Month: April 2010

Love Song for Fidel Castro

~ oxfordbrookesuni

They’ve started a tight salsa
when Elisa strolls on, hips round as a drum.

Her band whoops, edges up the percussion
and the bass whips her calves.

She looks at each woman, remembering
how she brought them together,

their babies now workers, mothers,
or fathers, grins at the years they display

in their breasts, waists and eyes,
one thousand, three hundred and three.

She nods to Aleida on congas holding rivers
in her palms and Mathilda, the oldest,

on rhythm guitar, playing just as she’s waited
in a chair by the door, night after night all her life.

Elisa turns to the room, finds the President’s table,
puts a mike to her mouth.

“For this man tonight, twenty lovers,” she jokes
and her eyes won’t leave as she sings

of sun in the citrus, Batista,
all the sweat and fists in the wind,

of a child in a cellar, paths through the cane,
the wings on every island’s shoulder blades.

She sings of the speeches scrolled in his pockets,
of Angola, Mandela, his friend.

She sings of Havana, how it still burns
on maps of the world,

of Martí’s white rose and an exile’s return
to the Island of Youth.

Then she picks up the claves and the crowd
shines the floor with its footwork,

as they dance the way heat breaks
the line of a road, each beat and bell of the salsa,

a gasp in the hand.

by Jackie Wills

© Jackie Wills, 2007

Jackie Wills has been resident poet at, amongst other places, an airport, the Surrey countryside, and with marketing teams at Unilever. Powder Tower (Arc), her first full collection, was shortlisted for the 1995 T. S. Eliot prize and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her second collection, Party (Leviathan), was published in 2000. ‘Love Song for Fidel Castro’ comes from her latest collection, Commandments (Arc, 2007). You can find out more about the book here.

A former journalist, Wills now works as an editor and creative writing tutor. She lives in Brighton with her partner, the South African musician Risenga Makondo, and their two children. Jackie Wills writes a blog about her work, available here.

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.

Leaving Fingerprints

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I know this frosted landscape
better than it knows itself, its layers
a busy clock of history, still ticking.

Under my feet I feel the trail of the slug,
the snail, the earth’s deep squirm
around an anklet or an amulet, a broken cup.

Lost, the names of the ones
whose fingers made and used
and threw away these things,

written and rewritten in the calligraphy
of roots. The worm’s heave
and turn delivers messages up,

scribbled in folds of soil and mud, afterthoughts
that grow to trees, trunks with arms,
branches with fingers, twigs with nails,

scratches on air, tear
after tear on a white page.
These names have given their artefacts away

to be sparse as winter. Here I am, they say.
Here and here for you to see,
fingerprinted on the sky.

by Imtiaz Dharker

© Imtiaz Dharker, 2009

Imtiaz Dharker was born in Pakistan, grew up in Glasgow, and now divides her time between Bombay and London. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings. Leaving Fingerprints, the title poem of which is printed above, is her fourth book from Bloodaxe.

In these poems, the only thing that is never lost is the Bombay tiffin-box. All the other things which are missing or about to go missing speak to each other – a person, a place, a recipe, a language, a talisman. Whether or not they want to be identified or found, they still send each other messages, scattering a trail of clues, leaving fingerprints.

You can watch Imtiaz Dharker read two of her poems here, and find out more about her and her work 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.

Setting Out from Great-Scatter Pass and Wandering Fifteen or Twenty Miles of Meandering Trail…*

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I rest three times every mile on this trail’s
ten thousand precarious twists and turns,

and when it loops back, I see friends vanish
into distant forests and hills, then reappear

beneath windblown rain high atop pines.
Water clamoring through stones becomes

silent conversation in the stream’s depths,
and across high peaks, winds wail and sigh.

Gazing out toward South Mountain’s sunlit
south face, sun white through far-off haze,

I see azure marshland all tranquil beauty
and dense forests that seem to drift at ease.

Forever hemmed in, I trust myself to wide-
open distance: it melts tangles clean away.

by Wang Wei, translated by David Hinton

Translation © David Hinton, 2009

* The full title of this poem by Wang Wei is ‘Setting Out from Great-Scatter Pass and Wandering Fifteen or Twenty Miles of Meandering Trail Through Deep Forests and Thick Bamboo, We Reach Brown-Ox Ridge and Gaze Out at Yellow-Bloom River’. It is taken from The Selected Poems of Wang Wei, translated by David Hinton (Anvil Press, 2009). You can find out more about the book here, and more about Wang Wei here.

Zen Buddhism became a sort of cult religion in the sixties and seventies, thanks to its espousal by such luminaries of the Beat movement as Gary Snyder, who himself translated some Wang Wei poems. Wang Wei was a master of the short, imagistic landscape poem that came to typify classical Chinese poetry. His practice of Zen Buddhism led him to develop a landscape poetry of resounding tranquillity, beautifully conveyed and introduced in Anvil’s book by David Hinton. Learn more about Hinton’s work and read more of his translations of Wang Wei here.

After translating the T’ang Dynasty contemporaries of Wang Wei (Po Chü-i, Li Po and Tu Fu) over the last fifteen or so years, David Hinton is thoroughly at ease in the intimate, almost conversational idiom of the great Chinese poetry of the 8th century AD. It is strange to think that around this time in England the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf was written: what a contrast between the sophisticated Chinese elegance and the rough-hewn Old English verse.

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 Sun Has Burst The Sky

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The sun has burst the sky
Because I love you
And the river its banks.

The sea laps the great rocks
Because I love you
And takes no heed of the moon dragging it away
And saying coldly ‘Constancy is not for you’.

The blackbird fills the air
Because I love you.
With spring and lawns and shadows falling on lawns.

The people walk in the street and laugh
I love you
And far down the river ships sound their hooters
Crazy with joy because I love you.

by Jenny Joseph

© Jenny Joseph, 2009

Nothing Like Love (Enitharmon, 2009), from which this poem is taken, is a brilliant new collection from Jenny Joseph that brings together a number of her early and previously uncollected love poems. A prolific and wide-ranging writer in prose and verse, Joseph is best known for ‘Warning’, a dramatic monologue about ageing. Joyous and bright, ‘The Sun Has Burst The Sky’ showcases her aptitude for love poetry, its seemingly simple sentiments made fresh and vibrant through deft composition. Find out more about the book here. You can hear her read ‘The Sun Has Burst The Sky’ and other poems at this site.

Enitharmon Press takes its name from a William Blake character who represents spiritual beauty and poetic inspiration. Founded in 1967 with an emphasis on independence and quality, Enitharmon has been associated with such figures as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Kathleen Raine. Enitharmon also commissions internationally renowned collaborations between artists, including Gilbert & George, and poets, including Seamus Heaney, under the Enitharmon Editions imprint. Discover more about Enitharmon 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.