End of the Year Blues

July 31, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The days will slowly stretch themselves,
I know, and I’ve watched many winters
come and go through different eyes.
Nothing should surprise.

Once they were those of a raw young
boy cycling home in the evening gloom
full of promise and expectation, eagerly
awaiting summer’s invitations, cricket
and tennis on seamless lawns, endless
seaside days, and, later, girls to cavort with
beneath the sun’s fading rays.

And now these eyes have become those
of an ageing man, and each turning year
another hurdle, an unkind countdown
from a time whose end, one always
thought, would never come, too young
to care, illusion’s snare.

Yet seeing dear ones vanish each fragile
year stiffens the resolve, reminds that
dark, light, dark, light is the way our world
revolves, gives you the will to fight on,
value all you have as, once more, the dark
dissolves around you, and light restores.

by Jeremy Robson

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries for less than one more month! 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 Smokestack:

After breaking a thirty-five year writer’s block with Blues in the Park, Jeremy Robson’s new collection of poems is his second book in three years. Subject Matters takes us into a world that is both contemporary and timeless. Many of these poems are personal, recalling the pleasure of a smile, a landscape or a song, and the lives of friends like Ron Moody and Dannie Abse. Others evoke scenes and subjects from an earlier era – Dick Barton, Roy Rogers, Paris in the 1950s, London jazz clubs, CND rallies, telephone exchanges with sexy names – occasionally drawing on his Jewish experience to give context to his depiction of a modern world where violence explodes with increasing fury and the sirens rarely stop. All subjects that matter. You can read more about Jeremy’s new book on the Smokestack website, and more about Jeremy’s work in this interview.

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.

Grunting Up

July 24, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Who would have thought that these great slab-sided beasts
who fall to their knees and slump belly up, 
would sing this rhythmic, grunting lullaby?

Weight drops from back and loins but
swollen, undulating glands seem added on,
like a full frill at the bottom of a skirt.

The piglets rush to their particular nipple
and plug on, tongues curling, eyes closed,
chubby fingers, lined up, reaching.

And then she begins. This low throbbing,
this song to the milk flow,
this crooning hymn.

by Ilse Pedler

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries for just one more month! 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, and please feel free to share news of the competition with friends and colleagues.

Notes from Seren:

N.B. Grunting up is the name given to the noise a sow makes when her piglets are sucking.

Her life as a busy vet inspires the poet Ilse Pedler in her debut poetry pamphlet, the winner of the prestigious Mslexia pamphlet competition in 2015, The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels. The author uses both free verse and traditional forms like the sonnet and sestina to delve into days that can include dramatic situations with animals, both farm and domesticated species, and their human carers. A secondary theme runs throughout the collection, exemplified by the poem ‘Suturing Secrets’ – the secrets we keep as spouses or parents or from those we are close to. You can read more about the pamphlet on the Seren website.

Ilse Pedler was born in Derby in 1963 and grew up in Birmingham. A Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, she works as a vet in Saffron Walden. She has a son, stepson and a number of small and medium-sized animals. Her poems have been published in Poetry News, Orbis, The North and other journals. Writing about this collection, Helen Ivory has commented: ‘These poems point to the equality of mammals; the locked cabinets of our bodies, how a neat incision, a skilled turn of the wrist can reveal the hearts of dogs and humans alike. There is tenderness here, and a sense of wonder at the world, that scientists and artists share. This is a striking and sure-footed debut.’

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.

The Day My Cousin Took me to the Musée Rodin

July 17, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Perhaps it was the humid Paris day, perhaps
the naked glory of Le Baiser or my blatant boasts
of l’amour libre of which I knew, in fact, rien
that galvanised my cousin to try his luck with me,

but when he placed one sweaty main upon my
firm nichon and one upon my fesse, I was first
disinclined and then embarrassed. It was clear
he was quite serious, and had in mind, he said,
avec un clin d’œil, a quick and casual act of joy.

When I retorted with grammatical correctness
Je suis ta cousine!, he snorted Frenchly, flushed,
and muttered something vague about la frigidité
des femmes Anglaises, tossed his prematurely
balding tête and sauntered off into the crowd around

Sculpteur et sa Muse, leaving me abandonnée at last
to make some notes, before I took the métro home
to find him locked inside his room, his Jewish mother
elbow-deep in worry, onions and gefilte fish.

by Jacqueline Saphra

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, and feel free to forward the link to friends and colleagues.

Notes from Nine Arches:

All My Mad Mothers explores love, sex and family relationships in vivacious, lush poems that span the decades and generations. At the heart of this collection of poems is the portrait of a mother as multitudes – as a magician with a bathroom of beauty tricks, as necromancer, as glamorous fire-starter, trapped in ever-decreasing circles and, above all else, almost impossible to grasp.

Jacqueline Saphra’s The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions (flipped eye, 2011) was nominated for The Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. A book of illustrated prose poems, If I Lay on my Back I saw Nothing but Naked Women (The Emma Press 2014), won Best Collaborative Work at the Saboteur Awards 2015. All My Mad Mothers was published by Nine Arches Press in May 2017 and A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller is due from Hercules Editions in September 2017. She teaches at The Poetry School. You can read more about All My Mad Mothers on the Nine Arches website, and more about Jacqueline’s work on her own site. You can also follow the poet on Twitter. Last month, Jacqueline appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour to talk about her new book, and the interview is available on the BBC website (listen in from 12 minutes onwards).

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.

swallow

July 10, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

swallow is hirundo rustica
sings adeste, fidelis in season
swallow is a long tail streamer
has spent 20 years on the wing
swallow on intercity
not red or black but biro
swallow as fork of
erskine and brunswick
swallow feeds geraniums, tomato plants
sparrowhawks, hobbies
(beware of the sparrowhawk)
swallow on diet of bees, hoverflies
brandy butter, jelly cubes, gas mark eight
swallow as spanakopita
foraged at spar piccadilly
swallow draped over
lady chapel altar
swallow is a charm to a sailor
swallow is the mermaid of the sky
swallow on waiting room wall
swallow gave the V to me
swallow as a frozen piece of
hair snapped blue in the morgue
swallow loathes the winter
swallow will not come back

by Sarah Crewe

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Sarah Crewe is from the Port of Liverpool. Her work deals with working class feminist psychogeography. Her previous publications have included sea witch (Leafe Press, 2014) and flick invicta (Oystercatcher, 2012) She is one third of Stinky Bear Press.

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.