Kiss

July 23, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I am contorted in this pixie bed,
querulous with your story-time heckling,
your hair-splitting curiosity, 
craving monikers for the anonymous,
under-wrought woodland chorus.

You uncradle the slumber torch,
shadow dinosaurs on the ceiling.
I origami my palms into a pinned
butterfly, flapping for dear life,
an unforgiving crocodile on the prowl.

Bare soles walk the primrose walls,
cold as the rind of the retiring moon.
You complain, no matter how many times
I tuck your feet back into the duvet, 
they kick off the blankets to freeze.

Your sleights of procrastination,
delaying the damnation of bedtime,
the bane of these pristine years,
is why I lie beside you, drafting
magpies until your sleep is composed.

I peck your apple cheek, dented
with the dimples you inherited
from no one. That Sid James chuckle
nipping at the corners of your mouth,
the rifts between your milk teeth.

Nos Da. Are you near or are you far?
You sing your callow kiss, dawdling
the drumroll of its hum. You perch
it with the flourish of a conjuror,
unleashing the dove from the pan.

by Rhian Edwards

This is the final Weekly Poem for a while – we’ll be taking a break over the summer – but we’d like to thank you very much for reading and also thank all the wonderful publishers and poets that we’ve featured over the last year. If there have been any poems you’ve particularly enjoyed, we encourage you to seek out and buy the poets’ books! The Weekly Poem will return to your inbox on Monday 3 September.

But whilst you’re waiting for the next instalment, why not enter our competition? The 2018 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition is open for entries for only two more weeks – until 6 August! There are two categories – Open and English as an Additional Language – and the winner in each category takes home £1000. This year we’re delighted that our judge is the highly-acclaimed poet Kayo Chingonyi. You can find full details and enter via our website.

Notes from Seren:

Rhian Edwards is an award-winning poet and noted stage performer. Her first collection of poems Clueless Dogs (Seren) won Wales Book of the Year 2013, the Roland Mathias Prize for Poetry 2013 and Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice 2013. It was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her pamphlet of poems Parade the Fib (tall-lighthouse), was awarded the Poetry Book Society Choice. Rhian has also been a winner of the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry, winning both the Judges and Audience award. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and magazines and she has performed her work worldwide at festivals and events. Broodis an illustrated pamphlet with pictures by Paul Edwards, and features a long poem in ten parts inspired by the mnemonic for spotting magpies: ‘one for sorry, two for joy’ and detailing the breakdown of a marriage and the birth of a child. You can read more about the pamphlet on the Seren website, find more about Rhian’s work via her own site, 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.

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.

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Mandarin Duck

July 16, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Mandarin Duck

the gold is punches
or the gold lean comes from so
much gore. the heat
down in our heels. the chase. play
what is beautiful it is childlike.
we break for what is
ugly, for lunches, boats caught
at this point in another lake.
for turtles, birds’ bills. golden mornings
from the train & my mouth purple
from all the falling over

the water in my lips.
& here it is not the root,
the first of it. we were not moving
when you hit us but moving from the first
punch. she said home is where they say duck
like hook, like come here & here i am
rotten wood, knees again. i can’t feel them
don’t worry i mean we’re golden
like the gold smudged inside your eye.

by Charlotte Geater

Our 2018 International Poetry Competition is still open for entries – until 6 August! The competition has two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language – and this year is judged by the highly-acclaimed poet Kayo Chingonyi. You can find full details and enter here .

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Charlotte Geater grew up in Ipswich, moved to Oxford for university, and now lives in London. Charlotte was a submissions editor for online magazine Pomegranate, and has previously been published in The Salt Book of Younger Poets and Stop/Sharpening/Your/Knives (3) and (4). You can find her on Tumblr and 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.

On les tue par le feu, l’eau, l’électricité

July 9, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

On les tue par le feu, l’eau, l’électricité
Eux qui vécurent loin des sources
Et rêvant d’eau toute leur vie
Eux qui grelottaient, sans charbon
Au soleil glacé du Mouloud.
Eux qui veillaient sans lumière
Au fond d’un bidonville obscur.

La première fois qu’il vit
De près
Une baignoire
Fut le dernier jour de sa vie.

by Madeleine Riffaud

They kill them with fire, water, electricity

They kill them with fire, water, electricity
Those who lived far from springs
Dreaming of water all their life
Those who shivered, without coal
In Mouloud’s frozen sun.
Those who lay awake in the dark
Buried in a gloomy slum.

The first time he saw
A bath
Close up
Was the last day of his life.

by Madeleine Riffaud, translated by Alan Dent

We also just released our latest Poetry Centre podcast, in which Niall Munro talks to the award-winning Canadian poet Richard Harrison on his recent visit to Oxford. You can listen to the conversation via the Poetry Centre website.

‘They kill them with fire, water, electricity’ is copyright © Madeleine Riffaud. It is reprinted from Poets and the Algerian War, edited by Francis Combes and translated by Alan Dent (Smokestack Books, 2017) by permission of Smokestack Books.

The Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) was one of the bloodiest post-1945 liberation struggles. Characterised by civilian massacres and the widespread use of torture, it led to the death and displacement of two million people. It was also the first major conflict since the Spanish Civil War to mobilize a generation of writers and artists to protest against the conduct of the war, most notably in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earthand Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. In 1960 many of France’s leading writers and intellectuals – including Simon de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, Pierre Boulez, François Truffaut and Marguerite Duras – signed Le Manifeste des 121, calling on the French government to renounce the use of torture in Algeria. Many writers found themselves on the front-line. The Algerian writer Mouloud Feraoun was assassinated by the OAS in 1962. They tried, unsuccessfully, to kill Madeleine Riffaud (the author of this week’s poem), who reported on the war for L’Humanité. There were two attempts on Sartre’s life.

This anthology, edited by Francis Combes and translated by Alan Dent, features some of the French poets who opposed the war, including Louis Aragon, Jacques Gaucheron, Madeleine Riffaud, Pierre Seghers, Henri Deluy and Guillevic, as well as Algerian poets like Jean Sénac, Kateb Yacine, Bachir Hadj Ali, Noureddine Aba, Messaour Boulanouar, Mohammed Dib, Omar El Bernaoui and Mohamed Saleh Baouiya. It also includes a remarkable series of poems written in memory of Maurice Audin, a young university lecturer and member of the Algerian Communist Party who was murdered by the French authorities. These poets are important, but not only as historical witnesses to a terrible war. They remind us of the possibilities and of the responsibilities of poetry in our own times. You can read more about the anthology on the Smokestack website.

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.

Bouquet

July 3, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

No, I won’t throw it out, for the sake of that tulip:
still fresh and so white, that satiny curl –
a sea-captain’s collar folded over his tunic,
a theatrical backcloth, like a windowless wall.
Its petals are like cupped and half-turned palms,
its bloom a head, a gleaming cherry in its mouth.

…If it must go, let somebody else throw it out –
as God will say of me when my turn comes.

by Julia Nemirovskaya; translated by Boris Dralyuk

The Poetry Centre recently launched our 2018 International Poetry Competition! Open until 6 August, the competition has two categories – Open and English as an Additional Language – and this year is judged by the highly-acclaimed poet Kayo Chingonyi. You can find full details and enter here .

If you’re a translator, you have only a few days left to enter the 2018 Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation! Translate any poem from any language, ancient or modern into English, and be in the running for a cash prizeand publication by the Stephen Spender Trust. There are three categories: Open, 18-and-under, and 14-and-under. The judges this year are Margaret Jull Costa, Olivia McCannon, and Sean O’Brien. You can find more details on the Trust’s website .

Finally, we have just released our latest Poetry Centre podcast, in which Niall Munro talks to the award-winning Canadian poet Richard Harrison on his recent visit to Oxford. You can listen to the conversation via the Poetry Centre website .

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Julia Nemirovskaya is a Moscow-born writer and poet who now lives in the US and teaches at the University of Oregon. Her two collections are Moia knizhechka (My Little Book published in 1998) and Vtoraia knizhechka (Second Little Book, 2014). This poem first appeared in Russian in PLAVUCHII MOST: Russian and World Poetry Magazine, 2016 #1 (9), and will be published in Tretia knizhechka (Moscow: Vodolei, 2019).

Boris Dralyuk is an award-winning literary translator and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA where he taught Russian literature for a number of years. He is co-editor of the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry and has translated Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, both published by Pushkin Press.

Candlestick Press is a small, independent press based in Nottingham and has been publishing its sumptuous ‘instead of a card’ poetry pamphlets since 2008. Subjects range from Birds and Sheep to Tea, Kindness, Home and Puddings. Julia Nemirovskaya’s poem ‘Bouquet’ appears in Ten Poems from Russia – a first co-publication by Candlestick Press and Pushkin press. Candlestick titles are stocked by chain and independent bookshops, as well as by galleries, museums and garden centres. You can follow Candlestick on Twitter or find it on Facebook.

Pushkin Press was founded in 1997, and publishes novels, essays, memoirs, children’s books – everything from timeless classics to the urgent and contemporary. Our books represent exciting, high-quality writing from around the world: we publish some of the twentieth century’s most widely acclaimed, brilliant authors such as Stefan Zweig, Marcel Aymé, Teffi, Antal Szerb, Gaito Gazdanov and Yasushi Inoue, as well as compelling and award-winning contemporary writers, including Andrés Neuman, Edith Pearlman, Eka Kurniawan and Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Pushkin Press imprints include Pushkin Children’s Books, Pushkin Vertigo and ONE.

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.

Follow the Poetry Centre on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.