Smoke

November 28, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

In order to revive the orange age, you must assemble all of the witnesses, all those who suffered, those who laughed and even the youngest and those who were furthest away.

You must rekindle your grandmothers; make them come with their great crucifixes of cinnamon in tow and well-nailed with those large aromatic cloves, just as when they lived surrounded by fire and syrup.

You must interrogate the gillyflower and harass her with questions, until not a single purple detail is lost.

You must talk with the butterfly, seriously, and savage roosters with their hoarse voices and great silver talons.

And the veronicas shall come from way back when, pale veronicas—wandering among the flowers and smoke and trees—and the face of sugar, the portrait of the figs shall return.

And advise the wisteria so that they bring their old resemblance to grape. And the populous pomegranate, and the procession of yuccas, and the guardian of the loquat tree, yellow and hateful, and my mane of hair from that time, all of it full of witches and planets, and the wandering livestock and the angel of the hills and of the amethysts—with one pink and one blue wing —and the lemon blossoms, as big as spikenards.

And all of the silverplated cages shall come and all of the colored bottles and the keys and the fans and the Christmas cake standing on its cherry stilts.

In order to revive the orange age, you cannot forget anyone, you must call everyone, most importantly the smoke man, who is the most serious and the most delicate and the most beloved.

And you must invite God.

by Marosa di Giorgio, translated by Susan Briante

The Poetry Centre is on Facebook and on Twitter – join us there!

This section from ‘Smoke’ is copyright © Shearsman, 2011; translation © Susan Briante, 2011. It is reprinted by permission of Shearsman Books from Hotel Lautréamont: Contemporary Poetry from Uruguay , edited by Kent Johnson and Roberto Echavarren.

Notes from Shearsman:

Named in homage to Isidore Ducasse, the Uruguayan-French poet who wrote Maldoror under the name Comte de Lautréamont, and with a knowing nod to John Ashbery’s book of the same title, Hotel Lautréamont is the first major English-language survey of contemporary Uruguayan poetry for some 40 years. It features the work of Roberto Appratto, Nancy Bacelo, Amanda Berenguer, Selva Casal, Marosa di Giorgio, Roberto Echavarren, Eduardo Espina, Gustavo Espinosa, Silvia Guerra, Circe Maia, Eduardo Milán and Idea Vilariño. The volume is bilingual. You can find out more about the book from Shearsman’s page dedicated to it, and read further selections from the volume here.

Marosa di Giorgio (1932–2004) was born in Salto in Uruguay to Italian immigrant parents. After she studied law and briefly acted in a professional theatre company, she took a job in Salto’s municipal government and devoted her free time to reading extensively and writing fifteen books of poetry, three books of short stories and one novel. She is increasingly considered to be one of Latin America’s greatest poets of the 20^th century. You can learn more about Marosa di Giorgio at the official website for her work here (in Spanish, but with a translation option), and hear her read from her work at this link (in Spanish).

Susan Briante is the author of two collections of poetry: Pioneers in the Study of Motion (Ahsahta 2007) and Utopia Minus (2011). Her translations of Latin American writers have appeared in Bomb, Translation Review, and Reversible Monuments (Copper Canyon Press) among others. From 1992–1997, she lived in Mexico City where she worked for the magazines Artes de México and Mandorla.

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with an active translation list. You can learn more about the publisher here, and find Shearsman on Facebook 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.

River is the Plural of Rain

November 21, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Each of us is water Carole Satyamurti

From a mouth of soil among sedge and willow
water calls out on its journey
to all its other selves: follow

follow us from the shallows into the deep. Below
the surface currents strain their sinews
spilling white foam over stones to follow

the earth vein where it flows,
furling and ravelling together
as stream follows after stream.

Its pulse is the undertow,
its pores are the rain,
and every drop is dreaming of sky.

by Rebecca Gethin

Notes from Oversteps:

Rebecca Gethin’s first collection, River is the Plural of Rain, named after this poem, was published in 2009 by Oversteps Books. Rebecca lives on Dartmoor in Devon, but also returns frequently to the mountainous valley in Italy where her ancestors lived. She teaches poetry at Dartmoor Prison, and has recently published her first novel, Liar Dice. You can find out more about Rebecca Gethin at this link, where you can also read another poem from the collection.

Oversteps Books publishes some of the best in contemporary poetry, covering a wide range of established and new poets. There is a rigorous editorial policy, and the books are produced to the highest standards both in terms of editorial accuracy and the beauty of the finished books. Oversteps poets also give regular poetry readings at festivals and other events. Oversteps Books was founded in 1992 by the poet and translator, Anne Born (1924–2011). The poet and lecturer, Alwyn Marriage, became Managing Editor in 2008. You can find out more about the press here, and sign up for Oversteps’s mailing list.

Mosquito

November 14, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Fancy this in October, the last
Mosquito of summer left buzzing alone,
Its last fling in my room on the sixth floor
Of a tower block hotel; marooned like one
In the seventh decade with only the past
To look forward to, as the one sure

Topic he can buzz round with some old chum.
‘I had a good bloody summer,’ it seems to say,
‘With waiter and bellman, and that prim peach
Who keeps the consultant’s books across the way.’
And for one last sally it swoops and bites my thumb.
So I bite mine back at it, and reach

For a folded newspaper; all the same aware
How much I resemble it, my own small spites
And hopeless needs reduced to the last fling
Of one who doles out charm in sexless bites
To check-out girls and bank clerks as if to swear,
‘Oh man, I buzz and suck like anything!’

by Alan Brownjohn

Notes from Enitharmon:

Drawing on six decades of work, this new selection charts Alan Brownjohn‘s idiosyncratic take on the issues for which his poetry is known – love (and sex), time (and mortality) and our ecological and cultural environment (threatened and abused).

Brownjohn was born in London in 1931 and was educated at Merton College, Oxford. He worked as a schoolteacher between 1957 and 1965 and lectured at Battersea College of Education and South Bank Polytechnic until he left to become a full-time freelance writer in 1979. A regular broadcaster, reviewer and contributor to journals including the Times Literary Supplement, Encounter and the Sunday Times, Alan Brownjohn was poetry critic for the New Statesman and was Chairman of the Poetry Society between 1982 and 1988. He has also served on the Arts Council literature panel, was a Labour councillor and a candidate for Parliament. In 2007, he received the Writers’ Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award. You can find out more about Brownjohn in these interviews, and hear him read some of his poems at the Poetry Archive.

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. You can sign up to the publisher’s mailing list here to receive a newsletter with special offers, details of readings & events and new titles and Enitharmon’s Poem of the Month.

Songs and Sonnets: 248

November 7, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Look at her. You will see nature’s power
Hanging like the sun over a blind world.

Quickly. Death searches out the gentlest.
Loveliness is mortal. She is looked for.

He sidles up beside a creature in spring
Temper, everything wonderful in one flesh.

My crazed verse is stricken with sun.
Look on this glare before blindness

Rides weeping over the world.

by Francesco Petrarch, trans. Nicholas Kilmer

This translation of ‘Songs and Sonnets: 248’ is copyright © Nicholas Kilmer, 2011. It is reprinted from Songs and Sonnets (Poetica 8), published by Anvil Press, 2011. This is an enlarged edition of Songs and Sonnets from Laura’s Lifetime published by Anvil Press in 1980.

Notes from Anvil Press:

‘Petrarch deserves to be valued as a real man, a careful thinker, a good poet,’ writes Nicholas Kilmer introducing his enlarged selection of the great Italian poet who lived from 1304 to 1374. Free in form yet holding close to the central impulses of Petrarch’s inspiration, Kilmer’s ‘readings’ in this bilingual edition present Petrarch as a confessional poet and a humane moralist of startling honesty.

Nicholas Kilmer lives in Cambridge, MA, USA. Since leaving teaching in 1982 he has worked as an art dealer and curator. As well as poetry and translations, he also writes mysteries set in the art world. You can learn more about Kilmer here.

Anvil Press, founded in 1968, is based in Greenwich, south-east London, in a building off Royal Hill that has been used at various points in its 150-year history as a dance-hall and a printing works. Anvil grew out of a poetry magazine which Peter Jay ran as a student in Oxford and retains its small company ethos.