Seamus on the Tube

August 21, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Looking away, not looking away –
The happenstance of what may change everything;
Those standing commuters moving off at Charing Cross
For the Bakerloo Line and then your eyes lifting

Above those seated opposite, as one does, to read
Between faster Broadband and Las Vegas –
“Where your accent is an aphrodisiac,” it says,
And where “what happens here, stays here,”

The Railway Children where in the white cups 
Of the telegraph wires a young boy knows 
That words are carried in the shiny pouches of raindrops.
Like this poem carried for you in the red and white Tube

On the Northern Line in cold January’s real freeze;
Snow is promised in the suburbs so everyone’s scarved
Against the weather. Words taking you back to the fifties
And his boyhood summers before everything changed.

Reaching Warren Street, you’ve read it 
Four or five times, absorbed the innocent wisdom 
And sense of the thing. Those people opposite 
See a crazy old man mouthing words, appearing to sing.

by Tony Curtis

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries for just one more week! Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. First Prize in both categories is £1000, with £200 for Second. The competition is open for submissions until 11pm BST/10pm GMT on 28 August 2017. Visit our website for more details and to enter, and please feel free to share news of the competition with friends and colleagues.

The TOAST Poets scheme is now open for applications until midnight on 25 August! TOAST is a professional development project for mid-career poets. It takes the form of eleven workshops over the course of a year from September 2017 – Summer 2018. Each TOAST poet is offered two, hour-long mentoring sessions with an established poet or editor to discuss their work and what steps they might take to progress. This year’s mentors are Hannah Lowe and Kayo Chingonyi. Visit the TOAST website for more details and to apply.

Notes from Seren:

Seren celebrates the 70^th birthday of the Welsh poet Tony Curtis with the publication of his From the Fortunate Isles: New and Selected Poems. This landmark book features poems from ten of his previous collections, in addition to a substantial number of new poems: marking a career in poetry fifty years in duration. This is a poet whose themes and variations remain consistent: a deep affection for his roots in West Wales, tender attachments to family, a profound interest in the wars of the last century, and an abiding fascination for all art forms, particularly painting and poetry. Writing about Tony’s poetry, the late Helen Dunmore commented: ‘The poems reverberate with present, sensuous experience, but beyond their immediacy there is a deep hinterland of public and private histories, of grief and delight.’ You can read more about the new book on the Seren website.

Tony Curtis was born in Carmarthen in 1946. He studied at Swansea University and Goddard College, Vermont, USA and is the author of a number of poetry collections and pamphlets, including: Taken for Pearls (1993), War Voices (1995), The Arches (1998), Heaven’s Gate (2001) and Crossing Over (2007). He is the editor of a number of popular anthologies on subjects ranging from war to Pembrokeshire, Snowdonia, coal, and orphans in the charitable anthology Tokens for the Foundlings (2012). His many critical books include The Art of Seamus Heaney (1982), and Dannie Abse (1985), How Poets Work (1996) and Welsh Painters Talking (1997). Curtis has won the National Poetry Competition, the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Cholmondeley Award. He is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at the University of South Wales, where he established and was Director of the MPhil in Writing, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has toured widely, reading his poetry to international audiences. You can read more about Tony’s work on his website and on his Facebook page.

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 and follow Seren 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.

Hurricanoes

August 14, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Fifteen years before I’d heard of King Lear I walked home
from a party through a storm, daring the sideways rain to
stop me, clenching my jaw, livid to the gills in a stretched-
arm soaking.

Turns out I’d also lost a girl, I kissed her in the disco the week
before, fell immediately to lovesickness, dry-mouthed, way
off the pace during 5th-form games, nights spent praying
to any god who’d listen that her crowd would show and I
could get to know her name, and in doing so use my tongue
again.

The late evening sun lit up the crosstown bus, but by the
time I saw her in the kitchen I’d had three ciders and the sky
outside was heavy as a boxer’s eyes.

She was sat on the stovetop wrapped around a Mod while
his Fred Perry friends stared into their vodkas and orange
squash. I remember a hot throat and a cold torso. Not the
spot for a New Romantic. Inner chatter took over.

Tearing up in the street I bated the wind, beckoned it over,
butted it for seven miles, drove into the rain with my
promontory chest, a deposed king wailed his misfortune to
the only gods left.

They ordained a fever slow to subside and the next fort-
night in bed. I no longer talk to the elements though they
often whisper in my head.

by Daniel Roy Connelly

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries for just two more weeks! 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 to enter, and please share with fellow poets or poetry lovers!

The TOAST Poets scheme is now open for applications! TOAST is a professional development project for mid-career poets. It takes the form of eleven workshops over the course of a year from September 2017 – Summer 2018. Each TOAST poet is offered two,hour long mentoring sessions with an established poet or editor to discuss their work and what steps they might take to progress. This year’s mentors are Hannah Lowe and Kayo Chingonyi. Visit the TOAST website for more details and to apply.

Notes from Little Island Press:

At once personal and hauntingly universal, Extravagant Stranger is the compelling memoir of self-professed ‘global scalliwag’ Daniel Roy Connelly – former diplomat, theatre director, Shakespeare scholar and conscience-stricken father. Laced with international intrigue and hilarious moments of well-aimed self-scrutiny, here is a book – like the life it relates – truly without comparison. Read more about the book and hear Daniel read from his work on the Little Island Press website.

A former British diplomat, Daniel Roy Connelly is a theatre director, actor and professor of creative writing, English and theatre at John Cabot University and the American University of Rome. He has acted in and directed theatre in America, the UK, Italy and China, where his 2009 production of David Henry Hwang’s M Butterfly was forced to close by the Chinese secret police.

His writing is widely published in print and online. He was the winner of the 2014 Fermoy International Poetry Festival Prize, a finalist in the 2015 Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Prize and winner of the 2015 Cuirt New Writing Prize for poetry. Recent work has appeared in The North, The Transnational (in German), Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Moth, Acumen and Critical Survey and he has a forthcoming pamphlet from Eyewear Publishing as part of their Aviator Series. Follow Daniel’s work on his website and via Twitter.

Little Island Press is an independent publisher of fiction, poetry and essays. Founded in 2016, it publishes innovative, intellectually ambitious writing in elegant, hardback editions designed by the award-winning design studio typographic research unit. Find out more about the press on its website and follow its activities on Twitter.

The Spoonbill Tastes the New Menu

August 7, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The table was laid with tureens, deep dishes – even vases
were shaken of flowers and filled with the tasting menu
of the season: steaming broths and stews, delicate and hearty.

The visitor trod slowly among the dishes, then, stepping carefully
into each one as if testing bathwater, paddled the fragrant
silt of herbs, undissolved stock cubes, churning up the bed

of each pot. The maitre’d pursed his lips at the scaly feet
wading about in the china, his stomach rumbling at wafts
of french onion, vichyssoise, bisque (it wasn’t his idea to invite

their esteemed guest or her unorthodox methods to the table
but the chef marked noone as more adept at judging the calibre
of soups). One by one she lowered her open bill into each

tureen, waving it in an infinity sign from side to side, filtering
for morsels, pausing to hoik a crouton into her pale throat.
She made no noise, no sign of joy. The chef peered through

the porthole of the kitchen door, his brow beaded with sweat
until the last soup was uncovered: a bouillabaisse, dense
with clams and chunks of fish. The visitor raised her wings

in ecstasy and plunged her utensils straight into the broth,
grabbing at squid tentacles and shrimp, garlicky stock clagging
her feathers, then gave the only applause ever reported

in her career. A clack of spoons, like castanets, resounded
through the room, and the critic pressed oily prints
on the tablecloth in the run-up to flight: five lopsided stars.

by Jasmine Ann Cooray

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 Sidekick Books:

Jasmine Ann Cooray is a poet and therapist from London, of Sri Lankan and mixed European lineage. Spurred by a silent adolescence, she now designs and implements a variety of projects that cultivate emotional literacy through poetry. In 2013 she was Writer in Residence at the National University of Singapore and has just finished tenure as a BBC Performing Arts Fellow with Spread the Word. Her first full collection is almost complete, and she is working on a collaborative poetry and aerial arts show with Upswing about what it means to trust. To balance her frequent reclusiveness, she does an excellent line in hugs. You can follow Jasmine on Twitter, and watch her read one of her poems, ‘Ice Cream Box of Frozen Curry’, here.

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.