In the Orchard

March 28, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Black bird, black voice,
almost the shadow of a voice,
so kind to this tired summer sky,
a rim of night around it,
almost an echo of today,
all the days since that first
soft guttural disaster
gave us ‘apple’ and ‘tree’
and all that transpired thereafter
in the city of the tongue.

Blackbird, so old, so young, still
happy to be stricken with a song
you can never choose away from.

by Anne Stevenson

There are only a few places left for our next poetry workshop this Saturday! It will be led by poet and teacher Sarah Hesketh and is entitled ‘“more than skin can hold”: Writing People’. The workshops runs from 10.30-4.30pm in the John Henry Brookes Building here at Oxford Brookes University, and will consider the questions that arise when we attempt to represent and remember others in our writing. All are welcome! Visit our website for more information and to sign up.

Alongside poet Kelley Swain and Claire Hamnett from the Oxfordshire Science Learning Partnership, Niall Munro (Poetry Centre Director), is one of the judges for the Oxfordshire Science Festival poetry competition! If you know pupils in Oxfordshire schools aged 7-16, please encourage them to enter! Full details (and information about prizes!) are available on the OSF website.

This Sunday, as part of the Oxford Literary Festival, actor Toby Jones talks to Oxford Brookes’ Professor Simon Kövesi about his life and career and how he interprets the written word in his performances. You can book tickets for the discussion on the OLF website and hear Toby read Blake’s poem ‘London’ at this link.

‘In the Orchard’ is copyright © Anne Stevenson, 2016. It is reprinted from In the Orchard (Enitharmon Press, 2016) by permission of Enitharmon Press.

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

In the Orchard is not so much a collection of poems about birds as a book of memories and rare moments in which a number of familiar birds have played a spark-like role in bringing poems about. They are chiefly lyrical in character and range in time from ‘Resurrection’ written over fifty years ago to recent poems like ‘The Bully Thrush’, but they are not ordered chronologically and shouldn’t be associated with events in the poet’s private life. The etchings by Alan Turnbull are the result of his patient and painstaking study of each bird as it relates to the poem in which it appears. You can read more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

Anne Stevenson, an Anglo-American who has lived in Britain for many years, published eleven collections of poems with OUP before Bloodaxe Books brought out two further volumes incorporated into her Collected Poems 1995–2005. Her Selected Poems were published by The Library of America, after she won The Poetry Foundation of America’s Neglected Master’s Award in 2007. In the same year she received the Lannan Prize for a Lifetime’s Achievement in poetry. In recent years Bloodaxe has published Stone Milk (2007) and Astonishment (2012). Find out more about Anne Stevenson’s work and hear her read from her poems on her 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.

Willow Tit

March 21, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Her beak is a split thorn
carving a zipline,
undressing the seedpod.

Ignore her calls,
those sudden shudders
of breath in a pinetree.

Ignore her completely.
Some birds in China
sculpt nests from spit;

she’ll hammer a home
in your huge neglect,
eyeshadowed, black-capped.

In the land of the dead
the judges will balance
your heart and her feather.

by John Clegg

Happy World Poetry Day! This Thursday, our Visiting Professor Michael Parker and Aleksandra Parker discuss the new English edition of Andrzej Franaszek’s biography of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, which they have translated and edited, and his relationship with Seamus Heaney. There is more information about the book on the Harvard Press website. The event takes place in room JHB 205 of the John Henry Brookes Building at Oxford Brookes University, is free to attend, and refreshments will be served. All are welcome!

Our next poetry workshop will be led by poet and teacher Sarah Hesketh and is entitled ‘“more than skin can hold”: Writing People’. It will take place on Saturday 1 April from 10.30-4.30pm in the John Henry Brookes Building here at Oxford Brookes University. The workshop will consider the questions that arise when we attempt to represent and remember others in our writing, and all are welcome! Visit our website for more information and to sign up. Please note that places are limited!

Finally, this Sunday, the Director of the Poetry Centre, Niall Munro, will be in conversation with poet and publisher Andy Croft at the Oxford Literary Festival about why poetry matters. More details can be found on the OLF website.

John Clegg was born in Chester in 1986, and grew up in Cambridge. In 2013, he won an Eric Gregory Award. He has published a pamphlet, Captain Love and the Five Joaquins (The Emma Press, 2014) and a full-length collection, Holy Toledo! (Carcanet, 2016) He works as a bookseller in London.

Notes from Sidekick Books:

With this poem we continue our selection of poems from Sidekick Books’ four volumes of Birdbooks. In 2009, with two micro-compendiums under their belt, Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone, the editors at Sidekick, discussed the idea of a book of bird poetry – but one in which less well known species were on equal terms with the popular ones. There are dozens of poems about herons, eagles, ravens and nightingales, not so many about the whimbrel, the ruff, the widgeon or the hobby. Paper-cut artist Lois Cordelia was recruited to give the series its distinctive covers, and over 150 artists and illustrators were commissioned over six years to complete the series. The first volume is now in its second printing. Find out more about the Birdbook series on the Sidekick website.

Sidekick Books is a cross-disciplinary, collaborative poetry press run by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone. Started in 2009 by the ex-communicated alchemist Dr Fulminare, the press has produced themed anthologies and team-ups on birds, video games, Japanese monsters and everything in between. Sidekick Books titles are intended as charms, codestones and sentry jammers, to be dipped into in times of unease. You can follow Sidekick’s work on the press’s website and via Twitter.

I found my father’s love letters

March 14, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

To my unknown father

I found my father’s love letters
in strange and obscure places,
hidden in dark secret spaces,
where memories had closed the doors.

I found blank letters, with matching cards and envelopes.
A small drawer filled with letters unfinished,
crossed through, curling at the edges,
turning in the colour of time.

There was one in Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera
sandwiched somewhere between
Fermina’s rejection of Floretina
and a lifetime of loving, waiting for true love.

I found some penned in a note pad, half-written, half-thought,
scribbled to capture fleeting thoughts,
earnest in writing the emotional overflow
that time edits into streams flowing over with love.

I found one folded
lost in the attic
an elegy to love
that time had forgotten.

I searched to find the true name to those letters entitled my love.
A secret lover? Distant lover? First time lover?
or even my mother of whom you gave a thousand names
but I never heard you call her my love.

by Roy McFarlane

The Centre is co-sponsoring an exciting symposium called ‘Poetics of Home: Place and Identity’ which will be in London this Saturday 18 March. It will feature presentations and dialogues by a diverse range of established and emerging poets and poet-researchers whose work engages with and interprets the meanings of homeland and cultural identity. It also includes a reading by George Szirtes and Hannah Lowe. There are a few tickets remaining, so sign up via this page.

Notes from Nine Arches:

This debut collection of poems by former Birmingham Poet Laureate Roy McFarlane explores love, loss, adoption and identity in powerful, precise and emotionally-charged poetry. From bereavement comes forth a life story in poems; the journey of sons, friends, lovers and parents, and all the moments of growing-up, discovery, falling in and out of love and learning to say goodbye that come along the way. Themes of place, music, history, and race interweave personal narratives, with poems that touch on everything from the ‘Tebbitt Test’ and Marvin Gaye to the Black Country, that ‘place just off the M6’. Distinct and memorable, McFarlane’s poems are beautifully crafted, intricately focused, moving their readers between both the spiritual and the sensual worlds with graceful, rapturous hymns to the transformative power of love. Read more about the book on the Nine Arches website, and more about Roy’s work on his own website. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets (The Terrors by Tom Chivers and The Titanic Cafe closes its doors and hits the rocks by David Hart) were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2012, Nine Arches launched the Debut New Poets Series of first collections and the press has now published more than 30 collections of poetry and 10 issues of the magazine. We continue to build a reputation as a publisher of well-crafted and innovative contemporary poetry and short story collections. Follow Nine Arches on Facebook and Twitter.

The House on Fire

March 8, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Paper burns the fastest. And the dried flowers
you leave on all the windowsills, and the piano
flaring its final silence. All that silver
running to mercury. The noise of it fills each room
until the roof angles up off its beams.
In the bathtub your hair splays out like white
weed. The wallflowers dozing against the porch
slump into their own scorched scent.
Each room breathless and slamming its doors,
flames leaning down to touch the water –
Then we’re walking through the ruts of the frozen field again,
my red wellies, the dry sheets of ice that crack like toffee,
the horses echoing out the mist and nuzzling velvet
into the palms of our hands. And you’re in the kitchen
cutting puffballs with the bread knife, and you’re sowing
crumbs into the flowerbeds, and saying not yet.
Then you’re striking matches at the cooker
with your swollen fingers all bent
and the phone is ringing,
and the light is in my eyes. I’ve seen ghosts
pour like water through a dim room, white things,
weak things that scatter in a draught, and now I see you,
and how your ghost is like fire: roaring,
laughing, eating.

by Rhiannon Hooson

Our next poetry workshop will be led by poet and teacher Sarah Hesketh and entitled ‘“more than skin can hold”: Writing People’. It will take place on Saturday 1 April from 10.30-4.30pm in the John Henry Brookes Building here at Oxford Brookes University. The workshop will consider the questions that arise when we attempt to represent and remember others in our writing, and all are welcome! Visit our website for more information and to sign up. Please note that places are limited!

The Centre is co-sponsoring an exciting symposium called ‘Poetics of Home: Place and Identity’ which will be in London on 18 March. It will feature presentations and dialogues by a diverse range of established and emerging poets and poet-researchers whose work engages with and interprets the meanings of homeland and cultural identity. It also includes a reading by George Szirtes and Hannah Lowe. For more information, contact the organizer, Jennifer Wong, via poeticsofhome2017@gmail.com

And finally, Happy International Women’s Day! To celebrate, this week’s publisher, Seren, is offering its acclaimed anthology, Women’s Work at half price! Visit the website for more details.

Notes from Seren:

A thoughtful, complex and lyrical first collection of poems by Rhiannon Hooson, The Other City is inspired by personal history as well as stories from classical mythology, and in the book the poet uses gorgeous specific details that bring her poems to life. She also has a lively way with a narrative, pulling one into a story that might be about Zeus, a lover’s infatuation with her hair, or a cat that tracks ‘finches/ across the thin crust of snow’. There are quite a few poems about her childhood in Wales: the farm where she grew up, the rooms presided over by her father and mother: ‘…the fizz of green kindling,/the line of boots in the porch’.

Rhiannon Hooson was born in Mid Wales in 1979, where she lived until moving to the north of England in 1998. She studied and later taught at Lancaster University, where she was awarded first an MA in Creative Writing (with Distinction), then a PhD in poetry. Her first pamphlet, This Reckless Beauty, was published in 2004, and in 2008 she received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. Her work has appeared in a number of literary magazines and anthologies. She now lives in the Welsh marches after time spent living in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Writing about her new book, The Other City, Graham Mort has commented: ‘This is a beguiling debut from a poet who already has a recognizable voice and emotional register. Sensuous, musical, darkly involved, the poems make and confound their own realities.’ You can read more about TheOther City on the Seren website, and more about Rhiannon’s work on her site.

Seren has been publishing poetry for 35 years. We are an independent publisher specialising in English-language writing from Wales. Seren’s wide-ranging list includes fiction, translation, biography, art and history. Seren’s authors are shortlisted for – and win – major literary prizes across Britain and America, including the 2014 Costa Poetry Prize (for Jonathan Edwards’ MyFamily and Other Superheroes). Amy Wack has been Seren’s Poetry Editor for more than 20 years. You can find more details about Seren on the publisher’s website.