After Seven Photographic Portraits of a Grey Connemara Pony

May 28, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You will know a pony by its ears:
Listening out for weather forecasts and love songs.

By its mane:
Tossed over its eyes like a witch’s broom.

By its coat:
Always buttoned up, tight-fitting, dusty and well-worn.

By its eyes:
That look at you, then look at you again to take you in.

By its hooves:
Made for dancing, and so are worn at the tips.

By its mouth:
That loves to eat words given with pats of the hand.

By its nose:
That knows you, and lifts the pony’s head to let it know you’re coming.

By its tail:
That conducts the symphony of birdsong, lake-song, light-song.
That is the bog underfoot, here above the village of Roundstone.

by Tony Curtis

Candlestick Press will be launching its latest pamphlet, Ten Poems about Horses, on Wednesday 19 June at Alison’s of Tewkesbury, with Alison Brackenbury and a line-up of guest poets. For more details, visit the Candlestick Press Facebook page . Sales support Bransby Horses, an equine welfare charity.

Don’t forget to register for the exciting reading with Ilya Kaminsky and Shara Lessley on 26 June, the symposium ‘Our Poetry and Our Needs’ on 9 July, and the launches of our latest ignitionpress pamphlets on 22 and 23 July. There are more details about all of these events here .

Finally, if you’re keen on filmmaking and poetry, why not enter our filmpoem competition! Choose a poem by one of our ignitionpress poets, respond to it in a short film, and win prizes and screenings! The deadline is 7 June, and there are more details on our blog .

‘After Seven Photographic Portraits of a Grey Connemara Pony’ is copyright © Tony Curtis, 2019. It is reprinted from Ten Poems about Horses, selected and introduced by Alison Brackenbury (Candlestick Press, 2019) by permission of Candlestick. You can read more about the pamphlet here.

Tony Curtis was born in Dublin in 1955. He studied Literature at Essex University and Trinity College Dublin. An award-winning poet, Curtis has published ten warmly received collections. His most recent are: Folk (Arc Publications 2011); Pony (Occasional Press 2013) with drawings and paintings by David Lilburn; Approximately in the Key of C (Arc Publications 2015). He has been awarded the Varuna House Exchange Fellowship to Australia and the Irish National Poetry Prize. In April 2018, the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, Minnesota, awarded Curtis the 22nd Lawrence O’Shaughnessy prize for poetry. He has read his poetry all over the world to great acclaim. May 2019 saw the publication of This Flight Tonight – a book that celebrates the lives of Alcock & Brown and their incredible flight from a field in St. John’s, Newfoundland, to a bog in the west of Ireland in June 1919. He is a member of Aosdána. Read more about Tony’s work here.

Candlestick 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 Cricket to Tea, Kindness, Home and Puddings. Candlestick Press titles are stocked by chain and independent bookshops, as well as by galleries, museums and garden centres. They can also be ordered online on the Candlestick website, where you can find out more about the full range of titles. You can follow Candlestick on Twitter and Facebook. In 2018 Candlestick sold over 75,000 pamphlets.

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.

Nearing Warminster

May 20, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Salisbury, solitary, sings as if Isaiah in her –

All Along the Watchtower edge and ridge of plain they ride for Warminster.

Anger, broken in her, iron age, stone age, bone and barrow, is as if her
Father yet not father photographed before the war
Unfathomed by her –

Anger of another relatively new to her beside her now
Like coulter – plough-hard, harrow-hard –
Would break the clod of her

For what is yet unheard in her is hoard
It is for him to bare.

As if the solitary village in her, commandeered, were Imber
Unrestored –

As if the word abide with me were loud and overlord in her.

by Gillian Allnutt

Imber, a village on Salisbury Plain taken over by the army in 1943, is still uninhabited today.
We are delighted to say that this week’s poet, Gillian Allnutt, will be reading in Oxford this evening (Monday) in an event organized jointly by the Poetry Centre and the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture. Spaces for this event are limited, so please register here.

Looking forward, don’t forget to register for the exciting reading with Ilya Kaminsky and Shara Lessley on 26 June, the symposium ‘Our Poetry and Our Needs’ on 9 July, and the launches of our latest ignitionpress pamphlets on 22 and 23 July. There are more details about all of these events here.

Finally, if you’re keen on filmmaking and poetry, why not enter our filmpoem competition! Choose a poem by one of our ignitionpress poets, respond to it in a short film, and win prizes and screenings! The deadline is 7 June, and there are more details on our blog.

Gillian Allnutt was born in London but spent half her childhood in Newcastle upon Tyne. She is the author of nine poetry collections. Nantucket and the Angel and Lintel were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and poems from these collections are included in her Bloodaxe retrospective How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems (2007), which draws on six published books plus a new collection, Wolf Light, and was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her most recent collections, both from Bloodaxe, are indwelling (2013) and wake (2018). Since 1983 she has taught creative writing in a variety of contexts, mainly in adult education and as a writer in schools. In 2009/10 she held a writing residency with The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (now Freedom From Torture) in the North East, working with asylum seekers in Newcastle and Stockton. She lives in County Durham. Gillian Allnutt was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2016 in February 2017. You can find out more about Gillian’s work on the Bloodaxe website.

Bloodaxe Books was founded in Newcastle by Neil Astley in 1978 and has revolutionised poetry publishing in Britain over four decades. Internationally renowned for quality in literature and excellence in book design, our authors and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry, from the T.S. Eliot Prize and Pulitzer to the Nobel Prize. And books like the Staying Alive trilogy have broken new ground by opening up contemporary poetry to many thousands of new readers. Find out more about Bloodaxe on the publisher’s website.

Landscape

May 15, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

there is no turf where I’m from
no sponge fertile ground
my landscape is a tarmacadam road
at the foot of the Dublin Mountains
my childhood home a four-bed semi

I remember the progression
of cars

Montego
Peugeot
Renault
Prius

and the day my mom arrived
with her very own
ancient Opel Bluebird
the same colour as the Loreto nuns
and the same age as me
in my final year of secondary school

I sat up front with her
pleased as punch not to be biking home
past the throngs of teenage boys from the other school
in my brown skirt
and long gabardine coat

when we pulled up to the drive-thru
my heart sang for a cheeseburger
we sat on woolly seats
munching fries in the car park
of a suburban shopping mall

unaware of the blue-grey tint
poised by the mountains
just behind our backs

by Julie Morrissy

This week’s poet, Julie Morrissy, will be launching her new tall-lighthouse collection, Where, the Mile End, on Monday 20 May at the Poetry Café in London alongside another tall-lighthouse poet, Brendan Cleary, whose book Do Horses Fly? is inspired by the images created by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Find out more about the event here.

If you happen to be in Oxford rather than London on Monday (20 May), join the Poetry Centre and the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture as we welcome acclaimed poet Gillian Allnutt to Oxford. Spaces for this event are limited, so please register here.

Finally, if you’re keen on filmmaking and poetry, why not enter our filmpoem competition! Choose a poem by one of our ignitionpress poets, respond to it in a short film, and win prizes and screenings! The deadline is 7 June, and there are more details on our blog.

Julie Morrissy is an Irish poet, academic, and critic. She is a recipient of the Next Generation Artist Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. Her debut pamphlet I Am Where (Eyewear, 2015) was shortlisted for Best Poetry Pamphlet in the Saboteur Awards. She earned her PhD in Creative Writing at Ulster University, and she is the Newman Fellow in Creativity at University College Dublin.

Where, the Mile End, publishedin conjunction with Book*hug Press, Canada, sees tall-lighthouse return to publishing under its original owner/director, Les Robinson. This is poetry with an edge, employing an energetic lyric that follows the poet through Europe, the US, and Canada. Morrissy introduces a deft awareness of image, rhythm, and poetic realisation. The poems intimately link the vitality of two continents, tightly holding the reader to the snow, the streets, and the sensual memories embroidered throughout. Find out more about the book here.

tall-lighthouse has a strong reputation for publishing new talent, and was the first in the UK to publish Helen Mort, Sarah Howe, Liz Berry, Ailbhe Darcy, Adam O’Riordan, Rhian Edwards, Emily Berry, Vidyan Ravintharan, Kate Potts and many others. Find out more on the tall-lighthouse website, or find the press on Facebook and Twitter.

This Last Year

May 5, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Between those Alps and Apennines
on a walk towards the Po,
there are tall, spaced, roadside poplars,
planted fields of silver birch…
At sunset, here, church cupolas
interrupt surrounding darkness
streaked with red hopes for good weather;
but then a so-called super moon
emerges from horizon trees—
their fragile threads of branches
like violent scratch-marks on a ruddy face.

We’re threading through an after dusk
along the wide, slow-flowing river,
are lost in conversation
on wherever best to live
late days, or else discreetly wonder
about a greener charm in distance
on the far bank’s fertile side,
or at whatever may appear
over deepened skylines this last year.

Higher, whiter, blurred in mist
floated from warm earth, that moon
might be the common coinage
of our coming separation—
but breaking up is hard to do,
and the best part’s even harder
now migrants go on envying
rights to be taken at the border
closing ahead as we pace on.

Ahead, through twilight, can you see
outlines of their fainting country?
Where, next year, they’ll good as tell you
not to lament that loss of value
others envy? Abandon rage, outrage
at shames come from a muddy spring?
And why? Because, sans everything,
you’ll reach that other country, age?

2 January 2018

by Peter Robinson

This week’s poet, Peter Robinson, is one of the speakers at an exciting symposium, ‘Our Poetry and Our Needs’, which is being held at the University of Reading on Tuesday 9 July. The event features an international group of poets and academics, is open to all and free to attend. To see the provisional programme and to register, please visit the Eventbrite page here.

Also coming soon, don’t miss the chance to hear the acclaimed poet Gillian Allnutt in Oxford when she reads for us on Monday 20 May in an evening co-organized with the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture. Tickets are free, but register here.

Finally, look up our Eventbrite listings to find readings by Ilya Kaminsky and Shara Lessley on 26 June and our three ignitionpress poets who will be launching their new pamphlets on 22 and 23 July.

Ravishing Europa, Peter Robinson’s eleventh collection, marks a wholly unexpected development in the poet’s work, prompted, as evident throughout, by the fissures exported from a political party to an entire country and beyond by the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union. Its consequences cast crucial events for this poet, both personal and public, into unforeseen fresh lights. Prompted by a televised debate to wonder in the title poem upon what impulse the founding European myth is based, Robinson’s new poems search through his individual and cultural memory to offer, as the book unfolds, an answer. Read more about the book on the Worple website.

Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953, and grew up mainly in Liverpool. He co-edited the magazines Perfect Bound and Numbers while helping organize various Cambridge Poetry Festivals and a Poetry International at the South Bank Centre. His many volumes of poetry include a Collected Poems, 1976-2016 (2017), Ghost Characters (2006) and The Look of Goodbye (2008). He was awarded the Cheltenham Prize for This Other Life (1988). Both The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems (2002) and The Returning Sky (2012) were recommendations of the Poetry Book Society. A translator of poetry, mainly from the Italian, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni (with Marcus Perryman) appeared in 2006. Other publications include his aphorisms, Spirits of the Stair (2009), five volumes of literary criticism, the most recent being The Sound Sense of Poetry (2018), various edited collections, anthologies, The Complete Poems, Translations & Selected Prose of Bernard Spencer (2011) and The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2013). A collection of essays on his work, The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson edited by Adam Piette and Katy Price, appeared in 2007. Peter is also the poetry editor for Two Rivers Press and Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. You can read more about Peter’s work on his website.

Worple Press was founded by Peter and Amanda Carpenter in 1997 and publishes books by new and established poets: collections, pamphlets, works in translation, essays, interviews. Early authors included Iain Sinclair, Joseph Woods, Beverley Bie Brahic, Kevin Jackson and the acclaimed American nature poet Peter Kane Dufault. Recent collections include Andy Brown’s Bloodlines, The Tree Line: Poems for Trees, Woods, and People, edited by Michael McKimm, Rockabye by Patricia McCarthy, and The Watching Stair by Diana Hendry. More information can be found at the publisher’s website, and on Facebook and Twitter.