Month: May 2010

Far Along in the Story

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The boy walked on with a flock of cranes
following him calling as they came
from the horizon behind him
sometimes he thought he could recognize
a voice in all that calling but he
could not hear what they were calling
and when he looked back he could not tell
one of them from another in their
rising and falling but he went on
trying to remember something in
their calls until he stumbled and came
to himself with the day before him
wide open and the stones of the path
lying still and each tree in its own leaves
the cranes were gone from the sky and at
that moment he remembered who he was
only he had forgotten his name

by W.S. Merwin

© W.S. Merwin, 2009

W.S. Merwin has been the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Bollingen Award. He has also received fellowships from the Rockefeller and the Guggenheim foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of many books of poetry and prose. He and his wife Paula live in Hawaii, where he has lived for more than thirty years. You can learn more about Merwin here and here.

Merwin’s most recent collection, Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), from which this poem is taken, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. “I have only what I remember,” Merwin admits, and his memories are focused and profound — Pennsylvania miners and neighborhood streetcars, a conversation with a boyhood teacher or deceased parent, the distinct qualities of autumnal light and gentle rain, well-cultivated loves, and “our long evenings and astonishment.” From the universe’s contradictions, Merwin calls upon the unexpected to illuminate existence. Read more from the collection here.

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.

Please note that this is the last of the weekly poems for this academic year. We do hope that you have enjoyed this year’s selections, and thank you for your continued support of the Poetry Centre through your subscription to the weekly poem service. The service will recommence in September. Have a very pleasant summer!

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.

Caput Mortuum

~ oxfordbrookesuni

An apple orchard, meadows and a river,
a raft at a mooring where children are swimming,
an ancient ash, the sawmill and the bridge,
and at the heart the home of all our colours –

tin pales of white lead paste, and silver mica
from China, and zinc oxide from Peru,
Carrara dust, pozzuoli, burnt sienna,
red ochre, aniline, Verona green,

dammar resin, madder lake, campeachy,
bone black, indigo and dragon’s blood,
Dutch pink and gallnuts, dried black mallow flowers,
kamala, berberis root and walnut shells,

and dark in the stillness a man with a mortar and pestle,
cracking the lapis lazuli apart,
grinding the purest in the pulverisette,
a second grinding, then a sifting,

binding the powder with turpentine resin
and heated beeswax, letting it draw for a day,
then straining it in a linen bag
in a bucket of lukewarm water,

colour coming in a tide,
filling fifty pales, returning
to the first to pour the water off
and dry the sediment and sift again –

this, I think as I gaze beyond the river where the children swim,
beyond to where the sky consoles
with old familiar colours of our physics and our souls,
this in our stillness is our purest blue.

by Michael Hulse

© Michael Hulse, 2009

Born in 1955, Michael Hulse grew up in England. After studying at St. Andrews, he lived for twenty-five years in Germany, working in universities, publishing and documentary television, before returning to England in 2002 to teach at the University of Warwick.

Hulse’s poetry has won him firsts in the UK’s National Poetry Competition and the Bridport Poetry Prize (twice), and Eric Gregory and Cholmondeley Awards from the Society of Authors. In the past he has co-edited the best-selling anthology The New Poetry, and in the Nineties was general editor of the Könemann literature classics series and of Arc international poets. He has also been the editor of the literary quarterlies Stand and Leviathan Quarterly, and currently edits The Warwick Review.

Hulse has translated more than sixty books from German, including works by Goethe, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, and the late W. G. Sebald.

His latest publications are a new book of poems, The Secret History (Arc), and a translation of Rilke’s novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Penguin Classics). Learn more about Michael Hulse here.

‘Caput Mortuum’ is taken from The Secret History, and you can read a selection of other poems from the collection 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.

Broken Sleep

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I wake to a residue of milk
playing in your throat.
Through the window starlings
coagulate in the no-colour dawn,

each bird distinct, but utterly
in thrall to formations of twist,
kite, looming bee-swarm.
Your single cry’s answered

by a parched breaking in my chest
and a laboured rush
of hot liquid. As I lift you
from your crib, still balled up

and loaded with sleep, I know
soon you’ll uncurl, walk away
to a point I can’t hear you.
The birds rise together as though

on an up-draught. I spread
your outstretched fingers
on the back of my hand as you
work away at one breast –

ears pulling in time, toes curling;
your whole body drinking –
and lost milk from my other breast
grows cold as rain on my nightdress.

by Sally Read

© Sally Read, 2009

‘Broken Sleep’ is the title poem of Sally Read‘s second collection (Bloodaxe Books, 2009). It comes from a cycle of poems addressed to a baby from a mother, moving from the uncertainty and awe at the discovery of a pregnancy through to the ecstasy of early motherhood. It charts, with tenderness, the child’s development from a foetus in the dark, to a walking, talking toddler in a bewildering and exciting world. The poems comprise a hymn and an elegy to the experience of pregnancy and early motherhood.

The second part of the book, The Glass Eye, moves swiftly into a world where loss, whether of a loved one, a breast, or simply innocence, is countered by extraordinary kinds of redemption. Whether conjuring angels, music, or lies, these pieces offer a sometimes disturbing but always marvellous alternative to the unavoidable blackness behind the glass eye.

You can find out more about the collection here, more about Sally Read at this page, and hear her read from her work at the Poetry Archive (if you cannot hear the recording here, click on the link entitled ‘open player in a new window’).

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.

behind the lines

~ oxfordbrookesuni

– just as you might never
find some white-worn
tongue of soap

long fluffed
beneath basin – or
fine marks of particular

weight penned in their
margin near skip-
bottom or

one flake
falling deep in a
cwm between sheer-set

neighbours of pine – or
with morning still
dark that

word
barely spoken
to your sleeping ear

by Mario Petrucci

© Mario Petrucci, 2010

i tulips (Enitharmon, 2010), from which this week’s poem is taken, is the new collection from Mario Petrucci, a prize-winning poet who draws upon his knowledge of science and ecology to craft arresting, modernistic verse. i tulips is an adventurous suite of spare, fractal lyrics that reveal hidden depths and complexities under the reader’s microscopic gaze. The poem ‘behind the lines’ is an example of Petrucci’s intense and inventive renovation of closely observed human experience. You can find out more about the book here, and more about Petrucci here and here.

Please note that this poem was originally posted incorrectly formatted – that error has now been corrected, and the poem appears above in its correct form.

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.

Pig’s Heaven Inn

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Red chiles in a tilted basket catch sunlight —
we walk past a pile of burning mulberry leaves
into Xidi Village, enter a courtyard, notice
an inkstone, engraved with calligraphy, filled
with water and cassia petals, smell Ming
dynasty redwood panels. As a musician lifts
a small xun to his mouth and blows, I see kiwis
hanging from branches above a moon doorway:
a grandmother, once the youngest concubine,
propped in a chair with bandages around
her knees, complains of incessant pain;
someone spits in the street. As a second
musician plucks strings on a zither, pomelos
blacken on branches; a woman peels chestnuts;
two men in a flat-bottomed boat gather
duckweed out of a river. The notes splash,
silvery, onto cobblestone, and my fingers
suddenly ache: during the Cultural Revolution,
my aunt’s husband leapt out of a third-story
window; at dawn I mistook the cries of
birds for rain. When the musicians pause,
Yellow Mountain pines sway near Bright
Summit Peak; a pig scuffles behind an enclosure;
someone blows his nose. Traces of the past
are wisps of mulberry smoke rising above
roof tiles; and before we, too, vanish, we hike
to where three trails converge: hundreds
of people are stopped ahead of us, hundreds
come up behind: we form a rivulet of people
funneling down through a chasm in the granite.

by Arthur Sze

© Arthur Sze, 2009

Arthur Sze was born in New York City and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, he has conducted residencies at a number of different universities in the United States including Brown University, the University of Utah, and Washington University. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Book Award, and has received grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation. Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, Carol Moldaw, and daughter, Sarah. You can read a recent interview with Arthur Sze here.

A temple near the hypocenter of the atomic blast at Hiroshima was disintegrated, but its ginkgo tree survived to bud and bloom. In his ninth book of poetry, The Gingko Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), from which ‘Pig’s Heaven Inn’ comes, Arthur Sze extends this metaphor of survival and flowering to transform the world’s factual darkness into precarious splendour. He ingeniously integrates the world’s mundane and miraculous into a moving, visionary journey. More poems from this collection are available to read here.

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.