Trees in winter

March 25, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Trees —
they know the recess
of winter, how
to retreat,
continue bereft of leaves,
without grief,
as though practising
the acts of dying;
branches
braced
motionless,
seemingly supported
by freezing air,
frame the view
to the city;
fine adventitious roots,
like the repressed,
multiply,
stretching way out beyond
the drip-line;
taproots strike
veridical
into the hiemal earth,
that deep
blue lake;
not yet the cessation
of things.

by Sharon Morris

Notes from Enitharmon:

Sharon Morris was born in west Wales and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she is currently a senior lecturer. She has exhibited photography, film and video, and performed live artworks bringing together spoken text and projected images. Having completed a PhD in 2000 on the relation between words and images, referring to writer H.D. and artist Claude Cahun, she continues to write on semiotics, visual theory and poetics, for which she received a Leverhulme research fellowship in 2003. Her poems have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Tying the Song (Enitharmon, 2000), the first anthology from The Poetry School, and In the Company of Poets (Hearing Eye, 2003). John Haynes has described the poems in Gospel Oak, Sharon Morris’s new collection, as ‘lithe, fluent poems which typically begin here and now and end beyond it, whose delicate descriptions of nature often evoke a history as it were “under the ground”.’

You can read more about Gospel Oak at this page on Enitharmon’s website and from this interview with Sharon Morris in the Camden Review. Sharon Morris will be reading from her collection this Saturday March 30 from 7.30-9.30pm at The Shuffle at The Poetry Café, Betterton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC1. More details can be found on The Shuffle’s Facebook page.

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.

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.

Life After Wartime

March 18, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Some things never change.
The garden bushes wag their beards
like arguing theologians while the orange fists
of passion fruit take cover in the leaves.
The sky aches with unmapped distances
and the sun hides nothing.
At dusk, it surrenders to the moon.

When there’s small-hours muttering in the street
remember it’s only someone deciding to go home or go on,
pushing the night for the last of the great good times
and into a shell-shocked morning after.

At least there’s coffee again.
It takes our minds off the radio,
the smooth-voiced reassurances,
the metaphors encrusted like barnacles
on every announcement, your almost
imperceptible jump at the sound
of a pamphlet shoved through the door.

Things never change.
People wear their silence like a caul.
To bring them luck against drowning.
They were parents. Or siblings. Or both.
They are the ones that nothing surprises,
the ones who no longer look up
when a jet comes roaring in above the city,
framed against the orange sky,
picking its way among the towers.

by Tom Phillips

This week’s poem from Tom Phillips and last week’s from Kate Behrens both come from Two Rivers Press, and are scheduled to coincide with an exciting reading by these two poets and the Press’s editor, Peter Robinson, tomorrow (Tuesday 19 March) at Oxford Brookes. You can read a sample of Peter Robinson’s work here. The reading will take place at 6pm in Headington Hill Hall, and all are welcome. There is no charge, and refreshments will be provided! For more details, visit this page.

Notes from Two Rivers Press:

Tom Phillips‘s first full-length collection navigates terrains which range from Eastern Europe, Australia, and the Home Counties to his own back garden in Bristol. From the different perspectives these vantage points offer, it unearths connections between chance meetings and ‘big history’, family stories and the state we’re in. It also looks at poetry itself as a ground on which to recreate – and negotiate with – one thing that nobody can change: the past. Read more about the collection at Two Rivers’s site here.

Tom Phillips is a writer based in Bristol, and the author of two pamphlets of poetry: ‘Burning Omaha’ and ‘Reversing into the Cold War’, and the full-length collection Recreation Ground. His plays include ‘Man Diving’, ‘Hotel Illyria’, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ and the solo show ‘I Went To Albania’. Tom is also currently studying for a PhD in creative writing at Reading University.

Two Rivers Press was founded in Reading in 1994 by Peter Hay (1951–2003), an artist and enthusiast for the town and its two rivers, the Kennet and the Thames. In nearly two decades of publishing and with over seventy titles since its inception, it has been described as ‘one of the most characterful small presses in the country’. It focuses on local poets and a significant part of its work explores and celebrates local history and environment. Bold illustration and striking design are important elements of its work, used to great effect in new editions of classic poems, especially ones with some Reading connection: for example, Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and in collections of contemporary poetry from local poets such as Reading Poetry: an anthology edited by Peter Robinson. It has recently published A Mutual Friend: Poems for Charles Dickens, an anthology with a very distinguished list of contributors, also edited by Peter Robinson. The Press is strongly rooted in the local community and has close links with the University, Poets’ Café, RISC, Museum of English Rural Life and other local groups. Its contribution to Reading’s culture won for it a Pride of Reading award in 2008. You can find more information at the press’s website, and on its Facebook page.

France

March 14, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Whatever they had been told was lies: there was no kind of
deal awaiting them, no siren call. The armistice was signed
but the war had been lost years before and nobody had told
them. Indigo night interrupted by orange explosions on the
horizon, great sweeping clouds of dust making everything
invisible for hours on end, the spotlights bearing down on
them the length of the assault line. We will never know defeat,
they repeated; the words of their leader an idiot’s mantra in
their throats. They spent the whole day waiting for news:
when should they expect the enemy? In the evening, a small
group sat by the linden tree and passed a bottle around. The
dusk obliterated memory. One of the men dreamed of France,
a country he had never been to. People’s lives there are
almost perfect. Something small and forgotten in his soul told
him France was a better place in which to die; that there,
eternity has brushed its sleeve against the land.

by Richard Gwyn

‘France’ is taken from Sad Giraffe Café by Richard Gwyn, and published by Arc Publications.

Notes courtesy of Arc:

Richard Gwyn grew up in Crickhowell, South Wales. He studied social anthropology at the LSE and worked in factories and as a milkman, before leaving London to spend ten years in aimless travel, settling for periods in Greece and Spain. He returned to the UK in the 1990s and took a PhD in Linguistics at Cardiff University, where he now directs the MA in Creative Writing. He is the author of five collections of poetry and two novels, The Colour of a Dog Running Away and Deep Hanging Out. In addition, he has written many articles and essays and reviews new fiction for The Independent. He has translated poetry from Spanish and Catalan, and his own poetry and fiction have appeared in several languages. You can find out more about Richard Gwyn at his website here.

Sad Giraffe Café, from which ‘France’ is taken, is a collection of prose poems which together form a shifting, progressive narrative. There are three recurring themes: an imaginary and sinister kingdom, a young wanderer named Alice, and a shape-shifting, time-travelling, first-person narrator. The poems seem to be devoid of past or future, existing in an unstable, and at times apocalyptic present. They are peopled by strangers and lodged in an ‘elsewhere’ which is also somehow familiar. They have the feel of dreams masquerading as real events, or else of real events masquerading as dreams. You can find out more about Sad Giraffe Café and read other poems from the book here.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. Find out more about Arc by visiting the publisher’s website, where there are discounts available on Arc books.

Disguised as the Air

March 11, 2013April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Between the chair and table
a musculature
of negative shapes.
The apple-tree thrives
on the ashes of others.
All that I give you
leaves me richer.
Only as corpses
are we entire.
If I hold back my knowing
you might find your own.
You can steal my car
but not my dance-floor.
The hole in the stone
makes for a wish.
The oyster tastes only of sea.
Thanks to what binds me
I am free for a moment.
The lopped-off branches
speed up the greening.
The sun in the monastery
slants through a void.
Love lies hidden
in what is missing.
This bird invents
from a handful of notes.

by Kate Behrens

This week’s poem from Kate Behrens and next week’s from Tom Phillips both come from Two Rivers Press, and are scheduled to coincide with an exciting reading by these two poets and the Press’s editor, Peter Robinson, on Tuesday 19 March at Oxford Brookes. The reading will take place at 6pm in Headington Hill Hall, and all are welcome. There is no charge, and refreshments will be provided! For more details, reply to this message or visit this page.

Notes from Two Rivers Press:

In The Beholder, Kate Behrens’ first collection, those fleeting moments between people, or between individuals and nature are distilled without judgement or resolution. A deer trapped in a garden makes a dangerous leap for freedom. Someone hangs onto a sense of beauty in the face of a life that is ugly and collapsing or confuses a landscape with long ago childhood play. Things are revealed obliquely, as if by homing in on a subject, its true meaning would evaporate. Nature confronts the poet with its deliberation, pointing up the mysterious gulfs between it and us from a solitude that infuses so many of these poems. The physical setting is often a Europe that feels unfamiliar — flats in cities, the burning horizon seen from a train, or the view from a window seen through the eyes of two traumatised people. But there is celebration here too, as in the ways children can heal, inspire, and teach us how to live, and in nature’s capacity to nourish. For more details about the collection, visit Two Rivers Press’s page here.

Kate Behrens was born in 1959, one of twin daughters to two painters. A runner-up in the 2010 Mslexia poetry competition, who reads regularly at the Poets Café in Reading, she lives in Oxfordshire, and has one daughter.

Osteopath

March 4, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My back’s a lump of clay, becomes a spine
Beneath your fingers, little hard-nosed creatures
That sniff out tangled nerves and sidelong pain
Autonomously probing with a blind man’s
Feel for the beauty of a groove or contour,
Reminding me that I am skeleton.

Now on my back I see the skylight frame
A chasm of unboundedness, space blue.
A half-moon lit up like an x-ray
Tugs at my gravity. You’re earthing me
With pressure: you rotate, push and pull,
Make new the muscles, tendons, of my body,
Create the definition that I lacked
So I may rise like Adam, ribs intact.

by James Harpur

Notes from Anvil Press:

James Harpur‘s fifth collection, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, journeys into realms seen and unseen, ranging from the landscapes of Ireland to the visionary realms of the mystics. Through the finely textured music of his poems, he explores emotional and spiritual intimacies while keeping a sharp observant eye on the everyday world. Angels and Harvesters displays both human tenderness and an otherworldly wonder, as Harpur continues his quest to reconcile the complexities of the human condition with a deep-seated spiritual longing.

James Harpur has published four previous books of poetry and a translation of Boethius’s poems entitled Fortune’s Prisoner. He is poetry editor of the Temenos Academy Review and has won a number of prizes and awards, including the 2009 Michael Hartnett Award and the 1995 British National Poetry Competition. He has held residencies at the Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco, the Munster Literature Centre and Exeter Cathedral. He lives in Co. Cork.

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. Visit Anvil’s website here, where you can sign up to their mailing list to find out about new publications and events.