it was the action, or lack of it, that came after that left the need unaddressed, and as such I am not sure there is any reason to conclude the response will be any different on this occasion. More likely, when in 10 to 15 years time the Church of England returns to this question this will just be added to the already long list of missed opportunities.

Reforming RE by Mark Chater

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The question “what is RE for?” is hardly new, nor is the need for robust answers. The failure to do “RE” well makes it an easy target for marginalisation by those that are uninterested in it or are actively anti its place within our education system.

Mark and the other contributors are honest about the current situation and refuse to make excuses for it – and the response they put forward is both attractive and has real potential to be effective, fingers cross they manage to get some meaningful implementation.

Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney

Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk

I found myself somewhat lost in the layers of this novel, the dual setting of the unreality of 1980s West Berlin and Chicago’s South Side and the rich cast of characters providing a lot to keep track on.

The way Jed’s identity as gay and Black plays with different ideas of respectability is central, and those around him are also wrestling to the identities they wish to have, the identities those that others give to them, and the gap between the two.

He begins with a rosy picture of gay bar ChiChi, but increasingly there is a darkness within the dynamics of its patrons – which often is the case if you scratch the surface of nostalgia for the tight knit gay spaces of the last century.

England by Marueen Duffy

Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk

Published in 2001 it is interesting to see some aspects which are of their time but actually Duffy has been successful in taking a long view as most of what she writes rings true now as well as it did then.

For those that worry that Brexit referendum campaign misled the British people there is little comfort here as the Myth of England that Duffy describes has Brexit weaved into its DNA, for example she notes on p103 that there is an “arrogance bred of this isolationist image… We would prefer to go it alone, even against all economic reason…” so if there were untruths used in the referendum they were ones the English mindset was preconditioned to want to believe.

We also find this in the reaction of many to the Scottish referendum within England, an attitude that I heard from many was essentially if Scotland wanted to be independent then good riddance to them – giving voice to a suppressed belief that England is burdened rather than enriched by the relationship, and the sense that expressing a desire for self-determination is essentially bad manners and ingratitude to the long suffering English parent.

Clearly she was writing just before “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters took other the world, as on p231 references the sentiment “Carrying on is itself a basic English stratagem, translated into wartime cliché as ‘pressing on regardless’...” without the biggest cliché of those particular posters – and fascinating window on the way they have being commercialised essentially as a simulacra.

The dogged carrying on is perhaps the appeal of Test match cricket as the batsman occupies the crease holding out for the draw.

The were some places where language felt a little dated, perhaps in retelling the racist tropes of our colonial past she would now make more explicit distance of her own views from them, and I felt that we ended up with a little too rosy a picture of Afro-Caribbean and Asian immigrant experiences in this country.

We also have a rather breathless conclusion, after millennium of history we get from the darkest days of WWII to the present in 20 pages – maybe it is the intervening 20 years that have put a significant additional distance, the War being 80 rather than 60 years behind us – increasingly it becomes the War Great-grandparents rather than Parents lived through, and so is remote from us. But the conclusion is also optimistic that we are about the break free of the Myth and become Europeans (newly connected by the Channel Tunnel which she mentions for more times that feels warranted) – whereas as things are turning out we have retrenched back into Myth.

And reading in the first days of our second COVID lockdown these words, on the penultimate page, felt weirdly prophetic… “will e-commerce catch on in a country where people are used to going out not merely to shop but to meet others, either by accident or design? Our perceived discontent will be greater if we become a nation of fearful stay-at-homes… Although we are the least touchy-feely of people, we still need social intercourse, we need to feel the village beyond our front door...”

Stephen by Carl Watkins (Penguin Monarchs)

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Again the Penguin Monarchs series provides great interest in a slim volume, in the long run of Henrys and Edwards with its smattering of Richards the name Stephen stands out – yet somehow I had a vague knowledge of the Empress Matilda and “the Anarchy” without setting it in the context of Stephen’s kingship.

The story of Stephen points to the way that the hereditary principle was rarely a straight jacket, and it seems as often as not the English crown passed on beyond the direct line. Also, particularly having just read Maureen Duffy’s England, it is a reminder that the “isolation” of England is a myth, the interplay with Wales and Scotland, but also France and the wider continent had a very intimate influence on the shaping of the “politics” of England.

I also found myself reflecting that the is a echo between Matilda and Mary Tudor – both had the challenge of acceptance as female rulers, but this was not helped by their husbands, the fear that Philip of Spain would naturally control his wife Mary Tudor and through her England is prefigured in the fear that Matilda would be beholden to her husband Geoffrey Plantagenet.