Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.

Class is a bubble, formed by privilege, shaping and manipulating your concept of reality. But it can at least be brought to mind; acknowledged comprehended, even atoned for through transformative action. By comparing your privilege with that of others you may be able to modify both your world and the worlds outside your world - if the will is there to do it. Suffering is not like that. Suffering has an absolution relation to the suffering individual - it cannot be easily mediated by a third term like 'privilege'.

I'm a lapsed Quaker. I don't go to meetings any more. But I'm very drawn to Catholicism - all that glitter. I'd love to be a Catholic. I think it would be fantastic - faith forgiveness absolution extreme unction - all these wonderful words. I don't think anyone who was ever born a Catholic hasn't died a Catholic no matter how lapsed they are.