The Truth

April 14, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Long ago, in the Mumbles, my mother wore saris,
all flowing and veiled like the Marys in the giant
picture Bible I’d saved up for. My Father told me
Christ was Krishna – just less colourful. My sister
read philosophy; told me about the aching chasms,
a universe of infinite space between all bodies,
so I hugged her to stop the voice of that truth.

She told me Jesus was no more a God than the tree
outside our house. I loved that oak so agreed
and read the Bible more fervently than ever.
I liked the Bible pictures because everyone
looked dark and foreign like us, with their veils,
beads and saris. I went to chapel in the village,
heard an old man preaching in his Brethren voice.

Their Bibles were small, black with tracing-paper
pages of tiny words and no spaces. They smiled
as I uncovered my Bible for them to see, larger
than myself, full colour, illustrated with mountains,
so I could fall into lands of Palestine, Elam and Judah,
dance through deserts, lament at Jesus’ feet
and sing, yes, he is a tree, he is as warm as wood.

by Jessica Mookherjee

Jessica Mookherjee, highly commended in the 2017 Forward Prizes, presents her second collection of poems, Tigress. Mixing myth, magic and migration, these poems explore the impact of choice upon our lives and concentrate their magnificent, kaleidoscopic imagination on the intricate and often fraught nature of childhood and family, selfhood and womanhood. You can read more about Jessica’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter and on Instagram.

Fierce, often funny, always charged and revealing, Mookherjee’s acute attention to detail tracks lives lived between Bengal, Wales and London. In exploring the intense displacement and loss that marks the experience of migration, the poems move into territories of danger and safety, illness and heartbreak, and ultimately into self-discovery; a rich and sensual moonlit menagerie of bears, big cats, wolves, and ‘forest mothers’. At every step, Tigress is wildly inventive, elegant and utterly distinctive. Read more about the book here and listen to Jessica read another poem from the collection on the Nine Arches YouTube channel.

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 were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2017, All My Mad Mothers by Jacqueline Saphra was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Our titles have also been shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize, and in 2016 David Clarke’s debut poems, Arc, was longlisted for the Polari Prize. To date we have now published over ninety poetry publications. Read more about the press here and follow Nine Arches on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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.

Blood Sugar

April 8, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

No one gave him a scallop-shell or scrip
of anything; he worked long years for this.
He’ll take his As, his hard-earned scholarship,
his knotted hankie full of prejudice,

and seek for truth among the pleasant groves
of academe (Epistles, Horace). Art
hangs in those trees like fruit; like geese in droves,
ideas fill those lanes. His gritstone heart

softens to each blithe spirit there chance-met,
each punting lutenist, each well-read youth,
each fortune-favoured lightfoot lad. And yet:
although all Oxford knows Beauty is Truth

and Truth is Beauty, Sheffield says ‘Not quite.’
Sheffield wonders with Brecht, of what is built
the palace of culture? Such a golden white,
honey on yoghurt, syrup on cream, gilt

tears not worth spilling on milk spilt long ago.
The temple of learning glows like toffee ice.
Or sugar. Raw cane sugar. When you know
t’truth about beauty, then you question t’price.

by Eleanor Brown

The Poetry Centre is delighted to say that one of our most recent ignitionpress pamphlets, Hinge by Alycia Pirmohamed, has been selected as the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Summer 2020! You can find out more about Alycia’s wonderful pamphlet on our website (scroll down) where you can also hear her read a poem. Although we’re currently unable to post out copies of the pamphlets because of the coronavirus restrictions, any orders made now will be fulfilled as soon as possible.

‘Blood Sugar’ is copyright © Eleanor Brown, 2019. It is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Brown, White Ink Stains (Bloodaxe Books, 2019) www.bloodaxebooks.com. Read more about the book here, where you can also read further sample poems.

Eleanor Brown’s first collection, Maiden Speech, published by Bloodaxe in 1996, included her much anthologised ‘girlfriend’s revenge’ poem ‘Bitcherel’ along with a widely praised sequence of fifty love and end-of-love sonnets written during her 20s. Her second collection, White Ink Stains, appearing three decades later, draws on the lives of women of all ages.

Taking her title from the idea that when a woman writes about her experience as a woman, ‘she writes in white ink’ (Hélène Cixous), Eleanor Brown wanted to inscribe, among other things, the unseen labour of endowing infants with their mother tongue, their birthright of speech and language skills – the babbling, cooing, phonic repetition, echolalia, chanting of nonsense-words, singing of lullabies, nursery rhymes, counting rhymes, clapping songs, and telling of bedtime stories that is often the invisible and unrecorded work of women with pre-school-age children.

A number of these poems were written in response to interviews made for the Reading Sheffield oral history project. Eleanor Brown spent over a year listening to recordings before starting to write these poems, some of which stay very faithful to the speaker’s own words, while others travel further into an imaginative or active, poetic listening; these are the poems she heard not in what was said, but in pauses, intonations, emphasis, whispers, asides, digressions and deflections. You cana read more about White Ink Stains here, where you can also read further sample poems.

Eleanor Brown was born in 1969 and lived in Scotland until the age of 12. She studied English Literature at York. After graduating she worked variously as a waitress, barmaid, legal secretary, and minutes secretary, to be able to work also as a poet and translator of poetry. In 2001-02 she was Creative Writing Fellow at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde. She now lives, works, writes, sings (alto) and dances (Argentine tango) in Sheffield.

Her debut collection, Maiden Speech, published by Bloodaxe in 1996, was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She was one of the five poets featured in Bloodaxe’s 1997 New Blood promotion. Her second collection, White Ink Stains, is published by Bloodaxe in October 2019. She has also written works for theatre and led workshops about translating Baudelaire and Gautier in the context of musical settings by Vierne and Berlioz to produce singable versions of the texts. You can read more about Eleanor’s work on her website, find her on Facebook and follow her on Instagram.

The Englishman

April 2, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The Englishman is a regular with a usual.
He has slapped a bar-top laughing.

The Englishman is a charmer and a ladies’ man.
He’s been told off by a barmaid.

Whenever there are ladies present, he says
not when there are ladies present.

We should not be jealous of the Englishman.
He simply had the foresight to buy property.

He barbecues and cooks proper English breakfasts.
He insists on carving any meat.

The Englishman is a breast, and not a leg man.
He prefers the white meat.

On forms, he writes: English, male.
He hesitates between White and Prefer not to say.

He places great significance on handshakes.
He can tell a lot by an Englishman’s handshake.

He shakes hands with children and his brother.
The Englishman kisses ladies on the hand or cheek.

In the bathroom, the Englishman has a cheeky
Punch cartoon, taking aim at the establishment,

and when he pisses, the Englishman aims
for the water, not the bowl. He splashes joyously.

The Englishman is not pissed, actually.
He can handle his drink, and his own affairs.

The Englishman has had an affair. He wears
a signet ring and not a wedding band.

The Englishman doesn’t signal when he changes
lanes on roundabouts or the ring road.

The Englishman is very sorry. He didn’t realise
you were in here, getting changed.

by Ali Lewis

The Poetry Centre is delighted to say that one of our most recent ignitionpress pamphlets, Hinge by Alycia Pirmohamed, has been selected as the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Summer 2020! You can find out more about Alycia’s wonderful pamphlet on our website (scroll down) where you can also hear her read a poem. Although we’re currently unable to post out copies of the pamphlets because of the coronavirus restrictions, any orders will be fulfilled as soon as possible.

‘The Englishman’ is copyright © Ali Lewis, 2020. It is reprinted from Hotel (Verve Poetry Press, 2020) by permission of Verve Poetry Press. You can read more about the pamphlet here.

Ali Lewis is a poet from Nottingham. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. He has a degree in Politics from Cambridge, where he received the John Dunn and Precious Pearl Prizes and was a member of the Footlights, and an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, where he was shortlisted for the Pat Kavanagh and Ivan Juritz Awards. Ali is an AHRC-funded doctoral student at Durham University and Assistant Editor at Poetry London. You can learn more about Ali and his work on his website and follow him on Twitter.

Blood is washed off a car, the earth is packed away, relationships fracture and mend. Hotel, a striking debut pamphlet from Eric Gregory Award winner Ali Lewis is a book of both close focus and great expansion. We zoom in on a snowflake’s edge and a freckled wrist, and at the same time witness the continents merge and the universe expand into something unknowable. In a collection that contends with the seeming inevitability of masculinity, of grief, and of people moving apart, Hotel shows us that we exist in rooms of similar layouts and puts a glass to the walls between so we might overhear. Find out more about the pamphlet here.

Verve Poetry Press is a fairly new and already award-winning press focussing hard on meeting a need in Birmingham – a need for the vibrant poetry scene here in Brum to find a way to present itself to the poetry world via publication. Co-founded by Stuart Bartholomew and Amerah Saleh, it is publishing poets from all corners of the city – poets that represent the city’s varied and energetic qualities and will communicate its many poetic stories. Added to this is a colourful pamphlet series featuring poets who have previously performed at our sister festival – and a poetry show series which captures the magic of longer poetry performance pieces by poets such as Polarbear and Matt Abbott. Like the festival, we will strive to think about poetry in inclusive ways and embrace the multiplicity of approaches towards this glorious art. Find out more here. In 2019 the press was voted Most Innovative Publisher at the Saboteur Awards and won the Publisher’s Award for Poetry Pamphlets at the Michael Marks Awards.