The Bone Chests by Cat Jarman

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After enjoying the River Kings I was hoping for a bit more from this – in part the issue if that the Bone Chests don’t actually provide the key to unlock the narrative and in fact leave the book a bit all over the place.

We seem to jump around a bit, as the stories of the different Kings, Queens, and Bishops overlap – so having told one person’s story you often have to lurch back in time to pick up another’s.

There are various asides, for example we get a couple of pages in the treatment of the dead after the Battle of Waterloo, including the processing of their bones as fertiliser, from which can infer explanations why finding the locations of other historical battles which should be accompanied by mass graves in fact proves so hard, but it is then followed by five and a half pages on the discovery of Richard II explaining how it is possible to have a high level of confidence in the individual identification of some historic remains – both of these are interesting in themselves but at times as we wander freely you almost forget you are reading a book about the rulers of Anglo-Saxon England.

In a similar way the imagined vinaigrettes that begin each chapter somehow don’t quite work – they are not long enough for you to get into the head of the speaker, but long enough to break the flow of the Cat’s own voice.

We are given two sections of photos, but these are not given figure numbers or cross referenced within the text, while at the start of the book we get a map of England c.880 – but given the book is describing a dynamic period why we get this one date and no evolution over time – and a plan of the Norman Winchester Cathedral with the shadow of the Old Minister but not the New Minister despite the dynamic of the period under discussion being the uneasy relationship between Old and New which as the book closes is swept away by the construction of their Norman replacement.

Cat Jarman is an engaging writer, but somehow on this occasion the sum feels slightly than the parts...

Pity by Andrew McMillan

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This is McMillan’s first prose work but it unsurprisingly retains a poetic sensibility. Every word considered, crafted, and placed with exacting economy.

Chapter by chapter you jump between past and present, between the first person narrators, and it took a few to tune into the ways this fabric weaved together.

Set, by turns, in a Pit Village / former Pit Village a context in which identity is both strong and contested – exploring queer identity in this setting even today is pushing a boundary, being Gay and Working Class remains largely invisible.

Being a miner was perhaps the most manly of expressions of masculinity, and now the mine is closed and Simon is a Drag Artist (and call centre worker / OnlyFans content creator) but his masculinity is undiminished.

This is no fairytale – there is pain and sorrow in these lives – stories of endurance, endurance against the odds.

More of this please Andrew…

No Man’s Land by David Nash

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David Nash’s poems are rooted in an appreciation of the natural world, rooted in Ireland, rich in myth and folklore – poems that feel timeless.

A couple of examples:

The Plastic Bag Full of Plastic Bags

under the Sink

You know you’re Irish if you have one of these,

though you’ll also find you’re Armenian

or Hispanic or Jewish or Czech, because thrift

is universal. What, then, is Irish? Is it Dansk

biscuit tin of sewing detritus? Not outs

either? Stew is also out – it isn’t really an

innovation to boil all the food the you have left,

or at least not one so easily claimed. To ask

an old lad on the road directions, shoot the breeze

and end up drinking with him? #onlyinireland?

The past is better everywhere, and there’s no craft

in protesting so much difference. But there is risk.

Changeling

Easier than getting into

what sex was, I guess,

was to tell the cagier

children that the new baby

had washed up on the beach

with the seaweed.

Easier, and no less true:

even now, I don’t sleep well at all

and my go-to is to play dead

on a bed of egg-wrack

and wait for that night’s sea

to drag me back where I belong.

Happy Here – 10 Stories from Black Authors & Illustrators

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I got this collection out of the library because one of the authors is Dean Atta, and their contribution Asher Is A Rockstar! is an great motivational story.

As a collection it is an interesting mix, some like Dean Atta’s and Kereen Getten’s (Where is Home) tell ‘ordinary’ tales of finding yourself and your identity, others like Joseph Coelho’s Amelia St Clair and the Long-Armed Killer are more pyschdelic with its vengeful octopus, and Patrice Lawrence’s The After Ever After Bureau providing aftercare to fairy-tale characters whose “happy ever after” has run out of steam. But it is delightful in that.

The Lighthouse by Alison Moore

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After reading The Retreat I check out if the Library had any of Alison’s other novels, of which The Lighthouse is her debut.

The blurb on the back of The Retreat referred to “Moore’s trademark compelling unease” and it is evident in spades here – there is an intertwining of plots, with Futh and Ester being the central characters, who are barely acquaintances and yet their fates crash together.

There is a lot of unhappiness, none of the people we encounter are living their best life – but it is mostly the ordinary mundane unhappiness, of divorce, of loveless marriage, of loneliness, and it is perhaps that ordinariness that is the skill and the power – to build tension without anything “dramatic” happening – and then to leave the final scene unwritten yet vivid in our minds it lingers longer in our minds.

Novena by Jacques J. Rancourt

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Another collection that captures feelings so sharply.

It opens with Hello My Name is Also Jacques Rancourt which explores inherited identities and includes the line “… cannot pronounce | our own names properly.” which touched me with my own poor pronunciation of Gwilym.

From the sequence Novena

9.

Our Lady with Dreadlocks, I watch from behind

curtains as you sit before your mirror,

a twelve-blub crown, and slide the wig off your scalp.

Your upturned cups resting on the cosmetic table,

stubble returning to you like spring grass.

When you discover me in the reflection,

you tell me to come closer. Mother, into your lap

I submit my face, and we hold each other like men.

Stroke my hair now and at the hour of my death.

The Forward Book of Poetry 1995

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I put tabs on the following poems

Fountain by Kathleen Jamie

Missing by Alan Jenkins

The Fall by Fergus Allen

Condensation on a Windowpane by Dannie Abse, especially for the lines…

But pure water | is H₂O | and that’s complicated | like steam, like ice, like clouds.

Almost Like Joe Meek’s Blues by Edward Mackinnon, especially for the line…

Poor Joe was queer, no gay. The swingin sixties never came.

The Ailing Aunts by Nicky Rice