The Last Lesbian Bar in the Midlands by cleo henry

I think I’ve read this book, or most of this book (pamphlet, maybe, but it feels like a book to me (and has a spiiiiiiiiiiiine)) maybe about ten times.

I don’t feel like I understand every line, and I don’t necessarily feel like I looooove the book, as in like “am in love with it”, obviously, I’ve read it maybe ten fucking times, which kinda implies I looooove it in a way; maybe I do?

Maybe I do?

Maybe I like the way these poems and this book fit into my bag, into my hand, into the larger pockets of my clothes with larger pockets..?

Maybe I love how this fits into my life…

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The Last Lesbian Bar in the Midlands is a 2022 publication from Fourteen Publishing, who I think at some point only published books and/or magazines containing fourteen poems, but unless two of these pieces don’t count as poems or there are sets of pieces here that represent a single “poem” and there is no clear indicator in the text that this is the case (or there is and I missed it, which is possible), then there are not fourteen poems here. (I tried to count to fourteen in a few different ways, and I couldn’t get there. I couldn’t get there. I couldn’t get there. Sometimes over, sometimes under, but never fourteen. I think there aren’t fourteen poems here; but I only know that by counting?)

Fourteen is a good number.

Maybe that is the right amount?

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The first poem hooks me hooks me hooks me every time; it is titled ‘In Defence of Oyster / Lesbian Sex Metaphors’ and though, so, from its title, I know it’s not about oysters, it is the following set of lines that connects with me: “The long wade out to the oyster beds / Shells sheathed in silt cutting the shit / Out of pavement-soft soles”

The last time – maybe the only time (except for my few hours under the influence of [redacted] as discussed in my recent shortish film, Santander) – I felt free, and hopeful, and optimistic and still, fucking, alive, was one evening last Summer, when my lover and I (for whom I, like a fool, returned to a place that holds no hope for me) waded out in the low tide of the Thames Estuary at Whitstable to the oyster beds nestled in the brine-sodden mud; shoes were destroyed, clothes were soiled for multiple washes with the crud that exists at the bottom of water; I was drunk on wine and my lover drunk on oysters (and wine) and we stumbled and messed and fell and played and laughed and sang and it was messy and it was fine and it was risky and it was good.

I know that’s not what the poem’s about. But that’s what oyster beds mean for me. And “pavement-soft soles” is a lovely little thing.

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A poem is a conduit, not a memory, not a script. A route from soul to language to soul; souls are complex and bending; conduits can be both open and unaligned.

We don’t read poems as a route to resurrection or repetition.

We read poems to be provoked into memory, into humanity, into-

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These poems are beautiful; direct, then not; clear, murky, recognisable, familiar (not because I’ve read them maybe ten times but because but because but because they speak speak speak to humanity), readable…

in ‘Arrangements’, Henry writes about a disintegrating relationship “when they wake they see / their partner’s body / they think of polar bears adrift / in leaky rafts / but three / three could hold”;

in ‘I Hope I Never Learn’, “I never met a Simon I didn’t like until / I did and he was a real shit but I still say it / often I’ve never met a Simon I didn’t like / a total lie”;

in ‘I Love How Americans Talk About Their Towns Almost as Much as I Miss You’, “But your name sits under the cloche / of a crystal-cut sea.”

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In the poems here, there is beauty and there is pain, wit and wisdom, image and description. There’s all the stuff, basically, all the stuff poems need to be poems and not just a pile of words on an unforgiving page.

I liked it a lot. Three great books in a row! That rarely happens here!

Order The Last Lesbian Bar in the Midlands direct from Fourteen Publishing via this link