She’s a Game Old Bird

June 26, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My granny

takes canary sips
from her service-station tea,
jaundiced eyes lantern-bright
as she asks, again,
who the ambulance is for.

is magpie-quick
the nurses say,
fills her knicker drawer
with plasters, rubber gloves,
someone else’s dentures.

sticks her beak in other rooms
Look at’em! Lolling!
picks over the injustice
like a pigeon
pecking at its bruised breast.

preens,
her curled fingers
clawing damp strands.
Presently, she says,
I shall ask you to leave.

sings of her cuckoo-child,
sees his father one day in me
and cups my face,
tells me I have nothing
to be sorry for.

lies in a sketch of stillness:
eyes and mouth drawn
pencil-thin.
A sense of
something flown.

by Liz Soar

Please note that the Weekly Poem will be taking a week’s break next week, but will return with another poem on Monday 10 July.

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries! Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: English as an Additional Language and Open category. First Prize in both categories is £1000, with £200 for Second. The competition is open for submissions until 11pm GMT on 28 August 2017. Visit our website for more details.

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Liz Soar (b 1976) was born in Lancashire and studied French at New College, Oxford. After completing a MSt in Women’s Studies, she spent the early part of her career on the fringes of the literary world, first with theatrical literary agent, Judy Daish, and then in Oxford with David Fickling Books, before re-training as a teacher. Liz currently teaches English at Headington School and writes for pleasure whenever she can. Her poem ‘She’s a game old bird’ was written as part of Claire Askew’s ‘Creatrix’ course with the Poetry School. She lives in Charlbury with her husband and young daughter.

‘She’s a Game Old Bird’ is one of the poems featured in Candlestick Press’s new title Ten Poems about Grandparents, which is being launched at Headington School in Oxford at 7pm on Monday 3 July. The launch will feature readings by the anthology’s student editors, as well as by pupils and the English teacher whose poems are included in the selection. All are welcome! To attend, please email info@candlestickpress.co.uk or call 0115 967 4455.

All the poems were chosen by students at the school. The pamphlet also includes poems written by some of the students, alongside others by established poets including Tiffany Atkinson, John Burnside, Vicki Feaver, Joan Johnston, Mohja Kahf, Derek Mahon, and Andrew Waterhouse. The pupils’ choices reflect the multicultural world in which they are growing up. There’s a poem in three languages about a joyful reunion with a grandparent arriving from overseas and another in which a Muslim grandmother raises eyebrows in a posh department store by washing her feet in the sink in the ladies’ room.

Candlestick Press is an independent publisher based in Nottingham. It has been publishing poetry pamphlets since 2008 – not only for people who already love poetry, but also for those who will love it but perhaps don’t know that yet. Candlestick’s ‘instead of a card’ pamphlets are designed to make an ideal alternative to a mainstream greetings card and are a small gift in their own right. Each title is supplied with a matching envelope and bookmark left blank for the purchaser’s own special message.

Candlestick prints at least 3,000 copies of each new title and its pamphlets are stocked by museums, galleries and gift shops, as well as independent and larger bookshops. In 2016 over 55,000 pamphlets were sold.

You can see Candlestick’s full range of titles on the publisher’s website. You can also find Candlestick Press on Facebook and on Twitter.

A Song of Hibernation

June 19, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I wrapped my heart in a cotton shroud,
I wound my heart in a silk cocoon,
I gave my heart to the carrion crows
who flew my heart to a lace day moon.

The moon sank into a bruise-tinged haze,
my heart slipped into the cold cold waves.
The current twisting from flow to ebb
carried my heart away away.

I trapped my sorrow behind panes of glass,
I hid my body in a pinewood shed,
I pooled my tears for marygold drink,
I stifled my sobs in spider webs.

But a money-spinner comforted me,
crawled my hand as I scrawled my hurt,
taught my lament to the screaming gulls,
scattered my anguish to pecking culvers.

I will bathe my face in the morning dew,
I will pinch off fear to feed crane flies,
I will sprinkle self-pity along the shingle,
skimming pebbles as anger dives.

My skin will absorb a radiant sunset,
my body will bask in crepuscular rays,
I will wade in the shallows when cats’ paws thrill,
I will dance with the moon’s corona display.

My heart will return when autumn is dead,
once winter is sifted and spring has sprung,
my heart will stir in its shrouding cocoon,
bloody my body, release my tongue.

My heart will return as a cormorant
lumbering silently over the sea,
oiled and preened and cruciate,
embracing others and saving me.

by Nancy Charley

Notes from Smokestack:

In 2011 Nancy Charley spent six weeks in a little blue beach hut on Tankerton Slopes, near Whitstable on the Kent coast, recording the changing tides and shifting moods of the shingle beach. Little Blue Hut is a book about weather and water, bladderwrack and gutweed, swimmers, dog-walkers and sea-anglers, cormorants and blackheaded gulls, ‘resident birds’ and ‘transient people’. And always the horizon where sky merges with sea. In the first half of the book the Water-Watcher tells her tale, exploring the mysteries and the ‘bizarreries’ of the Thames Estuary and finding, like a beachcomber, myth and poetry in the rarely noticed details of everyday life. In the second half of the book a woman is summoned by the three female genii of the coast – Luna, Marina and Hertha. Helped by the birds, she discovers who she might be, whilst berthed in the safety of the Little Blue Hut. You can read more about the book on the Smokestack website.

Nancy Charley works as an archivist for the Royal Asiatic Society. Her first pamphlet, This Woman, was published in 2012. She lives in Ashford, Kent.

Smokestack is an independent publisher of radical and unconventional poetry run by Andy Croft. Smokestack aims to keep open a space for what is left of the English radical poetic tradition in the twenty-first century. Smokestack champions poets who are unfashionable, radical, left-field and working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority. Smokestack is interested in the World as well as the Word; believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society; argues that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry. Smokestack’s list includes books by John Berger, Michael Rosen, Katrina Porteous, Ian McMillan, Steve Ely, Bertolt Brecht (Germany), Gustavo Pereira (Venezuela), Heinrich Heine (Germany), Andras Mezei (Hungary), Yiannis Ritsos (Greece) and Victor Jara (Chile). You can find Smokestack on Facebook and on 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.

Nomad Song

June 12, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Now, far from the sea
the sea-lure remains.
Come home, I say.

My hands can carry less and less.
I want you near,
but you move further away.

Your belongings come along:
a small teak stamp box,
smooth and soft in my hands.

A tiny glass hexagon
colorful parrots inside.
They swing with you in eternity
on little plastic vines.

Chatwin’s ‘Anatomy of Restlessness’,
the last book you read.
‘We are travellers from birth.’

You, too, shed things and places
like layers of skin.

Now, far from the sea
the sea-lure remains.

Come home I say,
but you move further away.

by Lynne Hjelmgaard

Join us this Saturday when we pair up with the Oxfordshire Science Festival for a celebration of poetry about science! We’ll be hearing the winning poems in the Science Festival’s school poetry competition (judged by Poetry Centre Director Niall Munro and others), and there will be a reading by Oxford-based poet Kelley Swain, recently one of the poets-in-residence at the Oxford Museum of Natural History. For more details, visit this page.

There are only a handful of tickets left for ‘moments/that stretch horizons’: an international poetry symposium, which takes place here at Brookes on 28 June. Together with colleagues from the University of Reading, and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) at the University of Canberra, we will be exploring poetry about the environment, prose poetry and the lyric, and poetry and publishing. Tickets for the day (including refreshments and lunch) cost £10 (£7.50 for postgraduates). All poets, critics, and readers of poetry are welcome, and you can sign up here.

Notes from Seren:

The poet Lynne Hjelmgaard has written a beautifully evocative recollection of a journey she took by sailboat with her husband across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and Europe. A Boat Called Annalise moves from scenes of risk and turbulence, of wild beauty on the open water, to visions of their dream-like destination in the West Indies. The author’s clear-eyed and tender observations are as insightful about the paradox of paradise: tropical splendor amidst local poverty, as they are about the challenges of relationships at close quarters. You can read more about the book on the Seren website.

Lynne Hjelmgaard was born in New York City and lives in London. She taught Creative Art for children in various schools and institutions before she started writing poetry. She left the States in 1990 for the second time and has been living permanently in the UK since 2011. As a result of crossing the Atlantic in a sailboat with her husband she wrote the poems that were later collected in Manhattan Sonnets. After her husband died in 2006, she received a residency grant for the Danish Academy in Rome where she wrote poems that later appeared in The Ring. Writing about A Boat Called Annalise, Dannie Abse remarked: ‘[t]he whole book is powered by the synergy of related poems. This arresting sequence is much more than that of a percipient tourist. Widowhood allows them to acquire a poignant universality.’ You can learn more about Lynne Hjelmgaard’s work on the poetry pf website.

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’ My Family 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.

Still

June 5, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Between two monarchs bitter feuds are commonplace
And swarms are never slow to mobilise.
From miles away you’ll sense them massing for battle,
You’ll sense an appetite for hostilities, a violent thirst.
Cowards and dawdlers are dragooned into action.
Sounding the war-conch with droning wings
They stream into the breach, fizzing with fury,
Nerves set like wires, venomous bayonets fixed.
Back as far as their sovereign’s chamber
They’ll defend and engage, resolved to kill or die.
Or out of the blue yonder into the field
They’ll pour from the hive, countless as rain.

by Simon Armitage

The Poetry Centre would be delighted to see you at ‘moments/that stretch horizons’: an international poetry symposium for practitioners, a collaboration between the Poetry Centre, the University of Reading, and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) at the University of Canberra. We will explore one theme current in contemporary writing: poetry about the environment, and two concerns of poetics: prose poetry and the lyric and poetry and publishing. Each panel set up to discuss these issues will be composed of a mixture of UK-based academics and writers and academics/poets from IPSI. The symposium will take place at Oxford Brookes University, and places are limited. Tickets for the day (including refreshments and lunch) cost £10 (£7.50 for postgraduates). All poets, critics, and readers of poetry are welcome, and you can sign up here.

The Poetry Centre recently launched the Oxford Brookes 2017 International Poetry Competition, which is judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort. Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: English as an Additional Language and Open category. First Prize in both categories is £1000, with £200 for Second. The competition is open for submissions until 11pm GMT on 28 August 2017. Visit our website for more details.

Notes from Enitharmon:

Still is a sequence of poems in response to panoramic photographs of battlefields associated with the Battle of the Somme. Chosen from archives at Imperial War Museum, these astonishingly clear photographic images are ahead of their time. Still is published on the centenary of the battle, which is considered to be one of the bloodiest in British military history. Consequently, Armitage’s thirty poems are versions of the infamously tense Georgics by the Roman poet Virgil. The contemporary words meld with the visual devastations of war to haunting effect.

Designed by Praline Design Studio and published by Enitharmon Press and the Imperial War Museums, Still is an 74pp large-scale landscape publication with introductory texts, contemporary maps, fold-outs and decorated endpapers. You can find out more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

Simon Armitage lives in Yorkshire, has taught at universities in this country and the United States, and is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield. He has published eleven full-length collections of poetry, including Selected Poems and Seeing Stars, as well as notable translations of medieval verse such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Death of King Arthur and, most recently, Pearl, which won the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He has published two novels and four works of non-fiction; Walking Home – the prose account of his walk along the Pennine Way as a latter-day troubadour was a SundayTimes bestseller. Armitage also writes extensively for radio, television and film, is a regular broadcaster and presenter with the BBC, is the lyricist and singer with the band The Scaremongers, and has written several theatre pieces including dramatisations of both the Odyssey and the Iliad. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes such as the Keats-Shelley Prize and the Cholmondeley Award, and in 2010 was honoured with the CBE for services to poetry. He is currently the Oxford University Professor of Poetry, and you can hear recordings of his recent lectures on the Oxford University website. You can also read more about Armitage’s work on his 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.