Heavy Time by Sonia Overall

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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)

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

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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.

Conquered, The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England by Eleanor Parker

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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.