Month: July 2015

Author’s Prayer

~ oxfordbrookesuni

If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over,
for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.

If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge
of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through rooms without
touching the furniture.

Yes, I love. I can cross the streets asking ‘What year is it?’
I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.

by Ilya Kaminsky

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.

This Wednesday at The Albion Beatnik in Oxford, our Brookes colleague Jane Spiro launches her poetry collection Playing for Time, published by Oversteps Books. She’ll be reading with another colleague, George Roberts, and Zelda Chappel at 7pm.

‘Author’s Prayer’ is copyright © Ilya Kaminsky, 2004. It is reprinted from Dancing in Odessa (Arc Publications, 2014) by permission of Arc Publications.Notes from Arc Publications:

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived in the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. Kaminsky has worked as a law clerk for San Francisco Legal Aid and the National Immigration Law Center. Currently, he teaches English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University.

Dancing in Odessa was published in the US by Tupelo Press in 2004 and won the Whiting Writer’s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine. You can read more about the book on the Arc website, and follow his work via his own website.

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.

Going Out

~ oxfordbrookesuni


Light bulbs, parties, jaunts, the final things –
The last most thought about at eighty-four,
Now as I gingerly change one of the first.
As for the second and third, not much these days,
Lacking an appetite for either. Drink –
A pale dilution, watered wine; no taste
For bad behaviour, mad hilarity,
Or staying up too late.
      Or fashions, either –
I never paid attention to such things,
Not noticing when skirts went up or down,
Or poets began each line with lower case.

Last orders, ending up, or final things –
All titles with a flavour of last words,
All leading up to this one: going out.

by Anthony Thwaite

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. Please do pass on details to friends and colleagues.

‘Going Out’ is copyright © Anthony Thwaite. It is reprinted from Going Out (Enitharmon Press, 2015) by permission of Enitharmon Press.

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

Now that he is eighty-four, Anthony Thwaite says that Going Out is likely to be the last book of poems he publishes in his lifetime, and that the title is apt. But the words are wistful, even playful, and that is true of some of the book’s contents. The poems range over times and places, commemorating friends (especially the poet Peter Porter), and draw on memories, hard-won faith, self-questioning. As Michael Frayn has put it, Thwaite ‘writes with simplicity and precision about difficult and ambiguous things, the complexity and unceasingness of the world, the vastness and richness of the past, the elusiveness of the present – and the heroic persistence of our efforts to fix some trace of all this.’

Anthony Thwaite has been a university teacher, a radio producer, and a literary editor. His first collection came out in 1953, and Enitharmon published his Collected Poems in 2007 and Late Poems in 2010. He is one of Philip Larkin’s literary executors and editors. He is married to the biographer Ann Thwaite and lives in Norfolk. You can find out more about the book on the Enitharmon website, and hear Anthony read from his poems on the Poetry Archive website.

‘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. 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.

Thirteen, in a Gulag, 1950

~ oxfordbrookesuni

We rode on, squashed together like harvested hay.
I lost my sister and my bearings the other side of the Urals,
tried to make soup in some mud hut,
rubbing frozen sorrel leaves
with mutton tallow, trying to
melt snow under my sheepskin,
seeing as no one had taught me the Kyrgyz songs
which magically light fires in wood and in stone.

Dance, spark, chase away the ice and putrid fever,
wake mother with your wormwood medicine.


by Wioletta Greg, translated by Marek Kazmierski

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 competitionwill be judged by Bernard O’Donoghue and Hannah Lowe, and you can enter by visiting this page.

‘Thirteen, in a Gulag, 1950’ is copyright © Wioletta Greg, 2014 and translated by Marek Kazmierski. It is reprintedfrom Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance (Arc Publications, 2014) by permission of Arc Publications.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Wioletta Greg (b. 1974), poet, writer and translator from Southern Poland, has been active on the Polish literary scene since her first publication in the 1990s, and despite her move to the Isle of Wight at the beginning of the new millennium, has remained so. She has published several volumes of poetry, a collection of short prose poems and, most recently, a debut novel Guguły (2014), which has already been hailed as the ‘discovery of the year’ by critics and readers alike. Translated into English by Marek Kazmierski, her book Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance, from which this Weekly Poem comes, was shortlisted for the prestigious 2015 Griffin Prize. You can read more about the book on Arc’s website, and hear Wioletta read from her poems (in Polish) on the British Library website, with translations by Marek Kazmierski.

As part of the Poetry Centre’s Review Blog, student Brittany Krier reviewed the book, and you can read her thoughts on the Poetry Centre site.

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.

St. Peter and the Storm Petrels

~ oxfordbrookesuni


Footsteps on water.

Dawn clear as prayer.
Bodies hanging over water

like small, dark beads.

How long have they been out there
treading slowly across the bay,
staring down into the salt-clear distances,
scrying for storms?

There was a time when a saint walked on water.
We saw him – a bright light crossing the bay
leaving a trail of taut, still water
marked with footprints.

He left long ago, turning west
on his weightless march,
leaning into the heft of the waves
like a restless ship.

We still wait for him to return,
but perhaps, lost or driven mad
by such winds, such distances,
this is what he has become –

a petrel hanging over water,
staring down as if in wonder
and pattering its ragged dance

to the distant, scudding footfall of storms.


by Ben Smith

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.


The poet 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 this Thursday 9 July. For more details and for tickets, visit the Oxford Playhouse website.

‘St. Peter and the Storm Petrels’ is copyright © Ben Smith, 2014. It is reprinted from Sky Burials (Worple Press, 2014) by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Ben Smith’s poetry, criticism and short fiction has been published in a wide range of magazines, anthologies and journals. He completed a PhD on Environmental Poetry at Exeter University and currently lives in Devon. The poems in his debut pamphlet Sky Burials map shifting environments, strange ecological events and dubious auguries. Told through the voices of birds, unreliable seers and broken bones found in rivers and museums, these dark, playful poems explore prophecy and ritual, science and uncertainty in the era of climate change. Read more about the pamphlet on the Worple site, and another poem from the collection (as well as work from Worple poet Isabel Galleymore) on The Clearing 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.