Penelope to Ulysses

June 29, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Dear Ulysses,

you’re late.

Don’t worry about answering, just come home.
The enemy of Grecian wives has fallen,
but, honestly, Troy wasn’t worth it.

If only Paris had drowned
in some storm when he was heading for Sparta,
I wouldn’t lie frigid in my bed
or have to moan of tedious days
or pass my nights like some poor widow
at the loom’s dull web.

I mean, I know love makes me anxious
and my nightmares were excessive –
lurid scenarios; Trojans singling you out etc.
Hector’s name made me ashen.
When I heard he’d killed Antilochus,
I was a nervous mess.
Then Patroclus died, in borrowed armour,
so even cunning couldn’t guarantee success…
Each time Greek blood warmed spears
I was flooded with fear.

But someone must look out for couples:
Troy burnt and you survived.
Now soldiers slur victory songs;
smoke coils from altars laid with souvenirs;
admiration makes old men babble
as girls hang on tales from lovers’ lips.

The other night, one man mapped battles
in spilt wine, lightly tracing Troy:
‘The river was here; Priam’s palace,
Achilles’ tent, then Hector’s corpse…’

I sent our son to find you – he got the story:
how you, full of your daring – not caring about us –
stole into the Trojan camp at night
and just two of you slaughtered hundreds.
Sounds typically cautious and thoughtful.
Until I heard you’d ridden back, my heart
reared with fear at every word.

Anyway, you’ve razed Troy, but what does it matter
to me it’s been levelled?
I remain as I was while it remained –
alone.

by Clare Pollard

Clare Pollard is currently touring a staged version of Ovid’s Heroines, in which she reads, recites and performs her astonishing poems against a backdrop of Mediterranean light and sound. Produced by Jaybird Live Literature, the show visits the Burton Taylor Studio Theatre in Oxford on 9 July. For more details and for tickets, visit the Oxford Playhouse website.

As part of the MCS Arts Festival Oxford (20 June-5 July), the highly-acclaimed poet Roger McGough will be reading tomorrow evening (30 June). You can find more details on the festival site. Also tomorrow, Penny Boxhall will be leading an Illumination Poetry Workshop in the Old Library, University Church of St Mary the Virgin from 4.15pm.

An extract of Penelope’s letter to Ulysses, one of Ovid’s Heroides, translated by Clare Pollard as Ovid’s Heroines. With this letter, Ovid puts a different perspective on Homer’s The Odyssey. The Trojan War has long been over, but the Greek war hero Ulysses has not returned to his wife Penelope in Ithaca. Whilst those who have read Homer will know this is because he has been waylaid by obstacles that include Gods, monsters, weather and the sorceress Circe, Penelope has heard nothing. Their son Telemachus has just returned from a fruitless trip to Pylos, where he was trying to find out what has happened to his father and was almost killed.

You can read more about Clare’s book here, and follow her work via her website and on Twitter.

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.

A Calvinist in Love

June 22, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I will not kiss you, country fashion,
By hedgesides where
Weasel and hare
Claim kinship with our passion.

I care no more for fickle moonlight:
Would rather see
Your face touch me
Under a claywork dune-light.

I want no scent or softness round us
When we embrace:
We could not trace
Therein what beauties bound us.

This bare clay-pit is truest setting
For love like ours:
No bed of flowers
But sand-ledge for our petting.

The Spring is not our mating season:
The lift of sap
Would but entrap
Our souls and lead to treason.

This truculent gale, this pang of winter
Awake our joy,
For they employ
Moods that made Calvary splinter.

We need no vague and dreamy fancies:
Care not to sight
The Infinite
In transient necromancies.

No poetry on earth can fasten
Its vampire mouth
Upon our youth:
We know the sly assassin.

We cannot fuse with fallen Nature’s
Our rhythmic tide:
It is allied
With laws beyond the creatures.

by Jack Clemo

A reminder that the deadline for submissions to the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Prize is 31 August. There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language, and First Prize in each category is £1000. The competition will be judged by Bernard O’Donoghue and Hannah Lowe, and you can enter by visiting this page.

As part of the MCS Arts Festival Oxford (20 June-5 July), the highly-acclaimed poet Roger McGough will be reading on 30 June. You can find more details on the festival site. On 27 June, the festival will also host a youth poetry slam, featuring a wide range of students from across Oxfordshire, and an Illumination Poetry Workshop with Penny Boxhall, Tuesday 30th June, Old Library, University Church of St Mary the Virgin.

Jack Clemo (1916-1994), English poet and author whose physical sufferings – he became deaf about 1936 and blind in 1955 – influenced his work. Clemo’s formal education ended when he was 13. His early poems reflect the stark landscape of the clay-pits in their austere intensity. Important in his writings are the themes of Christianity and conversion, erotic mysticism and marriage, and the role of suffering in attaining happiness. He married Ruth Peaty in 1968, and she inspired his later poetry, which shows a softened acceptance of sex and love. During his lifetime Jack Clemo was considered one of the most important poets Cornwall has produced but as with many major poets his work fell into obscurity after his death in 1994. This Selected Poems represents his return to prominence. You can read more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

Writing about his work in The Independent, John Mole commented that Clemo was ‘a remarkable and original writer… [whose] charged, evangelical language has a strenuous urgency, a mixture of austere beauty and an often remorseless emphasis on the “striving flesh”, the “storm-flash of grace”.’

‘William Blake dreamed up the original Enitharmon as one of his inspiriting, good, female daemons, and his own spirit as a poet-artist, printer-publisher still lives in the press which bears the name of his creation. Enitharmon is a rare and wonderful phenomenon, a press where books are shaped into artefacts of lovely handiwork as well as communicators of words and worlds. The writers and the artists published here over the last forty-five years represent a truly historic gathering of individuals with an original vision and an original voice, but the energy is not retrospective: it is growing and new ideas enrich the list year by year. Like an ecologist who manages to restock the meadows with a nearly vanished species of wild flower or brings a rare pair of birds back to found a colony, this publisher has dedicatedly and brilliantly made a success of that sharply endangered species, the independent press.’ (Marina Warner.)

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

Wood

June 15, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

When you reach the trees
the apple’s rotted
on the golden bough,
– canker grown, fly-blown –

depths are still depths
but the way swirls in shallows,
the rough hint of path runs
up only to bramble.

But this last look, wake-up
pinch, hollow laugh, sorrow –
might be a fork’s touch,
a fresh furrow.

by Olivia Byard

As part of the MCS Arts Festival Oxford (20 June-5 July), the highly-acclaimed poet Roger McGough will be reading on 30 June. You can find more details on the festival site. On 27 June, the festival will also host a youth poetry slam, featuring a wide range of students from across Oxfordshire, and an Illumination Poetry Workshop with Penny Boxhall, Tuesday 30th June, Old Library, University Church of St Mary the Virgin.

Notes from Worple Press:

Olivia Byard was born in South Wales and grew up on the Cotswolds and in Montreal, Canada. Her debut collection From a Benediction (1998) was short-listed for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and was followed by Strange Horses (2011). Her various roles have included factory worker, academic researcher, community organiser, children’s book writer, book controller, phone advisor for Mind, and, for the last twenty-one years, creative writing tutor. She is politically engaged, especially on Green issues. She comments online and her letters regularly appear in the Guardian. You can read more about her latest book on the Worple website, and follow her work on her own site.

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.

Schoolchildren on Vía Augusta

June 8, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Like leaves of wind surprised in a sudden gust
they peel away from the dense huddle,
one child, two, then several, more,
they take flight and ruffle up the street,
blown towards each other, impelled into merging,
unravelling the group they were in,
seeking it out again, finding their place.
A magnet drives them apart and tugs them back,
it scatters them first toward the street,
then brings them together once more. It’s very strange
the way they fill out, make themselves be.
As though they don’t know who are they are unless pursued.
They chase each other, touching, colliding.
There’s no giving way, except in a challenge
that blocks them one by one.
There are two or three who have already crossed over,
two or three more who are starting to break away,
until, as if the motive were spreading,
the curl escapes, flies free, tucks itself in,
and they cross the street en masse. A breath
of air lingers, a gentleness that rocks,
that wraps itself round the stragglers, making them
see that they’re not there, they’re not there yet, that the group
is on the other side. All
as natural as a kindly wind,
without violence, like a pattern,
a compact group once more
finally, after movement, calm and still.

by Pedro Serrano, translated by Anna Crowe

A reminder that the deadline for the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Prize is 31 August. There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language, and First Prize in each category is £1000. The competition will be judged by Bernard O’Donoghue and Hannah Lowe, and you can enter by visiting this page.

Pedro Serrano has published five collections of poems. Among these are titles such as; El Miedo (Fear) (1986), Ignorancia (Ignorance) (1994), Turba (Peatlands) (2005) and Nueces (Walnuts) (2009). Many of his poems have been translated into English and have been published widely in the UK and abroad. His work has recently appeared on The Verb on BBC Radio Three, presented by Ian McMillan.

The poems in the first full-length collection to be published in the UK by the acclaimed Mexican poet Pedro Serrano, Peatlands, are taken from Desplazamientos, a volume which draws on all his collections since 1986. Chosen by both the poet and his accomplished translator, Anna Crowe, these poems are wide-ranging, passionate and linguistically thrilling.

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.