Month: March 2023

Self-portrait as Bartlett pear

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Pausing
I consider
me fat
slightly
disfigured
heavy-hipped
and the pear, its honey
juice scenting all fingers.
An early child, my parents found
me awkward. I know a fruit now
can be the size of the world, and self-sufficient
without self-doubt, memory milks petals
the first to appear on the trees, blossom
filling the orchard with light.

by L. Kiew

‘Self-portrait as Bartlett pear’ is copyright © L. Kiew, 2023, and is reprinted here from More than Weeds (Nine Arches Press, 2023) by permission of Nine Arches Press. You can read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

More Than Weeds, the debut poetry collection by L. Kiew, explores the language of migration and how it is used in relation to plant and animal species, as well as peoples. These knowledgeable and verdant poems draw deeply on botanical and ecological detail and reveal secret histories thriving in the gaps between definitions; here are precious seedlings, unforced flowers, tongues of leaves, tangled roots and rhizomes.

With roots in decolonialising botany and horticulture movements, and influenced by the impact of the climate crisis and regenerative gardening practices, Kiew’s poetry is alive and thronging with the interconnected nature of things – and the formative forces of nurture, family, food, refuge and love. Human and plant voices speak for themselves of experiences of belonging and displacement, as well as encounters with violence. These vivid poems that ask us to scrutinise what is really contained or constrained by demarcations – whether those of weed or wildflower, or of borders and hostile environments.

A chinese-malaysian living in London, L Kiew earns her living as a charity sector leader and an accountant. She holds a MSc in Creative Writing and Literary Studies from Edinburgh University. Her pamphlet The Unquiet was published by Offord Road Books in 2019. Her debut collection, More than Weeds, came out in February 2023 with Nine Arches Press.

You can find more about L. Kiew on their website and follow them on Instagram and Twitter

Praise for More Than Weeds:

“L Kiew’s poems are inventive and iridescent. More than Weeds navigates ecology, migration and identity with a subtle and complex skill. Animated, strange, acutely-observed, the world in these poems is given an arresting voice.” – Seán Hewitt

“L.Kiew’s radically sensuous debut speaks from the wet earth up. Charting the aftermaths of past empires, inner city and rainforest habitats are interwoven through an ecology of tender co-nurture. Intimate with food insecurity and climate threat, fierce poems stand with migrants fleeing where “the logger’s axe made ghosts of us”. Sharing the “lemony silence” of transplanted knotweed, and the “treelace” of harvested latex, More than Weeds gives us new eyes through which to know our world.” – alice hiller

“Poems in More than Weeds grow, shapeshift and inhabit different spaces of language, emotions, and imagination. There are poems about the family, journey, and love – they crawl and dash off the page, alive and surprising like rabbits glutting grass banks by Inverness station. There are also poems that stay and endure, rewilding themselves into the psyche, like seed heads exploding afternoon showers. A beautiful and resonant collection.” – Romalyn Ante

Nine Arches Press was founded in 2008 and emerged from an awareness of the national literary landscape and a desire to provide a platform for new and emerging poets. Our titles have been widely acclaimed and shortlisted for national prizes including the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize, the Forward Prizes, TS Eliot Poetry Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, the Michael Murphy Prize, the Jhalak Prize, and the Polari Prize. Nine Arches has published over 120 poetry publications, and 29 issues of Under the Radar magazine, and provides a year-round programme of workshops, events, as well as priding themselves as publisher that uniquely provides writer development and mentoring. Nine Arches Press is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, and its Director / Editor is Jane Commane. Read more about the press on the Nine Arches website, 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.

Bringing Back the Day

~ oxfordbrookesuni

It wasn’t flash, a slackered June afternoon,
yet we wanted it. The grass shrewd with stones,
drizzle steaming our jeans, knuckled light.

We got up, dusted pepper of our fingers
and set about bringing the day home.
I wound in a stream, snipped swallows off lines.

You bundled a rape field into the car
and the wind switched off its lamp, Holding
one end, you another, we rolled a wild verge,

ripped nettles in perforated strips.
Crows drifted over, scorching their shadows
into each other, we grabbed those wings

the way we hadn’t quite kissed. The sun
was a lemon cord; I tugged once. It was light.
It all packed so small we forgot about it until April,

when there was no choice but to drag the day out,
drape it throughout the house. Floors crawled,
wallpaper flinched, flicked up sparrows.

I called your name and dog roses uncurled.
The sky was a balloon rising over the bed.
We lifted both hands and held on.

by Angela Readman

‘Bringing Back the Day’ is copyright © Angela Readman, 2022, and is reprinted here from Bunny Girls (Nine Arches Press, 2022) by permission of Nine Arches. You can read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

Notes from Nine Arches:

Angela Readman is a poet and story writer. Her poems have won awards including the Mslexia Competition, The Charles Causley Prize and The Essex Poetry Prize. Her short stories have won The Costa Short Story Award, The Mslexia Competition and the New Flash Fiction Review competition. Her story collection Don’t Try This at Home (& And Other Stories) won The Rubery Book Award and a Saboteur Award. In 2019 And Other Stories published her first novel Something Like Breathing. In 2020 she won the Working Class Nature Writing Prize. In 2021 she was awarded a Society of Author’s and Author’s Foundation grant for her story collection The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles (Valley Press, 2022.) Bunny Girls is her second collection with Nine Arches, following her late diagnosis with autistic spectrum condition. She lives in Northumberland.

Out of the doll’s house and into the woods, Bunny Girls steps out of the shadows of girlhood and looks at the world with wide eyes. Surreal, spiky, wise and darkly funny, this new collection by Costa-winning author and poet Angela Readman expertly mixes shades of film noir, northern wit, and magic realism. Through the lens of childhood, these poems address autism, anxiety, and darker concerns buried by cultural ideals of femininity.

Here in Readman’s skilful words are odes to severed heads, angels and Disney villains, Marilyn Monroe’s body double, squashed slugs, sexual awakenings, Wendy-houses and snow globes, nosebleeds and blackbirds. Women are both invisible and actively writing themselves into the visible. Where there is isolation and dislocation, its counterbalance is finding breathless, reckless joy in the acts of creation and imagination. At its heart, this enlivening, magnificent book is about darkness and light, the lovely and the frightening, the beautiful and the worrying.

Praise for Bunny Girls:

“Heady as a nosebleed, Bunny Girls vacuum packs syrup-sticky snogs, Moomins and the wingbeats of swans. Readers are lured into Wendy-houses and knocked out by fighting fish, platinum blonde wigs and working-class grit. Readman finds playthings everywhere and handles them as seriously as we must. Saucy and daft, her poems pull us out from our bodies to dance it all off under discoballs. Another belting book. The North East is lucky to call this top-notch poet one of our own.” – Jo Clement

“Angela Readman is one of our best writers of girlhood and this collection evokes nostalgia and longing for the danger and the glitter of it. These sensuous, beautiful, sometimes surreal poems, take thrilling leaps with a Plathian precision of language. They dive and weave and nod and wink. They also show how a neurodivergent lens can bring a magical perspective to the everyday and re-vision the world so that ‘Walls are rivers waiting to happen’ and ‘The alphabet is a song wiring ‘I am here’ all through your body.’” – Kate Fox

“Angela Readman manages to write poems that exist in a dream place, a place between reality and fantasy where even the most mundane experiences are delivered into something strange and incredible. These wonderful, vivid poems are shot through with vulnerability, a sense of awakening and more – wit, intelligence, a shrewd observation of life – so that the reader feels like they are being shown the small places of significance that the world contains, the profundity of the everyday. Reader, expect to be swept away, carried along in Readman’s world, and to emerge like a lamp that has been switched on, bright with the power of the poem.” – Wendy Pratt

You can follow Angela on Twitter.

Nine Arches Press was founded in 2008 and emerged from an awareness of the national literary landscape and a desire to provide a platform for new and emerging poets. Our titles have been widely acclaimed and shortlisted for national prizes including the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize, the Forward Prizes, TS Eliot Poetry Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, the Michael Murphy Prize, the Jhalak Prize, and the Polari Prize. Nine Arches has published over 120 poetry publications, and 29 issues of Under the Radar magazine, and provides a year-round programme of workshops, events, as well as priding themselves as publisher that uniquely provides writer development and mentoring. Nine Arches Press is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, and its Director / Editor is Jane Commane. Read more about the press on the Nine Arches website, 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.

Extra

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I

Listen, you are and you aren’t.
Yes, to make the action believable
moment by moment; otherwise no.
Today: expectation – part joy
part disbelief. Don’t overdo it. The feeling
barely surfaces, but we see it.
Don’t blink. There should be
infinity in your gaze.

II

The weather, Plato, whatever
it takes to look like friends
having coffee. And no big gestures –
you hardly figure till the sobbing
makes you turn, brings you in.
Then puzzles, embarrassed; but
pain too, recognition. Indirectly you
heighten the drama.

  III

So you’re leaning to look
back a last time. Not sad or happy,
more uncertain. That’s it – ongoing
uncertainty. Compose your face
with dark and light, to reflect the story.
The final shot is what stays. Like those
Russian horses in the rain by the river.
If words help, keep them to yourself.

by Jennie Feldman

‘Extra’ is copyright © Jennie Feldman, 2022, and is reprinted here from No Cherry Time (Arc Publications, 2022) by permission of Arc Publications. You can read more about the book on the Arc Publications website.

Jennie Feldman was born in South Africa, brought up in London, and graduated in Modern Languages (French) at Oxford. After a career in radio broadcasting, as well as teaching and editing, she became a freelance writer and translator.

Until recently she spent much of her time in Jerusalem; there she was a volunteer with the Israeli NGO Humans Without Borders, which transports chronically ill Palestinian children from the West Bank to hospital appointments in Israel. (She has written on this, and on other Palestine-related subjects, in the Times Literary Supplement.) She is now based in Oxford.

No Cherry Time is Jennie Feldman’s third collection of poems. Her first, The Lost Notebook (2005) was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex Prize, and her second, Swift, came out in 2012. Both were published by Anvil Press Poetry (now Anvil / Carcanet), as were three books of translations: Jacques Réda, Treading Lightly: Selected Poems 1961-1975 (2005); Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets 1938-2008 (2009), co-authored with Stephen Romer, which was awarded a special commendation by the judges of the 2011 Popescu Poetry Prize; and Jacques Réda, The Mirabelle Pickers (2012).

Jennie Feldman’s most recent publication is Chardin and Rembrandt by Marcel Proust (David Zwirner Books, 2016). Her poems have appeared in various journals, among them Agenda, London Magazine, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poetry Review, Stand, and the Times Literary Supplement.

In its geographical sweep – from Israel-Palestine (“Where a hillside’s being shaken /out of the dream”) westward across Europe – No Cherry Time reflects a personal tale of estrangement, departure and quest. Fine-tuned to the natural world, sustained by its fragile continuities, the poems play out a restive music. As the focus comes to settle on Greece, it is above all the Mediterranean (“Sea Between the Lands”) that buoys the imaginative spirit, blurring East and West.

Arc Publications publishes contemporary poetry from new and established writers from the UK and abroad, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English and the work of overseas poets in translation. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians.

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.

It won’t be a normal year

~ oxfordbrookesuni

March 2020

I recognise something of myself
in the panicking woman by the sheds
who counsels us to only plant
low-maintenance things this year
and a few quick crops for pleasure.

She almost acts out dashing in
under cover of dark to harvest.
They’re thinking of shutting down the plots
or saying we can only do an hour.
People take the piss, treating it like parks.

There’s a keening edge in her voice.
Her man looks down, stirring the gentle ash
left at the end of their little bonfire.
You can tell they’ve been through years together –
not years like this but still.

She works a while at weeding
and when we go to say goodbye she says
Sorry – I know it’s the way I cope,
to say the worst and hope for better.
Her sorry eyes. I do the same myself.

We’ve learnt, over the fifteen years,
which plants like the dry light soil.
We know the old guys who have been here forever.
Know how to keep the weeds at an ebb –
bindweed gone, couch grass in abeyance.

It’s the last day bonfires are allowed
before the season proper begins.
Birdsong. Buds on bare apple branches,
leaves opening out like hands. Rhubarb stretches
dragons’ wings. We take down the brassica nets.

We squint our eyes against the drifting smoke.
I almost say out loud, I can almost
see apocalypse. The future is acres
of bramble, nettle, the flourishing
of flag-waving luscious seeding grass.

by Ramona Herdman

‘It won’t be a normal year’ is copyright © Ramona Herdman, 2022, and is reprinted here from Glut (Nine Arches Press, 2022) by permission of Nine Arches. You can read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

Notes from Nine Arches:

Glut, by Norwich-based writer Ramona Herdman, is a darkly funny and open-hearted book about, as the poet describes, “how we live together and find meaning through the various rules and rituals that surround food, family, alcohol, work, nature, sex and love.”

In these candid and playful poems, appetites of all kinds are explored, from cocktails and cheeseboards, to sex and power. Herdman deftly presents the vulnerable underbelly of human experience, but with kindness and empathy. Poems in Glut look at relationships, interdependence, addiction, alcoholism, eating disorders, pain and chaos. Yet overarching all these is  vitality and a lust for life.

Victoria Kennefick, the TS Eliot Prize-nominated poet, observes: “It is appropriate that this miraculous collection ends on the word ‘love’ as the poems pulsate with that most essential of emotions: ‘Come home safe / Come home love.’ Glut is a true and rare gift.” You can read more about Glut on the Nine Arches website.

Ramona Herdman’s latest pamphlet, A warm and snouting thing (The Emma Press), was shortlisted in the poetry category of East Anglican Book Awards. Her previous pamphlet Bottle (HappenStance Press) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. One of her poems was chosen for the Poetry Archive’s WorldView 2021 and another won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize, 2017. Ramona lives in Norwich and is a committee member for Café Writers.

You can read more about Ramona’s work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

Nine Arches Press was founded in 2008 and emerged from an awareness of the national literary landscape and a desire to provide a platform for new and emerging poets. Our titles have been widely acclaimed and shortlisted for national prizes including the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize, the Forward Prizes, TS Eliot Poetry Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, the Michael Murphy Prize, the Jhalak Prize, and the Polari Prize. Nine Arches has published over 120 poetry publications, and 29 issues of Under the Radar magazine, and provides a year-round programme of workshops, events, as well as priding themselves as publisher that uniquely provides writer development and mentoring. Nine Arches Press is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, and its Director / Editor is Jane Commane. Read more about the press on the Nine Arches website, 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.