Endearments

February 11, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I have itemized
your oak leaf long limb wild

& have begun to name you things like
“summer eclipse

in my offline calendar” or even “sleeping
under the stars

in a Wal-Mart parking lot”
& honestly

that kind of romance is okay with me
because secretly I have also named you “river of pine”

& “blossoming spring flower along the path to
Mount Yamnuska.”

There is also my skin and yours,
there is also the way skin & skin are two

vastly different things
that this language has difficulty

capturing:
“every constellated mole” &

“pillar of shade.”
How all of these names describe the way

we coexist
& exist within one another—

the way you disappear into the trees
& I follow.

by Alycia Pirmohamed

Listen to Alycia read the poem here (scroll to the bottom of the page).

The Poetry Centre is excited to share with you the second selection from our forthcoming pamphlets – a poem from Alycia Pirmohamed’s new pamphlet Hinge, published this month by ignitionpress. Alongside Alycia’s pamphlet we are also delighted to publish Mia Kang’s City Poems and Hush by Majella Kelly, whose work we featured in the previous Weekly Poem. We will be sharing a poem from Mia’s pamphlet next week before we launch all three pamphlets at the Poetry Café in London on 20 February and at Waterstones in Oxford on 21 February. We’ll also be appearing at the Poetry Book Fair on 22 February (with a reading by Alycia and fellow ignitionpress poet Joanna Ingham), so do join us on one of these dates! You can find more details about tickets for the launches here.

‘Endearments’ is copyright © Alycia Pirmohamed, 2020. It is reprinted from Hinge (ignitionpress, 2020) by permission of ignitionpress. The poem was first published in the April 2018 issue of Glass: A Journal of Poetry.

Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet currently living in Scotland. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh, where she is studying figurative homelands in poetry written by second-generation immigrant writers of South Asian descent. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Oregon. In 2018, Alycia’s chapbook Faces that Fled the Wind was selected by Camille Rankine for the BOAAT Press Chapbook Prize. Her other awards include the 92/Y Discovery Poetry Contest, the Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest in Poetry, the Adroit Journal’s Djanikian Scholars program, and the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in publications internationally, including The Paris Review Daily, Prairie Schooner, Best Canadian Poetry, Gutter Magazine, and The London Magazine, among others. Alycia is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets, co-founder of The Scottish BAME Writers Network, and a submission reader for Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She has received support from The Royal Society of Literature, and from Calgary Arts Development via The City of Calgary. Find out more about Alycia’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

ignitionpress is a poetry pamphlet press from Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre with an international outlook which publishes original, arresting poetry from emerging poets, and established poets working on interim or special projects.

The first eight pamphlets to be published by ignitionpress, featuring work by Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, Patrick James Errington, Natalie Whittaker, Belinda Zhawi, Joanna Ingham, Jennifer Lee Tsai, and Sarah Shapiro are available from our online Shop. Each pamphlet costs £5 and you can buy three for £12. You can find out more about the poets and their work on our dedicated page.

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.

Hymn

February 3, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It’s Sunday morning and you are moving
inside me like a song that begins
in the syrinx of a lark, invisible
to the eye, silky and golden
on the ear. No promises have I made
yet I thee worship with my body. Me,
a sinner, unwelcome to receive the body
of Christ. I breathe you in as the curtains
of our church fall open on a Pink Lady
sky and the Owenriff river rushes past
the window, breathless and unrepentant
for its winter swell. My hymn hovers
—oh god oh god oh god—then rises again
to beat its milk-warm wings against the glass.

by Majella Kelly

Listen to Majella read the poem here.

The Poetry Centre is excited to share with you a poem from Majella Kelly’s new pamphlet Hush, published this month by our ignitionpress. Alongside Majella’s pamphlet we are also proud to publish Mia Kang’s City Poems and Hinge by Alycia Pirmohamed. We will be sharing poems from these two pamphlets over the next fortnight before we launch all three pamphlets at the Poetry Café in London on 20 February and at Waterstones in Oxford on 21 February. We’ll also be appearing at the Poetry Book Fair on 22 February, so do join us on one of these dates! You can find more details about tickets here.

Before that, the Poetry Centre is involved in two events this week as part of Oxford Brookes’s Think Human Festival. On Tuesday evening at the Old Fire Station we’ll be showcasing some of the poetry produced through our military veterans’ poetry workshops and reflecting on what it means to be a veteran. It will feature contributions from poet and veteran Jo Young, Dr Jane Potter (an expert on the writing of the First World War), psychologist Dr Rita Phillips, who has researched public perceptions of veterans in the UK and US, and poet Susie Campbell, who led the creative elements of the workshops. Tickets are free but register here.

Then on Thursday evening we’ll be taking part in ‘Poetry and Constitutions’ as we consider what effect constitutional laws and changes have on creativity and national identity. We’ll be welcoming Welsh poet Llŷr Gwyn Lewis, former Manx Bard Stacey Astill, and Scots Gaelic poet Niall O’Gallagher along with academics Professor Peter Edge and Dr Catriona Mackie. Join us at the Friends’ Meeting House by reserving your place here.

Majella Kelly is an Irish writer from Tuam, Co. Galway. In 2019 she won the Strokestown International Poetry Competition. She was shortlisted for the Rialto Pamphlet Competition and the Listowel Poetry Collection Award. She was also shortlisted for the inaugural Brotherton Prize at Leeds University and her poems will be published by Carcanet in a Brotherton anthology alongside the winner and the other three shortlisted poets.

In 2018 she won the Ambit Poetry Prize, came second in the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted by The Irish Times for a Hennessy Literary Award. In 2017 she was nominated by Crannóg for a Pushcart Prize and selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. In 2016 she came third in the Resurgence Eco Poetry Prize (now the Ginkgo Prize). Her poetry and short fiction has been published in such places as The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Southword, Ambit, The Well Review, Cyphers, The Pickled Body, Quarryman, Best New British & Irish Poets 2017, and Aesthetica’s Creative Writing Annual 2017 & 2018. She holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford.

When It Snowed

December 16, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

you made it sound simple:
how wild geese flying south

over Grizedale forest is a sign,
how ice used to paralyse Esthwaite lake

where Wordsworth skated
in his black coat, how winters fall

like prayers, how snow stitches
and mends all that is broken.

Through the pale hospital window
I watch roofs blanket white, cars

balancing great hats, footprints healing
themselves as if to trick me into believing

it’s just another of your winter days
and everything will recover.

by Kerry Darbishire

The Poetry Centre has just announced its programme of events for the first half of 2020! It features a reading by American poet Maya Popa; the launches of our latest ignitionpress pamphlets by Mia Kang, Majella Kelly and Alycia Pirmohamed; two events as part of the Think Human Festival – The Poet as Soldier and Veteran and Constitutions and Poetry – and a reading by André Naffis-Sahely, James Attlee & Hasan Bamyani. For more details and to book (free) tickets, visit our website.

The Weekly Poem will now take a short break until after Christmas. We wish you a very Merry Christmas and a great start to 2020! Thank you for reading!

‘When It Snowed’ is copyright © Kerry Darbishire, 2019. It is reprinted from Ten Poems about Snow, selected and introduced by Carole Bromley (Candlestick Press, 2019) by permission of Candlestick. You can read more about the pamphlet here.

Kerry Darbishire, a songwriter and poet, grew up in the Lake District and continues to live and write in a remote area of Cumbria. Her poems have appeared widely in anthologies and magazines and have won several competition prizes. She has published two full poetry collections with Indigo Dreams: A Lift of Wings (2014) and Distance Sweet on my Tongue (2018). She co-edited the Handstand Press Cumbrian Poetry Anthology, This Place I Know. Handstand Press also published Kay’s Ark, an account of Kerry’s mother’s life. Kerry regularly reads her work at poetry events and is a member of Dove Cottage Poets. Follow Kerry on Twitter 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 at Candlestick’s website where you can find out more about the full range of titles. You can follow Candlestick on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. In 2018 Candlestick sold over 75,000 pamphlets.

December began with shopping

December 2, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

for the exotic: mint and apple sauce,
imported rosemary, cranberries, candied
peel and blocks of English butter.

It began with baking, the Christmas cake
drenched daily with dark brandy
until it oozed from the lightest finger-flick

and emptying jar after jar
of Robertson’s mincemeat into pastry.
Cinnamon gold-dusted everything.

After the final Advent window,
we opened all our doors,
welcoming hungry occupants, their cars

filling up the driveway, aunts and uncles,
cousins in greater and lesser iterations,
the generations dressed in batik, bearing gifts.

The kitchen was ever at the heart of it.
My parents cooked together.
Crackling, perfection an inch thick

on the side of pig that Dad roasted
while Mum beatified the oven-pan,
red wine gravy, bliss of roux.

Cheerful, family sat where we could,
plates heavy in heady heat, heaped
meat, golden potatoes, peas, carrots too.

Our hands were full. Still there was more,
glasses, cups, Anchor beer and Sunkist,
hot kopi, Cointreau, joyful chatter,

mince pies with cream, walnuts
to crack and chocolates to unwrap.
Dad asked again, again and

again if we’d enough to eat
until decidedly replete, my extended family
levered to their feet, departed noisily.

Day cooled to a close. Dusk drifted quiet
through rooms to settle on stacks
of washing up glinting in the sink.

It was always good, that stillness,
sky kissed with flecks of light,
night unbuttoning its mysteries.

by L. Kiew

‘December began with shopping’ is copyright © L. Kiew, 2019. It is reprinted from Christmas Spirit: Ten Poems to Warm the Heart (Candlestick Press, 2019) by permission of Candlestick. You can read more about the pamphlet here.

L. Kiew lives in London and is of Chinese-Malaysian descent. She works as an accountant but finds time for poetry and her work has been widely published in magazines including The Scores and The North. Her debut pamphlet The Unquiet was published by Offord Road Books in 2019. Find out more about her work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

52 Malcolm Street, Heaton, Newcastle upon Tyne

November 29, 2019April 20, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

When I was three, Dad took us out to see the shoals
glittering off Warrenpoint. I remember the rhythms
of water, peering into the grey sea, the cruel way
they left their catch to die, each scale a prism.

Back on shore he told me, “Keep one, son” trawled
a blade through its gills, the sun a chrism on the open
wound. Even though I was so small I knew
I couldn’t cry: my lips went numb with biting.

When we made love, I dipped my head in memory.
Held tight, trying to concentrate on pillowcase, sheet-seams,
fish limbs flat against the dock, trying to control myself,
haul our small boat across the fathoms.

I didn’t know what you needed. Whatever it was
for the love of God, I wished you’d take it.

by Mariah Whelan

This is our second Weekly Poem of the week (after Monday’s poem from Brendan Cleary) to tie in with this evening’s reading at the Society Café in Oxford by the poet Mariah Whelan and visiting Canadian poet, Doyali Islam. Mariah and Doyali will both be reading from their new collections. Do join us if you can! More details and tickets here. Look out for podcasts coming soon which will feature both Mariah and Doyali.

In this genre-bending debut Mariah Whelan tells the love story of ‘He’ and ‘She’. Once lovers and now… something else, in this collection of sonnets the poems roam across the UK, Europe, Japan and South Korea to explore the oldest of lyric subjects – love, desire, friendship and betrayal. By turns painful, playful and sensual these poems explore the bonds that tie lovers and friends together in a collection of startling formal energy and emotional candour. You can find out more about the book on the Eyewear website.

Mariah Whelan is a poet, teacher and interdisciplinary researcher from Oxford. Her debut collection, a novel-in-sonnets called the love i do to you has just been published by Eyewear. Poems from the novel were shortlisted for The Bridport Prize, The Melita Hume Prize and the manuscript won the AM Heath Prize. A second collection of poems the rafters are still burning which explores writing, constructions of whiteness and museum archives is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press in 2020.

Mariah is currently finishing a PhD in The Centre for New Writing at The University of Manchester where she is writing a second collection of poems, researches trauma and representation in contemporary Irish fiction and also teaches Creative Writing. Mariah is a co-Creative Director of ‘Truth Tellers’ an interdisciplinary research project funded by King’s College London that brings artists and academics together to develop collaborative methodologies in the social sciences. Mariah also co-edits bath magg, an online magazine of new poetry that is a space for excellent writing from established and emerging poets. Find out more about Mariah’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

The Black Spring Eyewear Publishing Group is an independently-funded publishing group (made up of a little press or three) based in London, UK. Our books have been well-reviewed in The TLS, The Sewanee Review, The Times, Poetry(Chicago), PN Review, Poetry Review and Poetry London; and have won major prizes for criticism (The Pegasus Award) and for poetry and been longlisted and shortlisted for others, including The Forward Prize and the Somerset Maugham award from the Society of Authors. Our poets have appeared in the annual Forward anthologies, and been PBS Choices and Recommendations. For more about the press, visit the website.

Stanford’s Rank

November 25, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I dream of Stanford’s Ranch
white sheets on the tracks

rows of shutters & tripwires
& Sallie Gardner galloping

then in a swerve no more blurs
& Stanford wins his bet

like he nearly did with Occident
the first flying horse

all four hooves flying
unsupported transit

in my dream of Stanford’s Ranch
& the slow motion action replays

& the Video Technology
& the Surveillance cameras

& the dust cascading
under Sallie Gardner trotting

riding in future maps
into the Cowboy films

into the science books
into tomorrow’s sad years

so yes horses do fly
I have to remind myself

everytime I wake up
from my dream of Stanford’s Ranch

by Brendan Cleary

This is the first of two Weekly Poems for the week – on Thursday we’ll be featuring a poem from Mariah Whelan’s new book the love I do to you, which she will be launching in Oxford on Friday when she will be reading with visiting Canadian poet, Doyali Islam, whose recent book is called heft.

This week also sees our International Poetry Competition Awards Evening, which will be taking place on Thursday here at Oxford Brookes. We recently announced the winners, commended poets, and shortlistees in this year’s competition and we’re delighted that some of them will be joining us to read. Also joining us will be our judge, the internationally-acclaimed writer Jackie Kay! All are very welcome – please sign up here to attend.

Do Horses Fly? is a sequence of poems inspired by the photographic work of Eadweard Muybridge. The poems reflect on the images created by Muybridge and his life and times. You can read more about the book on the tall-lighthouse website.

Stanford’s Ranch. *Multi-camera setup, Palo Alto.*

Muybridge used 24 cameras to photograph sequential images of moving subjects in 1877-79.

The image was taken at Palo Alto where Muybridge worked on sequences of his motion photography in 1877-79.

These images are reproduced with permission from Kingston Museum’s Muybridge Collection, whose support made the book possible. The Museum holds one of the largest Eadweard Muybridge collections worldwide. Find out more here.

Brendan Cleary’s poetry has been published for over 30 years. Previous collections include The Irish Card and Sacrilege (Bloodaxe), Stranger in the House (Wrecking Ball Press), goin’ down slow – selected poems 1985-2010 (tall-lighthouse) and the highly-acclaimed Face (Pighog Press). Originally from County Antrim, Brendan spent a number of years in the North East before moving to Brighton where he currently lives and works as a poetry tutor.

tall-lighthouse press has a reputation for publishing new talent being the first to publish Helen Mort, Sarah Howe, Liz Berry, Ailbhe Darcy, Rhian Edwards, Jay Bernard, Emily Berry, Vidyan Ravinthiran and many others. Brendan’s book marks a return to publishing for tall-lighthouse with its original owner/director Les Robinson. Find out more about the press here.

The C Word

November 4, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

catches in the throat; the first syllable
on its own, enabling, following by a hissing snake,
rattletail bringing up the rear.

It trumpets its presence in the glare of the ward,
sneaks into glossy brochures, flashes its statistics
(the odds are against me), looks like carer but isn’t.

Not to be confused with the other c word
that cuts at both ends, detonated in hate
murmured in love – how can it be both?

And how can I contain them, sites of birth
and death? I should know how to speak
of what’s inside me. To be blunt.

by Tamar Yoseloff

Watch Tamar read this poem (and others from her new collection) on Seren’s YouTube channel, and then come to Waterstones Oxford this evening to see her read from her work in person! Tamar will be reading alongside Carmen Bugan, whose work we featured last week. Join us at 6.30pm in Waterstones Oxford (free tickets here).

On Wednesday we are hosting an open mic and small exhibition on the topic of mental health. All are welcome! We start at 7pm in JHB 203 (John Henry Brookes Building, Headington Campus, Oxford Brookes), and there will be free cake! Sign up to attend here.

You can find details of our other upcoming events, including free creative workshops in fiction and non-fiction, our International Poetry Competition Awards Evening with Jackie Kay, and a reading from Doyali Islam and Mariah Whelan here.

‘The C Word’ is copyright © Tamar Yoseloff, 2019. It is reprinted from The Black Place (Seren, 2019) by permission of Seren.

Notes from Seren:

The Black Place is a dark and gorgeously multi-faceted artwork, like a black diamond. Tamar Yoseloff eshews the sentimental, embraces alternatives, offers antidotes to cheery capitalist hype. But there is a sort of dark grandeur to her view of mortality, one that matches the sublime desert painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, the subject of the title poem. The central sequence in this collection, ‘Cuts’, is a characteristically tough look at the poet’s cancer diagnosis and treatment. The diagnosis arrives at the same time as the Grenfell Tower fire disaster, a public trauma overshadowing a private one. These poems focus on the strangeness of the illness, and of our times – they refuse to offer panaceas or consolations. Read more about the book on Seren’s website.

Tamar Yoseloff was born in the US and moved to the UK in 1987. She has published five full collections; her debut book, Sweetheart, won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize and was a PBS Commendation. She published a collection of new and selected poems in 2015 with Seren Books called A Formula for Night. She is also the author of Formerly (the inaugural chapbook from her publishing venture, Hercules Editions), incorporating photographs by Vici MacDonald and shortlisted for the 2012 Ted Hughes Award; two collaborative editions with the artist Linda Karshan and Nowheres, a privately-produced book with the artist Charlotte Harker in 2015. Tamar has also run site-specific writing courses for many galleries across the UK and taught for numerous London-based writing organizations. She is currently a visiting guest lecturer at Newcastle University on the Newcastle/Poetry School MA course in Writing Poetry and the Chair of the Poetry and Spoken Word Group of the Society of Authors. Find out more about Tamar’s work on her own website.

Seren is Wales’ leading independent literary publisher, specialising in English-language writing from Wales. Many of our books are shortlisted for – and win – major literary prizes across the UK and America. At the heart of our list is a good poem, a story told well, or an idea or history presented interestingly or provocatively. We’re international in authorship and readership, though our roots remain here in Wales, where we prove that writers from a small country with an intricate culture have a worldwide relevance. Amy Wack has been Poetry Editor since the early 90s. Our aim is not simply to reflect what is going on in the culture in which we publish, but to drive that culture forward, to engage with the world, and to bring Welsh literature, art and politics before a wider audience. Find out more on the Seren website and via Twitter and Facebook.

New Life

October 28, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

By the time she reached the age of twelve,
The girl with the red scarf and brown eyes
Had seen human body parts scattered in front
Of the house where she had been born, and she had
Fallen asleep to the sound of bombs and rifles.

She had walked out of the ruins of the family room,
Crossed eight countries, mostly on foot,
Scaling snowy mountains, descending on railway tracks
To signal the way to her parents who pushed the pram:
Made her own map of this world.

Through the nets of barbed-wire fences,
Cataloguing, as she passed through, the beatings
Her parents suffered at the borders where they crossed,
She looks back and smiles at the words
She has now abandoned, because they no longer help.

At her first school, the teacher speaks a language of freedom
Unknown to her. In this new language, she says,
She’d like to make a garden with her parents and her brother,
Who tries his own language as he sits up in the pram rattling
A plastic toy donated to him by a benevolent woman.

The map of the world the girl has drawn
Is being absorbed by the map of this century—
Soles of shoes scattered across the way to hope.
The road to a better life has not yet been planned,
Everyone is waiting for an architect.

by Carmen Bugan

News from the Poetry Centre: welcome back to the Weekly Poem after a short break as we wrestled with the beginning of the semester! We’re delighted to share a poem by Carmen Bugan this week, since Carmen will be reading in Oxford with Tamar Yoseloff on 4 November in Waterstones Oxford. Do join us! You can sign up for a free ticket here. We’ll be featuring a poem from Tamar’s new collection, The Black Place (Seren) next Monday.

We have a number of other events coming up over the next month or so, including an open mic and small exhibition on the theme of mental health on 6 November (more details here), our International Poetry Competition Awards, with a special appearance and reading by Jackie Kay on 28 November (sign up to join us here), and a reading by Canadian poet Doyali Islam and Oxford-based poet Mariah Whelan on 29 November; tickets here. All these events are free to attend. And if you’re interested in creative writing but don’t quite know where to start, you might like to join us at Headington Library for three free workshops, starting with poetry tomorrow (Tuesday) and continuing on 12 November (fiction), and 12 December (non-fiction). More details here.

Finally, our latest podcast, with spoken word poet and author of Stage Invasion: Poetry and the Spoken Word Renaissance, Peter Bearder, has just been released! You can find it here.

Carmen Bugan’s books include the memoir Burying the Type-writer: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police (Picador), which has received international critical praise, the Bread Loaf Conference Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction, and was a finalist in the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her previous collections of poems are Releasing the Porcelain Birds and The House of Straw (both with Shearsman), and Crossing the Carpathians (Carcanet). She is also the author of a critical study called Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile. Carmen has a doctorate in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford University and has been a Hawthornden Fellow, the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan, and is a George Orwell Prize Fellow.

Her new book, Lilies from America: New and Selected Poems, published by Shearsman, was awarded the Poetry Book Society’s Special Commendation for Autumn 2019. Writing about the book, poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has said: ‘This selection of Carmen Bugan’s poems offers readers an experience with all the surprise and continuity of a long, complex novel. […] [W]e realise that this is the record of a life already recorded, in the distorting staccato of the surveillance transcript, a distortion that leaks into the language of the later poems. Yet faith in the capacity of words to deliver truth survives, reflecting and recalling the exhuming of the typewriter, even if memory is vitiated and language is profaned.’ You can hear Carmen read from her work in a recent recording with A.E. Stallings in Boston here, and listen to her discuss her parents’ buried typewriter in the context of the Cold War here. You can find out more about Carmen’s work on her own website here.

Oliver’s Mysterious Poems

October 2, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Calamari

I can taste the salty solution of the jaw dropping batter that had risen like a star
The texture of the calamari was so deeply fried it was like a waterfall waiting to be let free
When I look at the salted calamari I could feel my heart racing. It raced like a cannon ball
The colour was so dynamic it made me feel like a storm of rain.

A poem about goldfish

The wavy sea washed through my beloved body
Which was as brightly coloured as the sun.
I could see shimmering coral shining off the sea bed below my tail.
The colour of my rare body which sparkled as the raging waves clashed together.

Remembering the Soldiers

The horrific scene which set the soldiers trembling onto the gothic solid ground below their feet.

Goose Fair

As I walked down a street I could see the colours of a fair that made me tingle inside
The loud thumping music that shouted down my suffocating throat that was traumatized by the claustrophobic fear of horror.

Orange Sorbet

As I ripped open the fearsome tangerine
I could smell the delicious mouth-watering heart stopping flavours that had been beyond my reach
It felt like a combination of different types of acids had taken over
It was a hurricane that launched into my watering mouth which felt like a drizzling waterfall.

by Oliver Boyles

Tomorrow (Thursday) is National Poetry Day, and at a time when we celebrate the variety and importance of poetry, we’re very pleased to feature a young local poet in our Weekly Poem series. Many thanks to Oliver’s mum, Donna, for providing us with a biography of Oliver and for sharing a selection of his poems.

Oliver Boyles, aged 15, lived in Epwell, Oxfordshire. In June 2018 Oliver was unfortunately diagnosed with a spinal tumour that had been caused by radiotherapy to the spine from his previous cancer treatment when he was six years old (after which he went into remission for 8 years). This latest cancer diagnosis left him paralysed from the waist down and confined him to a wheelchair, and he received chemotherapy and palliative care as the tumour had metastasized. Sadly Oliver passed away peacefully in May 2019, surrounded by his family at home. During his illness Oliver found comfort in writing poems, especially about his love of food.

News from the Centre: for National Poetry Day, two of our Poetry Centre Interns – Joanne Balharrie and Zoe Mcgarrick – have hidden poems around the Headington campus and nearby area. Find a poem, tag us on social media with a photo of the poem, and win poetry prizes! The poems will be lurking around campus for a week, so be on the lookout!

The Poetry Centre has announced a number of upcoming events in November. Visit our Eventbrite page to sign up for readings by Tamar Yoseloff and Carmen Bugan, Doyali Islam and Mariah Whelan, our IF Festival event about our recent military veterans project, and the awards evening for our International Poetry Competition, featuring Jackie Kay. All events are free, and everyone is welcome!

Parable

September 2, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The water in the boat’s hold is five feet high, and I have a thimble for the bailing. Each
day the duty roster remains the same: I take the burden longer than any member of my
crew. Weeks pass with no appreciable progress, and at least daily the tiny steel cup slips
from my fingers, to be rescued from the murk after lost minutes, sometimes an hour. After
months, we find a shipwreck survivor on a dinghy, and in gratitude he offers me his
bucket. I throw it into the sea to show him the magnitude of my work.

by Carrie Etter

Our International Poetry Competition – judged this year by the wonderful Jackie Kay, closes for entries today! There are two categories: Open and EAL, and winners in each category receive £1000, with £200 for runners-up. For more details and to enter, visit our website.

Notes from Seren:

Originally from Normal, Illinois, Carrie Etter has lived in England since 2001 and taught at Bath Spa University since 2004, where she is Reader in Creative Writing. Individual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem. Her new collection, The Weather in Normal, is published in the UK by Seren Books and in the US by Station Hill Press. It was been chosen as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2018. Read more about the book on the Seren website, and more about Carrie’s work here. You can also follow her on Twitter.