Catullus 51 High fantasy translation

March 27, 2018April 20, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Ille mi par esse deo videtur,
ille, si fas est, superare divos,
qui sedens adversus identidem te
spectat et audit
dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis
eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi
vocis in ore,
lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures, gemina teguntur
lumina nocte.
Otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:
otio exsultas nimiumque gestis:
otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes.

Catullus 51: High Fantasy translation

In the tavern, they sat near the fire, which created a companionate halo around the small company. Food was served, with ale and mead, and they started to feel merry, though tired and shaken by the terrors of the road. Snorri was elbow height to the rider in the green cloak, whose pitted face now seemed moon-like, lit by the elf woman who sat opposite, talking and smiling. Her laughter was like purses of silver poured out liberally and pocketed by that mortal. None of it was spent on the dwarf, who sat in shadow and twice looked at her and quickly turned away as he felt flames dart along his limbs. He tried once to speak, but his tongue was lead and he knew he could not speak and look at her still. His senses eclipsed, he heard only the pounding on the worn anvil of his heart. His eyes were shut in darkness, like the closing of the doors into the mountain. Confused by these new emotions, he applied himself with greater energy to the meal. Idleness, thought Snorri, taking great bites of the bread and roast meat in his trencher. Only idleness. The idle axe rusts and the lazy smith lets his fire go out.
by Rowyda Amin

Poetry news! We are delighted to say that one of our ignitionpress pamphlets, A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan, is the Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice for Summer 2018! You can read more about the PBS selection here, and find details of all three ignitionpress pamphlets (by Mary Jean, Lily Blacksell, and Patrick James Errington) here. There are two further launches for the press in Edinburgh and St. Andrews on 11 and 12 April, where you can hear all three poets.

On Saturday 14 April, ignitionpress editor and Oxford-based poet Alan Buckley will be leading a day-long workshop for the Poetry Centre entitled ‘First, are you our sort of person? – I, you, they and us’. It will explore how writing in the second and third person and first person plural can broaden our range as writers, and enable us to write more deeply into our own experience. Participants are invited to bring two of their existing poems to be worked on by themselves and others. Tickets are £45 (£40 for Brookes students and staff). To sign up, visit our website.

Have you seen our poetry reading series schedule? We have five readings coming up – with Peter Raynard and Richard Skinner; Kei Miller; Sinéad Morrissey; Clare Pollard; and Richard Harrison – and you can book tickets here.

Finally, Sphinx Theatre will presents the award winning show ‘A Berlin Kabaret’, a vibrant presentation of lyrical anti-war songs, at the Old Fire Station, Oxford on 20 and 21 April. The show features previously undiscovered and newly translated poems by Bertolt Brechtand provocative new voices from Crisis Skylight writing workshops. You can find more information on the OFS website.

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Gaius Valerius Catullus was Ancient Rome’s most notorious scandal-monger, filthsmith and lovelorn wretch. In this interactive handbook, Bad Kid Catullus, his famously sexy, savage, tender and scurrilous poems have been transformed and mutated in myriad ways: compressed, expanded, bricolaged, Catullus in six pulp genres, Catullus as playlist – even a Catullus karma sutra. And then there are pages for you, the reader, to fill in, in your own obscene fashion. You’ll never look at a sparrow the same way again. Find out more about the book on the Sidekick Books website.

An itinerant scribe, Rowyda Amin lived in the capital until she was sent into exile in the far west for an ill-judged remark about the emperor’s hairpiece. You can read more about Rowyda’s work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

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.

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 Clinic Bomber’s Mother

March 19, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The trick, she guesses, is: be seen. Offer
coffee to police, walk among the living
without thinking of the dead. Never

apologize for being his mother. Keep
his photos on the mantel, his boyhood
room the same. Bring daisies to his plot,

ignore the other graves. Who really knows
who knows. She donates blood, is comforted
that strangers wear his clothes, irons

linens for St. Paul’s, whose confessionals
have never felt so cramped. Bless me, Father,
she admits, the bathroom hook still holds

his robe. There’s little time to think or rest.
More and more, the wafer tastes like flesh.

by Shara Lessley

The Poetry Centre is delighted to say that this week’s poet, Shara Lessley, will be reading from her work in Oxford this Thursday 22 March, when she will be launching her new collection The Explosive Expert’s Wife. Shara will be reading with Yvonne Reddick, whose work we featured last week and will be reading from her award-winning pamphlet Translating Mountains. Join us for what will be a terrific evening – from 7-9pm at the Society Café. Find more details on our website. Yvonne will also be discussing her academic research about Ted Hughes earlier in the day at Oxford Brookes – contact us for more details.

Have you seen our new ignitionpress pamphlets yet? We have another launch event at the Oxford Literary Festival this Sunday 25 March. To get a taste of what’s in store, watch videos of the poets: Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington, on our ignitionpress pages, and buy the pamphlets here!

‘The Clinic Bomber’s Mother’ is excerpted from The Explosive Expert’s Wife by Shara Lessley. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2018 by Shara Lessley. All rights reserved. The poem was originally published in 32 Poems, 13.2 (Fall/Winter 2015).

‘Somewhere in the Middle / East, you sip coffee while I sleep…’ In sparse, powerful lines, Shara Lessley recalls an expat’s displacement, examines her experience as a mother, and offers intimate witness to the unfolding of the Arab Spring in her new collection, The Explosive Expert’sWife. Veering from the strip malls and situation rooms of Washington to the markets and mines of Amman, Lessley confronts the pressures and pleasures of other cultures, exploring our common humanity with all its aggressions, loves, biases, and contradictions. You can read more about Shara’s book on the publisher’s website.

Shara Lessley is a writer and teacher. The author of Two-Headed Nightingale and The Explosive Expert’s Wife, and co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, she is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Shara’s poems and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Missouri Review, and New England Review, among others. A recipient of scholarships from ArtsBridge and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Shara holds Bachelor’s degrees in Dance and English from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in Poetry from University of Maryland. She was recently awarded Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Oxford. Find out more about Shara’s work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

Above the Northeast Shoulder

March 13, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Face the flawless white
of profound frostbite,
she stoops at the porch of my tent,
pale hair brushing my forehead.
One hand touches my arm,
scaldingly cold.

She points to the western arête –
a fin with skirls of cloud
building its north face
to a shell of rime.

That night, I arrange
my oxygen bottles, hunch
under canvas, and wait
for clear sky over the Lhotse Face.
She unzips the tent-flap
and lets in a swirl of blizzard.

She sits writing
a one-cigarette poem
by torchlight, brow knitting.

As the temperature drops
she creeps into my sleeping bag –
her kiss sucks the air from my lungs.
I spend all night trying to thaw her.

In the morning,
the pad propped on her knees,
she begins a two-fag poem.
I pass her my Zippo.

by Yvonne Reddick

The Poetry Centre is delighted to say that this week’s poet, Yvonne Reddick, will be reading from her work in Oxford next Thursday 22 March. She will be reading with Shara Lessley, who will be launching her new collection The Explosive Expert’s Wife. Join us for what will be a terrific evening – from 7-9pm at the Society Café. Find more details on our website. Yvonne will also be discussing her academic research about Ted Hughes earlier in the day at Oxford Brookes – contact us for more details.

Have you seen our new ignitionpress pamphlets yet? We have another launch event at the Oxford Literary Festival on Sunday 25 March. Read and hear from the poets: Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington, on our ignitionpress pages, and buy the pamphlets here!

Notes from Seren:

Yvonne Reddick was born in Glasgow and grew up in Aberdeen, Berkshire and Kuwait. She won a Northern Writer’s Award for poetry in 2016. Her poems have appeared in magazines such as Stand and Shearsman, and been translated into Greek and Swedish. She lives in Manchester and works as an academic researcher and lecturer. Her book Ted Hughes: Environmentalist andEcopoet was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. ‘Above the Northeast Shoulder’ comes from her Mslexia-prize winning pamphlet, Translating Mountains, which features elegies to her father and a friend who both died in mountaineering accidents. You can read more about Yvonne’s work on these pages, and follow her on Twitter.

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.

When I lived alone

March 6, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

When I lived alone I was clean. Good.
I drank jasmine tea in the afternoons
working by lamplight in the gloom. At night
I read by candlelight. Drank Rooibos. Played
piano to the guitar, guitar to the piano.
Sometimes I sang, to them both, to the room,
to myself, alone. Sometimes I went out.
If I left for more than a day I’d stroke
the walls and tell the house to be good
without me. Occasionally, people came round
and made the still, contained air busy. 
Mostly though it was only me,
me and the house, being good together.
I slept curled up against the cool
stretch of its ribs like a cub. It breathed 
gently into me. How I loved
its scent of damp sandstone and old warm
wood. I loved how it touched on my mind
and shifted its light to my mood. How
it helped me be good. In the mornings
I’d sit in its eye with a pot of good black coffee,
reheating it on the hob as it cooled.

by Polly Atkin

This is a very exciting and busy week for the Poetry Centre, and we hope you’ll join us at one of our events! Tonight (Tuesday), we’ll be hosting an open mic at Oxford Brookes on the topic of identity, together with the Oxford Human Rights Festival and Oxford Brookes LGBT+ Staff Forum. All are welcome! This week also sees the launch of ignitionpress and our first pamphlets by Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington: we’re in London on Wednesday and Oxford on Thursday. Both events are free and we’d love to see you! We also have a series of readings and a workshop with Alan Buckley lined up for the coming months. Find more information about those here.

Notes from Seren:

Polly Atkin lives in Cumbria. Her second poetry pamphlet, Shadow Dispatches (Seren, 2013) won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize. In 2014 her poem ‘A Short History of the Moon’ won the Wigtown Poetry Prize, and she was awarded New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse Prize for work in progress ‘reflect[ing] a strong sense of place or the natural environment’. Her 2017 collection from Seren is Basic Nest Architecture. She has taught at the Universities of Lancaster and Strathclyde. You can read more about Polly’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

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 Familyand 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.