You, Me and the Bookcase

November 24, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The back seat of a car wasn’t ever
big enough. The boot had to be left open
to bring home our book case.

Fitting corners through doorways
allowed us to feel the grain, the scent
of polish rushing to our heads. Out of the rings

left by two glasses and what we surmised
a bottle of burgundy, we invented a story
about a couple like us, who at weekends scoured

shops for texts about the world. Atlases,
dictionaries, photo albums, and the collected works
of philosophers share the shelves.

We’ve devised an order of sorts,
and positioned spines so sometimes
we lie horizontal with the titles.

Although we haven’t filled all the gaps,
we’re learning it’s not just touch
and visual pleasure, but finding the words.

by Sally Flint

This Saturday 29 November at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, Hannah Lowe (Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing at Brookes) will be running a poetry workshop and taking part in a discussion with Mike Phillips in an event related to her fascinating recent publication, Ormonde. There are a few tickets left! Visit the Hercules Press website for more details.

Next Wednesday 3 December, Professor Maximilian de Gaynesford (University of Reading) will speak on ‘Why Poetry Matters’: 6pm (drinks and nibbles from 5.30) at the Ashmolean Museum’s Education Centre (nearest entrance from St. Giles). The event is free, but turn up early to secure a seat! More details can be found on the Ashmolean website.

‘You, Me and the Bookcase’ is copyright © Sally Flint, 2014. It is reprinted from Pieces of Us (Worple Press, 2014) by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Sally Flint grew up in the West Midlands and now lives in Exeter. Her poetry and prose have been widely published, anthologised and won awards. She teaches creative writing, facilitates community workshops and is co-founder/editor of Riptideshort story journal and Canto Poetry at the University of Exeter. She also works with Devon Drugs Service and Devon Community Foundation on a project called ‘Stories Connect’, based on the University of Massachusetts’ programme, ‘Changing Lives through Literature.’ Her research interests include healthcare in the arts, and the evolution of ekphrasis, especially the relationship between poetry, visual art and technology.

Worple Press was founded by Peter and Amanda Carpenter in 1997 and publishes 6-8 books a year by new and established poets: collections, pamphlets, works in translation, essays, interviews. Early authors included Iain Sinclair, Joseph Woods, Beverley Bie Brahic, Kevin Jackson and the acclaimed American nature poet Peter Kane Dufault. Recent collections (2014/2015) include Andy Brown’s Exurbia, Isabel Galleymore’s Dazzle Ship, Martyn Crucefix’s A Hatfield Mass, Julian Stannard’s The Street of Perfect Love, and Clive Wilmer’s UrbanPastorals. More information can be found at the publisher’s website, and on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

Midnight, Dhaka, 25 March 1971

November 17, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I am a hardened camera clicking at midnight.
I have caught it all: the screeching tanks
pounding the city under the pressing heat,
searchlights dicing the streets like bayonets,
Kalishnikovs mowing down rickshaw pullers,
vendor sellers, beggars on the pavements.
I click on, despite the dry and bitter dust
scratched on the lake-black water of my Nikon eye,
at a Bedford truck waiting by the roadside,
at two soldiers holding the dead by their hands and legs,
throwing them into the back, hurling
them one upon another until the floor
is loaded to the sky’s armpits. The corpses stare
at our stars’ succulent whiteness
with their arms flung out as if to bridge a nation.
Their bodies shake when the lorry chugs.
I click as the soldiers laugh at the billboard on the bulkhead:
GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU
SIX MILLION DRUNK EVERY DAY.
by Mir Mahfuz Ali

Tomorrow (Wednesday), there will be a joint poetry reading at Oxford Brookes by Peter Robinson and Hannah Lowe. It will take place from 12-1pm in T.300 (Tonge Building, Gipsy Lane Campus), and all are welcome. Peter Robinson is Professor of English Literature at the University of Reading, and a prolific and highly influential writer and editor. He has recently published Foreigners, Drunks and Babies, a collection of short stories, and Like the Living End, a chapbook of new poetry. Hannah Lowe is Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing at Brookes. Her collection Chick was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2013, and shortlisted for, amongst other prizes, the Forward Best First Collection Prize. Hannah’s pamphlet Ormonde appeared earlier this month from Hercules Editions. In September, she was named as one of the twenty Next Generation Poets 2014. For more details, contact niall.munro@brookes.ac.uk

Mir Mahfuz Ali is an exceptional new voice in British Poetry. A native of what is now Bangladesh, Mahfuz grew up during the difficult period of the early 1970’s when the region was struck, first by a devastating cyclone, then by a particularly vicious civil war. As a boy, Mahfuz witnessed atrocities and writes about them with a searing directness, in poems like ‘My Salma’ and the title poem, but much more than this, his trauma becomes transformative, and his poetry the key to unlocking memories of a childhood that are rich in nuance, gorgeous in detail, and evocative of a beautiful country. They celebrate the human capacity for love and survival in otherwise tragic circumstances. Read more about the book on the Seren website.

Mahfuz was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1958, moved to the UK in the 1970s. He has worked as a male model, a tandoori chef and as a dancer and actor. He is renowned for his extraordinary voice: a rich, throaty whisper brought about by a Bangladeshi policeman trying to silence the singing of anthems during a public anti-war demonstration. He has given readings and performances at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and in other theatres in Britain and elsewhere; on BBC Newsnight Review, Radio 4, and the World Service as well as speaking at a number of conferences and festivals, including addressing the Home Office on integration policy. His poetry has appeared in London Magazine, Poetry London, Poetry Review and PN Review. His influences include Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and Jibanananda Das (1899-1954). Mahfuz is an active member of Exiled Writer’s Ink, which is working to promote the creative expression of refugees and of exiled writers and encourage cross-cultural dialogue. Midnight, Dhaka, is his first full collection of poetry. Several poems from this collection won the Geoffrey Dearmer prize in 2014. You can find out more about his work from his website.

Seren is based in Bridgend, South Wales and was originally conceived in the early 80’s by then Head of English at Brynteg Comp, Cary Archard, on his kitchen table as an offshoot of Poetry Wales magazine. After moving briefly to poet Dannie Abse’s garage in Ogmore by Sea, the advent of Managing Editor Mick Felton has seen the press has go from strength to strength. We’ve published a wide range of titles including fiction (which under Editor Penny Thomas has seen the Booker-nominated novel by Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days, and an acclaimed novella series based on the medieval Welsh tales from the Mabinogion) and non-fiction (including literary criticism such as John Redmond’s Poetry and Privacy, as well as sumptuous art books like the collaboration between the painter Shani Rhys James and a number of poets and writers: Florilingua). Seren’s poetry list, edited by Amy Wack since the early 90’s, has produced T.S. Eliot nominated titles by Deryn Rees-Jones and Pascale Petit, Costa winner John Haynes, and a large list of Forward prize winners and nominees. Cary Archard remains on our Board of Directors and is a lively and influential presence. We mourn the loss, this year, of the wonderful Dannie Abse, also a guiding spirit. Find out more about the publisher on its website.

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.

Cracked Walnut and Cup

November 10, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The cracked walnut
beside the porcelain cup

is not a porcelain walnut
and a cracked cup

but as she who finds
her lover’s words in her mouth

and their friends who discover
their faces alike

the walnut shell seems
another drinking vessel

and the cup appears
ever more breakable.

by Isabel Galleymore

Tomorrow (Tuesday 11 November), the Emergency Poet visits Brookes! Between 11-3pm, the EP’s ambulance will be parked between the Media Centre and the John Henry Brookes Building on Headington Road. Come along for your free poetry prescription! This event is part of the Poetry Centre’s ongoing collaboration with the local mental health charity The Archway Foundation. Whether you’re from Brookes or not, all are welcome!

And tomorrow evening, the Next Generation Poets are in town. The Next Generation list, released every decade and organized by the Poetry Book Society, marks out the poets to watch from Britain and Ireland. At 7pm, Blackwell’s on Broad Street will host a reading featuring two of the twenty Next Generation 2014 poets, Jane Yeh and Luke Kennard, who will be reading alongside New Generation (1994) poet Susan Wicks, and local poet Rachel Piercey. More details about the event can be found on the Blackwell’s website, and more information about the Next Generation Poets 2014 from the promotion’s site.

Notes from Worple Press:

Isabel Galleymore was born in 1988. She held a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2012 and her poems have appeared in magazines such as Poetry Review, Poetry London and The Rialto. She is currently writing her critical PhD thesis on metaphor and ecopoetics at the University of Exeter and co-edits The Clearing, an online magazine of nature and place-based writing. Find out more about her book from the Worple website.

Worple Press was founded by Peter and Amanda Carpenter in 1997 and publishes 6-8 books a year by new and established poets: collections, pamphlets, works in translation, essays, interviews. Early authors included Iain Sinclair, Joseph Woods, Beverley Bie Brahic, Kevin Jackson and the acclaimed American nature poet Peter Kane Dufault. Recent collections (2014/2015) include Andy Brown’s Exurbia, Isabel Galleymore’s Dazzle Ship, Martyn Crucefix’s A Hatfield Mass, Julian Stannard’s The Street of Perfect Love, and Clive Wilmer’s Urban Pastorals. More information can be found at the publisher’s website, and on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

Days of November 2009

November 3, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Short days, long shadows:
sun rising low skims the hill.

Mending, making good, days full
of outdoor jobs, folk

racing to finish before dark,
before winter. Angled light, always

on the edge of leaving. These days
when every little thing feels urgent,

unmissable, when all you want
is to hold on to a lit rack

of cirrus, the taste of woodsmoke
catching your throat, a sleek seal

slipping back under, the farewell
of geese, scribbled in black arrows.

by Sheenagh Pugh

Hannah Lowe, Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing, and Jennifer Wong, PhD student in English and Creative Writing, will be taking part in the Reading Poetry Festival on Saturday 8 November in a special Poetry Centre reading. You can find out more about the festival, and book tickets, on the dedicated website.

Sheenagh Pugh lived for many years in Wales but now lives in Shetland. She has published many collections with Seren, including a Selected and a Later Selected Poems. Her latest is Short Days, Long Shadows (Seren 2014). She has also published two novels, a book of translations and a critical study of fan fiction. Write Out Loud has commented that ‘this consummate collection has the certainty of touch one has come to expect from Sheenagh Pugh, one of our finest contemporary poets.’ Sheenagh taught creative writing at the University of Glamorgan, but has now escaped and returned to the wild. You can find out more about her work from her website, and her blog. She writes a lively blog and is a provocative and entertaining presence on social media platforms.

Seren is based in Bridgend, South Wales and was originally conceived in the early 80’s by then Head of English at Brynteg Comp, Cary Archard, on his kitchen table as an offshoot of Poetry Wales magazine. After moving briefly to poet Dannie Abse’s garage in Ogmore by Sea, the advent of Managing Editor Mick Felton has seen the press has go from strength to strength. We’ve published a wide range of titles including fiction (which under Editor Penny Thomas has seen the Booker-nominated novel by Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days, and an acclaimed novella series based on the medieval Welsh tales from the Mabinogion) and non-fiction (including literary criticism such as John Redmond’s Poetry and Privacy, as well as sumptuous art books like the collaboration between the painter Shani Rhys James and a number of poets and writers: Florilingua). Seren’s poetry list, edited by Amy Wack since the early 90’s, has produced T.S. Eliot nominated titles by Deryn Rees-Jones and Pascale Petit, Costa winner John Haynes, and a large list of Forward prize winners and nominees like Hilary Menos, Sheenagh Pugh, Kathryn Simmonds, Kate Bingham, Judy Brown, Meirion Jordan, Rhian Edwards and Marianne Burton as well as continuing to publishing classic Welsh writers like Duncan Bush, Christopher Meredith, Paul Henry, Ruth Bidgood, Peter Finch and new names like Jonathan Edwards and Dai George. Recently, we’ve also added some fine Irish poets: Anne-Marie Fyfe, Eoghan Walls, Siobhan Campbell, Carolyn Jess-Cooke; several Americans: Carrie Etter and Katha Pollitt; and the London-based: Kathryn Maris. Our staff also includes Simon Hicks, Publicity, who doubles as cover designer, Sarah Davies, Marketing and Digital Media, and Rebecca Parfitt, administrator for Poetry Wales magazine. Cary Archard remains on our Board of Directors and is a lively and influential presence. We mourn the loss, this year, of the wonderful Dannie Abse, also a guiding spirit. Find out more about the publisher on its website.