This Place

March 28, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

When my time comes
and I ask you
again and again where I am
you’ll be able to tell me, truthfully
that this place is a train
that I know quite well

Calling at:
Warrington Bank Quay
Wigan Northwestern
Preston

Calling at:
Wigan Northwestern
Warrington Bank Quay
and London Euston, where this journey terminates

Calling at:

by Sarah Hesketh

This is the first of a special trio of poems to be posted on the list over the next week from poets who are featuring in one of the two Poetry Centre events in the upcoming Oxford Literary Festival. Sarah Hesketh will be reading alongside Harry Man and Claire Trévien on Tuesday 5 April at 4pm (there are more details on the Oxford Literary Festival website), whilst Helen Mort and Alan Buckley will be performing their poetry show ‘The Body Beautiful’ on Sunday 3 April at 2pm; more details on the OLF website. We hope to see you there!

In 2013 poet Sarah Hesketh spent 20 weeks visiting a residential care home for people with dementia. The result is The Hard Word Box, a book of poems and verbatim interviews that takes the reader on a surprising and enriching journey through memory and imagination.

The agility of Hesketh’s poetic voice channels moments of tenderness, suffering and humour, revealing dementia as a negotiation with language and silence. The Hard Word Box is an inventive and compassionate meditation on the things that will be lost. Read more about – and further samples from – the book on the Penned in the Margins website.

Sarah Hesketh obtained an MA in creative writing from UEA. Her first full collection of poetry, Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf, was highly commended in the Forward Prize 2010. In 2013 she was poet-in-residence with Age Concern, working with elderly people with dementia, and in 2014 she published The Hard Word Box, a collection of poems and interviews inspired by this experience. In 2015, she was commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust to produce ‘Grains of Light’, a sequence of poems based around the story of Holocaust survivor Eve Kugler. You can read more about Sarah’s work on her website.

Penned in the Margins creates publications and performances for people who are not afraid to take risks. The company believes in the power of language to challenge how we think, test new ideas and explore alternative stories. It operates across the arts, collaborating with writers, artists and creative partners using new platforms and technologies. Read more about its work on its website. You can also follow Penned in the Margins on Twitter and 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.

The Muntjac

March 21, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

reflects our headlights in his eyes; 
his scrubby body disappears into the hedge

now white with May, 
tar and fern on his delicate hooves

and all at once the road reverts 
to emptiness, but something of his presence

stays, an apparition on the verge: 
fugitive from walled estates that favoured

curiosities, alien tropics quick and rank,
snaking beyond the boundaries, laying roots.

The road curves past Darks Dale floodlit,
 a tractor ploughing furrows, past New Broke Ups,

Wrong Land; and beyond, a tangle of forest,
oaks hunched like old men against the night.

by Tamar Yoseloff

News from the Centre! Tonight at 7pm, the Poetry Centre hosts an exciting poetry reading at the Albion Beatnik in Oxford with visiting US poet Leah Umansky and local poet Penny Boxall. Leah is the author of the dystopian-themed chapbook, Straight Away the Emptied World, the Mad-Men inspired, Don Dreams and I Dream, and the full-length collection Domestic Uncertainties. Penny is Education Officer at Oxford’s University Church. Her debut collection, Ship of the Line, was published by Eyewear in 2014, a year in which she also won second prize in the Jane Martin Poetry Prize and had her poem, ‘What You Mean to Me’, commended in the Forward Prize. For more details of the reading, visit our Facebook event page.

Irish literature expert (and former Director of the Poetry Centre) Dr Eóin Flannery, and Dr Donal Lowry, who has published widely on Irish foreign policy, are leading a one-day short course on Saturday 14 May at Oxford Brookes: ‘One Hundred Years On: 1916–2016. The Easter Rising: its History and Literature, Then and Now’. For more details, visit the Brookes website.

Tamar Yoseloff’s A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems includes dazzling new work as well as selections from her print collections and pieces from collaborations with artists. The title poem was commissioned by the Hayward Gallery for their 2013 exhibition ‘Light Show’ and is based on an installation by the Welsh Artist Cerith Wyn Evans. The poems in this collection are also concerned with heavenly presences, as well as evil spirits, explorations of light and dark.

Writing about the book, Martyn Crucefix has commented: ‘A Formula for Night is a major collection and career summary and really ought to be both on your wish list and on prize shortlists in the coming 12 months.’ Read more about A Formula for Night on Seren’s website.

Tamar Yoseloff is the author of four poetry collections, including Sweetheart, a PBS Special Commendation and the winner of the Jerwood Aldeburgh Festival Prize. Her most recent collections are The City with Horns and Formerly, a chapbook incorporating photographs by Vici MacDonald, which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. As well as other projects with artists, Yoseloff has also edited A Room to Live In: A Kettle’s Yard Anthology. She has been Reviews Editor for Poetry London and Poetry Editor for Art World. Yoseloff lives in London, where she is a freelance tutor in creative writing. She explores the intersection between poetry and visual art on her blog Invective Against Swans.

Seren is an independent publisher based in Wales. Founded in 1981 to publish poetry discovered by the then-editor of Poetry Wales magazine, Cary Archard. Under Managing Editor Mick Felton the press now publishes a broad range of fiction, non-fiction, and criticism. Amy Wack has been Poetry Editor at Seren for over 20 years. During that time, poets published by Seren have won or been shortlisted for the Costa, Forward, T.S. Eliot and Aldeburgh Prizes. ‪You can find out more about Seren on the publisher’s 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.

Blackberries

March 14, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It’s dark by nine, stoats have been seen
on the dry stone wall by the sun-room,
and I have a feeling the blackberries need to be picked.When I set off with my grandmother’s hat, her stick and basket,
children run after me, thistles lie down,
the cows make way at the gateand even the insects seem to disperse
more respectfully, leaving their eggs
in the crop’s black best as if that might stop me

simmering the lot of them tomorrow
in the big aluminium pan. Somewhere in an outbuilding
jars of ten-year-old overboiled jam

recrystallise slowly (I should throw them away)
while the good stuff sits on a shelf in London
where no one has time for toast and tea.

No one else will put up with so many scratches,
wade into rosebay willowherb six foot high
or chance it with the stinging nettles,

bitten and burnt and aching all over,
filling the basket with little black blind spots,
berry-sized bruises that float in the eye.

This summer again, in patches of scrub
at the back of my mind, such fruit has been ripening
red from green and green from white

that somebody has to pick it, some sweet thing
of the sweetness of August’s August rain
be preserved.

by Kate Bingham

Join us on Monday 21 March for an exciting poetry reading at the Albion Beatnik in Oxford with visiting US poet Leah Umansky and local poet Penny Boxall. Leah is the author of the dystopian-themed chapbook, Straight Away the Emptied World¸ the Mad-Men inspired, Don Dreams and I Dream, and the full-length collection Domestic Uncertainties. Penny is Education Officer at Oxford’s University Church. Her debut collection, Ship of the Line, was published by Eyewear in 2014, a year in which she also won second prize in the Jane Martin Poetry Prize and had her poem, ‘What You Mean to Me’, commended in the Forward Prize. For more details, visit our Facebook event page.

Kate Bingham’s Infragreen is her eagerly-awaited third collection of poems. Her subject matter can be deceptively simple: rain, the school run, a conversation, but these poems are full of subtle emotional power and wrought with dazzling patterns. Quicksand Beach, her Forward Prize-nominated previous book, was admired by The Guardian for its ‘urgent interrogation of the ways in which we love.’

According to Poetry Review, ‘Nothing is taken for granted in the intellectual universe of these poems: instead they draw strength from going on creating in the face of mystery… Infragreen is full of sensuous, imaginative and beautifully accomplished work.’ Read more about the book on the Seren website.

Kate Bingham is a poet, novelist, and filmmaker who lives in London. Her previous collections are Cohabitation and Quicksand Beach. ‘On Highgate Hill’ was nominated for the Forward Prize Best Single Poem in 2010. Find out more about Kate’s work on her website.

Parapluie

March 7, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

For P & ZG)

I do not want to be made of blue velvet;
I want to be blue velvet. With a handle of silver
shot lace, made by a consumptive old
Romanov who sips her remittance from tall
thin glasses of sweetened black tea.

It is an understatement to say I wish
to shimmer; that I’m quietly reflective
of colour. Selective colour.
I do not want to reflect grey.

I want to be crafted with unprecedented
patience by a slender man who has no
English and fabulous hands. I want to stand
alone, without the icy compromise of a solitary
walk in St Petersburg. I want to lie;

lie beautifully within the fabrication
of my fabric. I want to spread, not just my folds
but myself, on the edge of a shelf of mahogany or
a complex inlay of cherry.

I will be complete but not
undone by a ribbon of magenta. I will be warmed
by dry fired irons and the only creases that fall
from me will be creases that are not
part of the truest part of me.

I will be held by a thin frame of teak, picked
from a clearing in Burma. It has been
rosined with cinnamon and dipped in a resin
of smoked cane sugar.

I will hear the wind before it blows through
the gap in a sash window of a fifth floor
rent-controlled apartment on the west side
of Wenceslas Square. I will contemplate only
the nature of rain.

If I am left in the maze of second hand shops
that runs under Rue de Rivoli; if I’m thrown on a bonfire
at the end of no particular week, my combustion
will form a distraction of radiance.
I will show you the origin of red.

by Rosie Shepperd

Tomorrow at the Old Fire Station in Oxford, poet & theatre-maker Hannah Silva presents her solo show ‪‎Schlock! Produced by Penned in the Margins , Schlock! sees Hannah rip up her copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and with the help of radical punk-pirate Kathy Acker, she attempts to put the female body back together.You can find out more on the OFS website .

The Poetry Centre has programmed two events at the upcoming Oxford Literary Festival . Helen Mort and Alan Buckley perform their show ‘The Body Beautiful’ on Sunday 3 April , and then Claire Trévien, Harry Man, and Sarah Hesketh will read on Tuesday 5 April . Come along!

Rosie Shepperd’s debut poetry collection, The Man at the Corner Table , is a feast of delights. Its grace and precision charm us, and then beguile us into a world that is vital and unsettling. Sheenagh Pugh says: ‘Rosie Shepperd looks aslant at the everyday until it becomes uncommon. She explores sadness through humour and emotion via the silence of white space. Her voice is singular, engaging, unmistakable.’

Rosie Shepperd trained as an economist and worked in financial journalism and then banking in London and New York until 2004. She studied Creative Writing at London University’s Birkbeck College and at the University of South Wales and has a PhD from London University’s Goldsmith’s College. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and she has won a number of competitions and was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, which was read on stage by Juliet Stevenson. Stevenson observed: ‘Rosie Shepperd’s poems read like miniature films. The intensity of the moment she captures in each is framed with such vivid imagery, shot through with sensuality and wit. And her rhythms have the rigour and restlessness of really good jazz… Hers is a startlingly original voice. I so enjoyed reading this collection.’

Seren is an independent publisher based in Wales. Founded in 1981 to publish poetry discovered by the then-editor of Poetry Wales magazine, Cary Archard. Under Managing Editor Mick Felton the press now publishes a broad range of fiction, non-fiction, and criticism. Amy Wack has been Poetry Editor at Seren for over 20 years. During that time, poets published by Seren have won or been shortlisted for the Costa, Forward, T.S. Eliot and Aldeburgh Prizes. ‪You can find out more about Seren on the publisher’s 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.