Lastu

August 18, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Niitythän oli aivan ihania,
että niissä kukki päiväkukat sen minä muistan
että kerran tuolla kun oli sellainen peltoaukema
mutta mikäs kasvi se sellainen oli
minkä ympärillä ne perhoset
mikäs kasvi se siellä oli ja
sitten sitä metsää hakattiin ja sitten sitä ei enää ollu
mutta kun mä en muista sen nimee
ehkä mä muistan sen sitten
siitä mentiin sillan yli
ja silta vei joen yli ja siinä oli tuomi ja
tuomi sitten kaartui sen joen yli ja sananjalkoja
ja haiseva kurjenpolvi ja laakea kivi polulla
ja mä olen monta kertaa nähnyt unta siitä polusta
toisessa oli hirveesti muurahaisia
toinen oli sellainen ilman muurahaisia
toisessa oli paljon neulasia ja käpyjä mutta se toinen,
se oli hyvin lempee, siinä kasvo päivänkakkaraniitty
siinä vieressä ja siellä erämaassa oli sellainen torppa
isä lähti aina sunnuntaiaamuisin lintuja ampumaan
ja kastematoja oli meillä kotona ja
niitähän kerättiin kun oli pitkä siima, se on
semmoinen siima jossa oli paljon koukkuja
ja kerran tällainen siima
oli meidän vintillä kun oli paljon koiranpentuja
ja yks näistä pennuista sai sen siiman huuleensa.

The Shaving

The meadows used to be really wonderful,
with all daisies there, that I remember,
and there was this sort of clearing at one time
but what was that plant
the one the butterflies went for
what plant was that and
then the forest was chopped down and it was gone
but I just can’t dredge up the name
I might have it
we walked over a bridge from it
and the bridge crossed a river to a bird cherry and
the bird cherry bent over the river and ferns
and smelly cranesbill and a flat stone on the path
and I’ve had so many dreams about that path,
one had loads of ants
another had no ants
the first had lots of pine needles and cones but the other,
it was gentle, like, it had a daisy meadow
next to it and there was this cabin in the wilderness
Dad went out every Sunday morning to shoot birds
and we had earthworms at home and
we were always collecting them ‘cause we had a long fishing line,
the sort with lots of hooks
and once we had a line like that
in the attic when we had lots of puppies
and one of the puppies got its lip caught in the line.by Henriikka Tavi

Translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah

Two announcements: The Poetry Centre is inviting all members of the local community to join us in celebration of National Poetry Day on Thursday 2 October 2014 by performing poetry in our Pop-up Poetry event. If you would like to participate, please send us an e-mail at brookespopuppoetry@gmail.com including your name and a sample of the poetry you would like to read, by Friday 5 September 2014.

Details of the inaugural Winchester Poetry Festival have been released! Taking place between 12-14 September 2014, the festival is three days in length, features thirty poets, and hosts twenty-six events, including internationally-acclaimed and award-winning writers such as Patience Agbabi [Creative Writing Fellow here at Brookes], Ros Barber, David Constantine, Christopher Reid, Michael Longley, and Kate Firth. For more details, visit the Festival’s website, its Facebook page, or follow it on Twitter.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Hailing from Vehkalahti, now a part of Hamina, Henriikka Tavi’s (b.1978) first book, Esim. won the Helsingin Sanomat first book prize. She studied philosophy at the University of Helsinki and is a founding member of the co-op poetry publishing house Poesia. From 2006 until 2010 she also worked for the poetry magazine Tuli&Savu, serving as its chief editor from 2008 with Mikael Brygger.Published by Arc Publications in its New Voices from Europe and Beyond series, and edited by Teemu Manninen, Six Finnish Poets features the work of: Vesa Haapala, Janne Nummela, Matilda Södergran, Henriikka Tavi, Juhana Vähänen and Katariina Vuorinen. Their poems are translated by Lola Rogers, Emily and Fleur Jeremiah, and Helen R. Boultrum. These poets offer a refreshing mix of narrative, cinematic and experimental devices, ranging from science fiction to punk to whimsical subject matters. Several of the poets in this anthology collaborate with other artists and this engagement is evident as the poems speak to each other across the collection.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications 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. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.

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.

Francisco Goya Self-Portrait [Oil on Canvas, c.1815, Prado, Madrid]

August 11, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Terrors are eyes’ dust
of my dogs and monsters,
giants and catholics and kings;
their internecine wars
growl into my dead ears’
cloven expectations,
climb up the very walls
to hive the time again
towards existence
and the almost possible.

Thus can I show the horror vision grants
behind the tremor of our sight and skin,
draw out the dark that age has patterned.
Knuckle lead white and carbon
sour on bones’ illusions
now beyond all courts and favours
can I step back into the shadows’ mysteries
and dear God’s hopes of favours;
fight back in dark oils and stark
against the blank and surface of the world
that etches past the brain’s protective bones
as dry and marrowed out of copper
into the aqua vita black and resurrections
pressed through the arc of devils and their dams
in silence just behind the hum of pain
throbbing again from out my mother’s
body of light gave life to the bright earlier beings
of pastel pales and greens under blue clouds
that scattered into sight and silence
just behind the scream.

It will be saved
as I
without the need of sound
that vision hides behind
and drags the horrors into
the beautiful
even without the mind’s
obedience to its call.

by David Pollard

A reminder that The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre is inviting all members of the local community to join us in celebration of National Poetry Day on Thursday 2 October 2014 by performing poetry in our Pop-up Poetry event.  The performance will be a part of a series of Pop-up Poetry events featured around Oxford exclusively for National Poetry Day. Should you wish to take part, we would need you to have around five minutes of material to perform. We encourage you to read your own work and/or the work of other poets. If you would like to participate, please send us an e-mail at brookespopuppoetry@gmail.com including your name and a sample of the poetry you would like to read, by Friday 5 September 2014.

Notes from Waterloo Press:

David Pollard has been furniture salesman, accountant, TEFL teacher and university lecturer. He has published The Poetry of Keats, A KWIC Concordance to the Harvard Keats’ Letters, a novel, Nietzsche’s Footfalls, and four volumes of poetry: patricides,Risk of Skin, Self-Portraits and bedbound. Find out more about David Pollard’s work from his website, follow him on Twitter, and read more about his latest collection from the Waterloo website.

Waterloo Press offers readers an eclectic list of the most stimulating poetry from the UK and abroad. We promote what’s good of its kind, finding a commonality amongst the poets we publish. Our beautifully designed books range from lost modernist classics, translations and vibrant collections by the best British poets around. Our translation list is growing to 25% of our output. Waterloo Press brings radical and marginalised voices to the fore, mirroring their aesthetics in outstanding book design, including dust jackets; large font; and original artwork. With its growing list, Waterloo Press promotes at last a permeable membrane between contemporary schools, quite apart from archiving a few sacred vessels for good. WP fosters a poetics based on innovation with respect for craft, bloody-mindedness and as founder Sonja Ctvrtecka put it: ‘An elegant unstuffiness – a seagull perched on a Porsche.’ Now the major poetry publisher of the south-east, we also believe strongly in a community of like-minded independent presses. We’ve become a land.

Find out more about Waterloo Press via its website, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook.

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.

from Lives of the Poet

August 4, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

He remembers lunchtime readings at The Swan,
The Dove, The Mermaid; ‘the girls were all gazelles’
and among them sat that lovely, dutiful daughter . . .
He loved her. He began to write ghazals
to her eyes that reminded him of the sea . . .
He stepped out to sun that glittered on the water
beyond shop-girls and typists, suited types
and he felt, not that they were ‘free bloody birds’
but that happiness might still be caught, endlessly –
a salt-wet happiness in which there were few words,
in which she lay naked with that just-fucked look
and oleanders rustled in the breeze that shook
a leaf-shower down outside, while on
her shoulder shuttered moonlight fell in stripes . . .

Immoderation, intransigence, exorbitance,
a feeling of being out-of-this-world
or better-than-this-world, the prizes coming
at the wrong times to the proper people
and vice-versa, the protestations
of cheerfulness, the all-pervasive insecurity,
the chronic lack of commitment, the lifelong
dependence on others – for hospitality,
money, love – the simultaneous contradictory
impulses to be adored and alone, connected
and adrift; the brief passionate flare-ups, the long
epistolary retreats, the ecstatic arrivals,
panic departures; ‘agonizing reappraisal’,
disavowal; severe gloom, habitual dejection.

by Alan Jenkins

Poems ‘9’ and ‘20’ from Lives of the Poet are copyright © Alan Jenkins, 2013, and reprinted from The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann, edited by André Naffis-Sahely and Julian Stannard (CB editions, 2013).

Calling all poets! The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre invites all members of the Oxford community to join us in celebration of National Poetry Day on Thursday 2 October 2014 by performing poetry in our Pop-up Poetry event.

The performance will be a part of a series of Pop-up Poetry events featured around Oxford exclusively for National Poetry Day. Should you wish to take part, we would need you to have around five minutes of material to perform. We encourage you to read your own work and/or the work of other poets. If you would like to participate, please send us an e-mail at brookespopuppoetry@gmail.com including your name and a sample of the poetry you would like to read, by Friday 5 September 2014. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!
Notes from CB editions:

Alan Jenkins, deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement, has published a number of poetry collections, among them Harm (Forward Prize, 1994) and A Shorter Life (2005). The second poem here, in italics, is from the prose of the poet and translator Michael Hofmann – himself the subject of the book in which the poems are included, a collection of memoirs, poems and criticism published by CBe under the title The Palm Beach Effect.

CB editions, founded in 2007, publishes poetry alongside short fiction and other writing, including work in translation. Its poetry titles have won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize three times (in 2009, 2011 and 2013), and have been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize.

In 2011 CBe inaugurated Free Verse, a one-day book fair for poetry publishers to show their work and sell direct to the public; the event was repeated in 2012 and 2013, with over 50 publishers taking part, and has become an annual event. The next fair will take place on 6 September at Conway Hall in London.

Find out more about the publisher from the website, where you can also sign up to the CB editions mailing list, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook to keep up-to-date with its activities.

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.