Month: March 2010

Dark View

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The sun that puts its spokes in every
Wheel of manhandle and tree

Derives its path of seashines
(Spiritual centrality) from my

Regard. I sent it
My regards. Some yards

Of lumen from the fabrika
Have come unbolted in the likes

Of it, or maybe
In the likes of me — a long

Unweaving or recarding I
Cannot recall begun — and there

Before my eyes the palm
Puts lashes round the sun.

by Heather McHugh

© Heather McHugh, 2009

Heather McHugh, a 2009 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of thirteen books of poetry, translation, and literary essays, including a Griffin International Poetry Prize translation, as well as Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist volumes. McHugh has taught literature and writing for over three decades, most regularly at the University of Washington in Seattle and in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. From 1999 to 2005 she served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2000 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In Upgraded to Serious (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), the book from which ‘Dark View’ comes, McHugh presents a fast-paced, verbally dexterous, and brilliantly humorous book. Utilizing medical terminology to work through loss and detachment, McHugh’s sly rhymes and rhythms talk of love, raised hackles, and much in between. You can read further selections from her new collection at this page.

Copper Canyon Press is a non-profit publisher that believes poetry is vital to language and living. For thirty-five years, the Press has fostered the work of emerging, established, and world-renowned poets for an expanding audience. To find out more about Copper Canyon and its publications, click here.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Hope

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Like lightning in dark skies
I love to brighten up dark lives
and rid sad hearts of lonely cries.

I have one fierce enemy, despair,
all driven energy, forever there,
rips hearts apart and doesn’t care.

I care. Let’s walk together now,
help me to help, to grow and thrive
and let the future shine alive.

Despair would murder it and make you
guilty. Let’s talk now as we walk and see
the future reaching out to you and me.

Our skies are brightening up today.
I love your company, dear friend,
and always will, come what may.

I dream of being the living song
everyone would love to sing.
Impossible? No. That’s me. Let’s keep walking

until both our hearts are singing.

by Brendan Kennelly

© Brendan Kennelly, 2009

Much of Brendan Kennelly’s poetry gives voice to others and otherness. Whether through masks or personae, dramatic monologues or riddles, his poems inhabit other lives, other beings and other ways of being in the world.

The riddling poems of Reservoir Voices (Bloodaxe Books, 2009) of which ‘Hope’ is one, add a further dimension to these explorations, inspired by an autumn sojourn in America where he would sit by the edge of a reservoir, trying to cope with loneliness by contemplating black swans, blue waves, seagulls, trees and rocks:

‘It was in that state of fascinated dislocation, of almost mesmerised emptiness, that the voices came with suggestions, images, memories, delights, horrors, rhythms, insights and calm, irrefutable insistence that it was they who were speaking, not me. To surrender to loneliness is to admit new presences, new voices into that abject emptiness. So I wrote down what I heard the voices say and, at moments, sing.’

To find out more about Brendan Kennelly and to watch videos of him reading from his work – including ‘Hope’, click here.

Founded in Newcastle in 1978, Bloodaxe Books is one of Britain’s leading independent poetry publishers. Internationally renowned for quality in literature and excellence in book design, its authors and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry. Details of all Bloodaxe’s publications, plus sample video and audio clips of poets reading their work, can be found here.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

A Kingfisher

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Frequenting a corner of an eye,
Like a thing one didn’t really see,
Its dodges reconcile me
To the way you get undressed,
Affording less than a glimpse!

As for the one apparent
To our friend, eliciting
Her outburst as it darted
Close to the surface,
I guessed that stain on a backdrop

Of river and trees, that flight
I very nearly caught (but where
Was one supposed to look?)
Was lost for good. And then,
There went the streak of it

– Sooner gone than seen.
Was it, was it – what?
Sapphire? Emblem of all
Snatches: sought like the dream
One forgets even as one wakes from it.

by Anthony Howell

© Anthony Howell, 2009

Anthony Howell has been described as a “dandy” (in a review by Peter Porter) and the elegance of his poetry certainly justifies that. Perhaps it’s that quality which has led him to be compared with the American poet John Ashbery, a poet whose influence is more to be seen in his earlier work. In fact Howell employs a variety of methods, formal and other, in this highly enjoyable collection, which features two longer poems: one a detailed narrative description of the joys, or rather lack of them, in commuting across London; the other, the book’s title poem, a fable about lust which the poet describes, perhaps teasingly, as “extending a theme of dubious empathy explored by Browning in “My Last Duchess”.’

‘The Kingfisher’ comes from The Ogre’s Wife, published by Anvil Press in 2009. You can find out more about Howell’s collections here.

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern. You can read more about Anvil here.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

The Bread-Maker Speaks

~ oxfordbrookesuni

after Brendan Kennelly

It is true that you comfort me
As I slit your flesh
When kneading is done,

Marking a cross
To create four quarters.
I am not brutal,

Your crushed kernels,
Have long awaited
The flow from jug to bowl,

Moisture not known since before
You were beheaded
In an August field.

Through milk, you remember rain,
What made you grow.
And I remember another kitchen,

The smell when soda
Was spooned, a pinch of salt,
Melted butter. Each time

My fingers glide
Beneath your thinly-floured
Mound, I learn again how days

And dreams fatten in warmth,
Wetness, barely dusted by
What contains them:

Routine acts, healing
In work, pleasure
In slit and cut.

From the fingers out,
I make shapes.
The oven’s belly groans.

by Mary O’Donnell

© Mary O’Donnell, 2009

Mary O’Donnell was born in Monaghan, Ireland. She has been a teacher of English, German and Drama, worked with the development agency Concern, been a translator, and worked in journalism as The Sunday Tribune‘s Drama Critic. She has a particular interest in poetry in translation and wrote and presented the RTE Radio programme ‘Crossing the Lines’, a series which focused on European poetry and included readings from many European countries. O’Donnell has published five previous poetry collections, including The Place of Miracles (New Island, 2007), as well as three novels and two collections of short fiction. You can find out more about Mary O’Donnell here and here.

‘The Bread-Maker Speaks’ comes from her latest collection, The Ark Builders, a book in which she attends to the nature of love, loss and continuity, and provides an insight into the complex energies of a struggling global ecology. The rhythms of her own country, Ireland, are keenly observed as it lives out its modern role, partly in flux, partly still aware of ancient connections to land and language. You can find out more about the collection and read other poems from it here. ‘The Bread-Maker Speaks’ is partly a response to the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly’s own poem ‘Bread’, available to read here. The Poetry Centre will be featuring a more recent Kennelly poem in the next few weeks.

Arc Publications publishes contemporary poetry from new and established writers from the UK and abroad, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English, and the work of overseas poets in translation. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. To learn more about Arc and to see its range of titles, click here.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

November: River

~ oxfordbrookesuni

November shall have been a sombre month
like breath fetched from the navel of the earth
to say a word of ending. November
shall be a solemn month, recipient
of sides dashed down by rainfall, human turf.
The grass lashes. Flames ascend. The ash bed
a patch beneath god-eyebrow sky collects
a lifetime like the water’s look. This month
nods its face downwards. This was November.
Someone has died. Who hardly knows this.

by Vahni Capildeo

© Vahni Capildeo, 2009

Vahni Capildeo was born in Trinidad in 1973, and has lived in the UK since 1991. She is a Contributing Editor and the UK agent and representative for the Caribbean Review of Books. She is also a Contributing Advisor to Black Box Manifold, the University of Sheffield e-zine, and a member of the International Advisory Board for the Journal of Indo-Caribbean Studies.

This poem is from a series entitled ‘Winter to Winter’, and appears in the collection Undraining Sea, which was published by Egg Box last month. A poem from this book was Highly Commended in the Forward Poetry Prize, 2009. A second collection by Vahni Capildeo, Dark & Unaccustomed Words, is due out from Egg Box in 2010. You can find out more about Capildeo here, and hear her read some of her poems here.

Egg Box is a small, independent poetry publisher based in Norwich, run by young poet Nathan Hamilton. It is rapidly establishing a strong reputation for its freshness of approach and keen eye for talented newcomers. Click here to visit Egg Box’s website.