Andrew McMillan's debut novel, Pity, packs a big punch

Pity, award-winning poet Andrew McMillian’s debut novel, is, at under 200 pages, feels hardly much longer than the archetypal ‘slender volume of verse’ –  but don’t let that deceive you, because this packs a powerful punch.

Set in a former mining village near Barnsley (where the author hails from), it tells the story of the men of three generations of the Banks family: Brian, his sons Brian and Alex, and Alex’s son, Simon.

The brothers had followed their father down the mines – there being little alternative at the time. Simon, born into an era after the miners’ strike and the pit closures, works in a call centre by day and as a drag performer at night. He has recently started a relationship with Ryan, a security guard in a local shopping centre who wants to become a policeman.

A group of patronising, nameless academics, spending time in the village to record the memories of those who lived through the tumultuous 1980s, observe that the years since the strike have seen almost every trace of the industry that once sustained have been obliterated.

And they are bemused that the locals they talk to are reluctant to talk of those times – and not least of a disaster that hit one of the local pits.

McMillian tells his story in sparing terms – though throughout the book, there are brief sections that describe the local men leaving their homes in the morning to go to work, over and over; the grim reality of the ride down the pit shaft in the cage, and the bleak, dangerous work, as the coal dust works its way into the lungs of the miners.

These sections have an incredible poetic quality. Not that they romanticise the industry – quite the opposite. It feels like a nod to WWI poetry.

In the first such section, as the men walk to their work, McMillan writes: “The village, on their shoulder now, still asleep, not watching the migration of tired bodies. One of the men once said that he thought he could hear the coal ticking. Another man told him to stop talking daft. And beneath their feet, a mile down, history; waiting to be hacked into chunks and pulled out.”

It’s a motif that is repeated with slight variations throughout.

Part of the power of the novel is that it doesn’t pander to any sentimental attachment to the industry – or indeed, to the strike – while also portraying the contemporary world of work as far from perfect.

It also doesn’t seek our ‘pity’ and portrays the men as strong, yet also vulnerable and flawed.

There is little in these crucial passages to suggest that any of the men would regret not having to trudge to the mine. Yes, there’s an element of community, but it comes across more as something comparable to men going into battle rather than something remotely joyous.

And within this context, McMillian makes a wider exploration of male identity, community, relationships, sexuality and fear. In maintaining an emotional distance from his characters, he has increased the power of this. And in a splendid example of how this can work (see Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice), by the end you really do care about these men.

This is a seriously good novel about working-class, male experience in the late 20^th and early 21^st century. Very much worth reading.

Stars: looking up at the heavens

Stars

 

‘We are all in the gutter,’ said Wilde

‘But some of us look for the stars’

 

Yet the heavens are blank over London

Since light cancels out such a view

 

So I travelled to Travemünde

And I stood on the Strand after dark

 

Below pollarded trees in the cold

Ursa Minor winked down from above

 

The sight made me breathless with joy

And I wept with a new sense of life

• Image courtesy of Wikipedia

 

Spring 2022: A poem for a troubled season

Spring 2022

A furious wind screams in across the Baltic,

Winter’s raging farewell that cuts clean to the bone.

Crows scythe through the air, scanning for mussels,

While decaying munitions dream beneath the churning grey

And the Gustloff lies at sleep.

Halyards yammer against poles on the Strand, as the flags,

Wrapped round and round and round,

Cling on for dear life.

Yet blossoms still prick through the eye of the storm,

And a sheen of green can just be seen caressing the skeletal trees.

Two and a half thousand kilometres south east

It is a different storm and a different spring.

There, fire is in flower and blood blossoms across pavements.

A pall of dust hangs over blasted ruins and

Settles on the charred bodies and cars in the graveyard streets.

Once more, the world wonders where the hatred springs from and

How to make it stop.

Seemingly impotent in the face of the tempest,

Fingers cross with the hope that it will blow itself out

So spring can come once more.

Until the seasons turn again.

4 April 2022

Photo: The Baltic at Travemünde, by the author

C+nto – a stunning poetic riff on being a butch dyke

It was arguably a fortuitous coincidence that saw me pick up a copy of C+nto.

Having read a review of Joelle Taylor’s 2021 collection of poems in the Observer in mid-February, just after it had just won the TS Elliot award, less than a week later, I was on Broadway Market in Hackney – my local shopping street for over 30 years, in case you imagine I’m part of the more recent trendification – and, after getting incredibly tense about the lack of mask-wearing in shops, happened to walk past the Broadway Bookshop.

Glancing inside the wedged-open door (good ventilation), I could see that the owner was masked, behind a screen. I felt so absurdly grateful that someone was still taking COVID seriously that I went in, heading straight to the poetry shelves, which are not much more than a metre from the door.

And there was C+nto. So, what else to do but buy a copy? And since February is, in the UK, LGBT+ History Month, it also seemed apt.

It is a simply outstanding collection.

“There is no part of a butch lesbian that is welcome in this world”, says Taylor (pictured above) in her introduction.

“According to the Human Dignity Trust, it is illegal to be a lesbian in almost a quarter of the world’s countries.”

She goes on to cite how Brexit has led to a “nationalist confidence”, with “bigots from both sides emboldened to assault homosexual and trans people.

“The word ‘lesbian’ is synonymous with that hated epithet, ‘TERF’, and, as a community, we spend more time policing each other than protecting.”

Quite. And indeed, I am writing this a few days after reports in the LGBT+ press – and even appearing in Rupert Murdoch’s Sun – that the Russian forces currently waging war on Ukraine have drawn up lists of those to be murdered, and that those lists include known LGBT+ people. For the ‘crime’ of being LGBT+.

Vladimir Putin has form on this – not least in terms of Chechnya, which tells us that his support for genocide against LGBT+ people is not imaginary.

However, in terms of the book itself, let’s start with the title.

“Cunto

– inflection of CUNTARE

(third person singular past historic)

“Cuntare

– (transative) (obselete. literary)

To relate, tell, or recount (a story)”

This is an incredibly powerful selection of verse that centres around conveying a sense of a specifically butch lesbian history; of pubs and clubs now gone; of individual dykes now departed.

Taylor very powerfully explores the idea of having to work out not simply who you are, but how you authentically present to a world that does not, largely, want an authentic you – unless you conform to a hetero normative – and in a horrifying large number of cases, will murder you for daring to present as anything other than that.

And indeed, this also touches on what the very process of having to do all this actually does to the person having to do it.

Her idea of a symbiosis between one’s skin and suits of clothing is stunningly effective. As are her portraits of specific dykes that she has known: in particular, in Valentine, where she introduces us to a black dyke – or ‘stud’; a black, masculine presenting lesbian, according to the glossary.

But more widely, in her conjuring up a fictional lesbian club, Maryville, and an origin myth for butch dykes, she has given voice to a world that most people will not know exists.

Scene Nine is set in a crematorium, where butches file past the open coffin of one of their own, only for the lead butch mourner to find that her deceased loved one is to take her final journey dressed in a “cerise ballroom dress, as though the coffin were the display case for a doll. Her face is battered with makeup. Her hair is hair, but the boi knows that under the wig, the stud has a clean undercut. Her severed strings are arranged carefully around her. The woman in the coffin looks at the woman standing over her. The woman in the coffin looks like a woman.”

It is a short, but utterly tragic and heart breaking and powerful representation of the brutal and dehumanising nature of homophobia, that is so very much more than the sum of its words.

Taylor – predominantly know as a performance poet (there are videos online and QR codes in the book for a couple of her performances) is from Lancashire and there are definite moments when you think of Jeanette Winterson and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

But this is in terms of overlap of experiences – perhaps not least in both having made comments on fundamentalist Christianity.

In ROUND THREE – the body as trespass, Taylor writes of how “... three Pentecostal pastors   hymning holy Nazi insignia   break into your home [God is an atheist who no longer believes in Himself]   they unscrew the lightbulbs slowly  eyes fixed on the unfinished girl sobbing war   on the corduroy settee & whisper   a prayer for you to leave your family”.

Her use – and relish – of language is simply breath taking and astonishingly effective.

Sex, gender and so forth is complex – and as a bisexual who struggles even now, at the age of 59, to use the word ‘woman’ to describe themselves (it just really doesn’t seem to fit and never has), there was a vast amount in this collection that I could directly relate to – not least in terms of the ideas around one’s skin as a suit, and picking the ‘wrong’ one off the hanger.

And if there has ever been a better collective noun for butch dykes than “an insolence of leather jackets”, then I dare you to find it!

But I cannot recommend this enough. It is an absolutely incredible work and, I would suggest, as essential a piece of literature as one might wish to find.

 

Joelle Taylor

 

Broadway Bookshop

A poem for the winter solstice

 

Winter Solstice

 

Welcome to the shortest day of the year

The heart of the long, dark winter of the soul

When you don’t feel whole,

When the bowl is empty and the bole is bare

And a bear roars up at the stars somewhere

In deepest memories

That arc through the blood

Reigniting fear

As the year burns out and the world spins on

And the purpose of light is forgotten in the night.

 

Amanda Kendal 21 December 2021

Photo: DreamyPixel

As lockdown ends, there's another pandemic

Another pandemic

Piled pyramidally on top of the bin

Precarious crates and paper plates

Lord it over the overflow ...

A plastic salad tub or two

And paper masks

Crumpled blue

With broken strings.

There’s no pub near the lone pint pot

That leans rakishly against a birch,

Nursing the afternoon’s dregs and

Staying stock still so as not to lurch.

Bottle tops trodden into London clay

Sprout between tussocks of weary grass,

While a barber-pole straw dallies with daffs

And a pizza box spreads like porn-style ass.

Percussive rain on a discarded can

Refreshes the parts with a pinging tune,

And a neon spoon floats across the pond

As though water has borrowed the moon.

Bedraggled plastic caught in branches,

Remains of bunting tied to trunks

Shiny metal stars, bombed into the air to greet a birthday

Fallen now like blossom

Sparkle on the ground

And vie for space beside the wall

With shreds of a dog-torn rubber ball

And a plastic five that speared the cake.

Lockdown is easing as spring is sprung.

Let’s surge to freedom and

Show nature what it’s missed.

April 2021

Taking flight into a magical world

Wing

Matthew Francis

 

Faber & Faber

 

 

What better way to spend a chilly Saturday in early March, than curled up in a chair with a slender volume of poetry? In Matthew Francis’s Wing, I found the perfect companion for the afternoon, as wan sunshine tried to best the high clouds outside.

 

It was copy bought in Aldeburgh last September, on our brief escape from London before further measures to combat the pandemic were introduced. Neither The Other Half nor I are big on ‘shopping’, but after we’d booked the break, we discovered that the small town included a serious independent bookshop. And we knew instantly that we would pay at least one visit.

 

In the event, during a stay of nine nights, I strayed inside three times. Masks were worn, hands sanitised and then encased inside white cotton gloves that were left in a basket to be laundered on leaving. It is not a vast space, but oh, the bliss of being among shelves of books; of plucking unexpected titles off shelves, knowing that this was a well-deserved holiday-from-the-plague treat.

 

In a selection that was hugely influenced by the nature of the trip, Wing – published earlier in the year – was one of the books that went into my bag.

 

It is a joy.

 

With an overarching theme of examining microscopic life – and particularly the insect form – it also brings other wings into its embrace.

 

After opening the first section, Freefall, with a poem that starts with houseflies buzzing around where Francis is sitting to write, he concludes with a work of the same name – written “in memory of a friend killed in a parachute accident”.

 

Neither mawkish nor sentimental, this stunning verse blends the human with the natural world – even though the very fact of being in a plane and of parachuting is far from ‘natural’. But as the opening stanza has it:

 

Out of the metal shell of the plane, he hatched

Into raucous air,

 

and stretched out, breathless, as he’d done so often,

on the cushion of wind,

 

to crawl, crablike, across the irregularities

of the buffeting element.

 

Tissues of cloud below swathed the greens and yellows

of a chequered world.

 

The subject might seem out of place in a book of nature poetry, but it brings to mind Icarus and, in a collection titled Wing, is a counter – and poignant one at that – to the apparent effortlessness of flight in the non-human world; a reminder too, of the fragility of life.

 

The middle section of this collection is named Micrographia, after the “scientific treatise by Robert Hooke (1665)”, an English scientist who, with a microscope, was the first to visualise a micro-organism.

 

It is a remarkable melding of science and nature, as the microscope increases both understanding and also mystery.

 

The final section, Canticles, is more playful.

 

In Collective, for instance, Francis reinvents collective nouns: instead of a ‘clattering’ or a ‘train’, he posits a delightful “funambulism of jackdaws”. Forget ‘gaggle’, here we have a “chevron of geese” – how much more picturesque and accurate? – and a “double-take of blackbirds”.

 

And the poem finishes with a “shifting mandelbrot of starlings” – a glorious description of a murmuration, bringing science/maths into the impossibility of such miraculous formations.

 

In Sea Canticle, one cand almost hear the haunting tones of Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie (Sunken Cathedral), as the varied inhabitants of the seafloor float liquidly over and around the remains of a sunken sailing ship.

 

Wing is a glorious collection that, overall, has a quality of meditative awe at the complexity of life, even at its tiniest.

 

Wondrous.

 

New poem: Cold etchings

 

Cold etchings

 

The house faced east across the valley,

Stoic against the Pennine winters of childhood

When bitter winds would blast across the space

to bite at fingers blue and

Clog the arteries between towns

with snow that

Drifted and swirled and blotted out the view.

 

A plug-in Dimplex made bearable

the move from day to night,

Wan warmth radiated out to battle goosebumps

Until safety was reached

under flannelette and honeycomb and eiderdown,

With a piping bottle for frozen feet.

 

By morning, the large bow window would be frosted fast.

Frayed old towels folded on the sill below

Set to mop up when it thawed at last.

But before then

I’d dare to etch my initials on the glass.

 

This year, the cold snapped late.

But it was sharp enough when it arrived

To save some bees from neonics intended to beat a beet pest.

 

Locked down locked in I only saw

the rime through slatted blinds.

No early morning walks to the bus stop

Diverting slightly to surreptitiously

            etch messages on frosted cars

Under cover of decaying dark

As a fox barks in the nearby park.

 

 

8 March 2021

A plague on all our houses

Bruised and battered,

Brought low by its own benighted will,

Perfidious Albion crawls toward its golden dawn.

 

The high priests of Brexit now

Preach that, just as

Plucky little Blighty

Won in ’45,

So We Have Won Again.

 

This time the prize

Will not be having played an honourable part

In a defeat of fascism,

But blue passports for all and

Unicorns that frolic on the sunlit uplands.

 

Plague Island

As it has become,

Is governed by clueless clowns;

Corrupt and cronyistic,

Liars every one.

 

A tousle-haired buffoon,

A Ghost of Years Gone West;

A gurning schoolboy who proclaims

This country is ‘the best!’

Let’s not forget the bully,

Who loves being smirkingly cruel,

And all their colleagues who believe

Poor children should feast on gruel.

 

Don’t forget the one who claimed expenses for his stable

Or he who dished out housing deals

To those around his table.

Recall the dolt who didn’t know

That Calais is rather near!

And the cheesy one whose trade deal claims

Bring forth an embarrassed tear.

 

Who voted for this bunch of goons,

Fiddling while the country burns?

 

It wasn’t me.

But have I done enough

To counter all their lies and obfuscation?

Or am I some sort of Vichyite,

Happy to go with the flow,

Avoiding complication?

 

I really don’t have a crib sheet,

I don’t really know what it means.

But I do know we need to be sharper

To think logically and

Not just to dream.

 

For dreams will not bring us progress;

And dreams will not combat the lies.

So put shoulder to the wheel

And hope we might learn to be wise.

                                                                            December 2020

Summer solstice … bone and stone and feather

Rosary

Bone and stone and feather

Leaf and stick and shell,

Scent of purple heather

Sound of ocean swell.

Green of grass below me

Blue of skies above,

Iced beck burbling freely

Cooing of a dove.

Thunder up in heaven

Drizzle in the breeze,

Kronking of the raven

Snow upon the trees.

Swooping murmuration

Swirling Northern Lights

Swifts’ airborne gyration,

Bumble bee in flight.

Fledgling’s hungry calling

Curlew’s haunting cry,

Wind through grasses rushing

Breeze’s gentle sigh.

Mist through woods now pouring

Ghost of breath in air,

Sun in azure soaring

Moon in ink set fair.

Bone and stone and feather

Leaf and stick and shell,

Whatever be the weather

Such things will keep me well.

Freedom Bid

A budgie, pretty in lilac, cream and brown

Perches on the trellis,

Glancing all around and seemingly

Unafraid.

Yet just yesterday,

The next-door blackbirds lost a chick.

Fledging too soon from the shielding hedge,

It dropped from the ledge and once on the ground

Was trapped.

Easy meat for a magpie to peck.

The budgie, charming colours so striking here,

Perches on the trellis

Alongside dowdy sparrows,

Pecking at jasmine flowers.

Ceramic white petals float to the ground.

Forget the local sparrowhawk or passing peregrine.

Staying alert, a black cat leaps

To snatch.

The budgie breaks away with a squawk,

Escaping – this time at least.

But having leapt from some shielding cage

Spread its wings and flown free,

How long can it survive?

The budgie, exotic in its parrot hues

Returns to the trellis,

Glancing all around and seemingly

Still unafraid.

But up and down and all around,

They watch.

And wait.

4 June 2020

Lockdown's creative surge continues

The lockdown brings with it plenty of difficulties, but there can also be opportunities – not least to think about things. 

I’ve already explained briefly here that for me, it has produced an entirely unexpected creative burst, as I have found myself writing poetry for the first time in decades.

In the last couple of days, remembering old family photographs uncovered when clearing my parents’ home two years ago this summer, I found that a couple of the pictures made me want to talk about them.

Or to put another way, I felt that I wanted to write about some of them, to build a picture in a different way. The photographs themselves will be included, because this is – hopefully – one thing complimenting another.

Before

Snow-dumped fells blur

Into snow-filled skies;

Drifts arc up from the road

Like a pitted bobsleigh track.

She stands in the middle distance,

To the bottom left.

Perspective,

deceptive,

has a black hedge tower over her,

Drawing the eye

and accidentally lending the shot

                        good composition.

The slide was colour but

Winter and time have leached that.

Blow it up and there is no trace

of a smile

in the smudge of a face.

Booted, with feet turned out

(Later, she’d say not to stand that way).

Stockings beneath a dress or skirt,

She relies for warmth on a big coat,

collar up

And hands hidden in gloves or overlong sleeves.  

Her hair is tucked away, queen-like, beneath a scarf.

Further off, two men in caps

            clear the road.

It was December ’62 and

The snow that had snowed

            would be followed by plenty more;

And, just a few days later,

            By me.

23 May 2020

The Duchess

Unexpectedly for me at least, the lockdown has produced a surge of creativity that I did not expect.

For the first time since my early twenties, when the results were predictably embarrassing (little experience of the world combined with a restricted worldview, given the restrictions of my home life), I have been writing poetry.

For the moment, I’m grouping what I write under a general banner of Lockdown Lines.

They are not all about the lockdown, but they have all been written while I am in lockdown.

I have posted a few already. This is one of those that is not about the coronavirus, but is about a lady who was in the bed opposite me when I was in hospital two years ago.

No notes or anything like that were taken at the time, but I have never forgotten the incidents I describe below. The section about what her past might have included is entirely from my imagination: all the rest really happened.

My father had died just a week before I went into hospital – a key cause was dementia. Perhaps that’s why Doris remains so clearly in my mind.

The Duchess

Swaddled in zebra-stripe velour she dozes,

Lunch barely touched on the over-bed table.

“Doris,” the time-starved nurse had pleaded,

“You must like fish and chips” ...

As though not eating was entirely a choice.

Broken hips will heal in time once reset;

A mind tick-tick-tocked into the past is gone.

Her son sits beside her, head bowed low;

There’s nothing to say and

He makes no move to disturb her 40 winks.

Next day, Annie and Joan urge her to “Get up!

“Try out your bionic peg!” they cackle.

I call out that the physio’s not here

And at last a nurse comes,                 

Bringing an end to impending disaster.                     

Doris, Doris duchess of The Dolphin,       

Known in the Duke’s Head but never in the Florin;

There you’d sip a stout or a port in a storm

Laughing with the girls and singing until dawn;

Around the Joanna you would croon a bar or two,

You could smoke like a trooper and tell a joke so blue that

You’d set the crowds ahowling and make a sailor blush

But you were always a lady and never just some lush.

On the bedside cupboard there is a bottle,

Gaudy plastic full of liquid pinky red:

‘Cherryade’ or so the label claims.

Hardly a Cherry B,

Never mind a stout or a port (in a storm).

In the middle of the night Doris demands

“Boy! Boy?” Querulous, tremulous and lost.

A nurse tries to calm her. Soothing sounds.

At last she drifts again ...

As though not sleeping was entirely a choice.

27 April 2020