Typhoon Etiquette

August 15, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Everything is wet
E  v  e  r  y  t  h  i  n  g
Things are done properly here
For two days you will all struggle with umbrellas
On the third day   the see-through plastic and spoke carcasses
line the kerbs
I wait
for my name and number to be proclaimed across the land
before making my arrival
I don’t rush
up the country
that would be inconsiderate
I take each island in turn
a typhoon etiquette
Yaeyama  Miyako   Okinawa  Amami   Tokara   Yakushima
I savour Okinawa   raking
each field   forcing every cane of sugar   every husk of rice
to drink itself daft
You will know of my arrival
via text
in the middle of the night
There’s the gathering of winds
the heavy slant
of rain   It is almost a relief for you
The waiting is over
I am here
Some of you bet on my wind speeds
I can perform at a mean 150 km an hour
Most aren’t fooled by the lull
after my initial hit
but I love to see those blond tourists
venture from their Best Westerns
flat cameras like amulets
They won’t stay for long
I like the streets
empty night or day   when even the crows are silent
then I concentrate
Destruction used to be easier
I’d been taught to savour the umashi
of Shibuya’s concrete   how it used to crumble
I spun around laughing when they built taller
But they’re cleverer than before
With this all-seeing eye
I do my best work   and my worst
Don’t be fooled
treesriverscarsseafronts are easy
My life is brief   a few days at most
Respect me
write down my name   worship me in this way
then shake the rope that leads to your gods
see if they are listening

by Katrina Naomi

Our International Poetry Competition is open for entries for just a couple more weeks – until 2 September. There are two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. Our judge is Jackie Kay, and you could win £1000! Find out more and enter here.

The Poetry Centre’s ignitionpress has just launched its three newest pamphlets by Joanna Ingham, Jennifer Lee Tsai, and Sarah Shapiro. You can read more about them and buy copies here.

Writing about this week’s poem, Verve Poetry Press says: ‘We are thrilled that the wonderful Katrina Naomi has asked us to publish the poems that came out of her recent Arts Council-supported writing trip to Japan. And a wonderful group of poems they are, that at once depict Japan, its traditions, its customs with great enthusiasm and some puzzlement. Katrina doesn’t pretend she is an expert but prods and questions not only what she finds but also herself.

Also included are Katrina’s translations of haiku by two Japanese masters, which have previously been published in Modern Poetry in Translation magazine. Altogether, this is Katrina trying something new, but with the quality, the wonderful way with words, the earnest grappling with the perceived world that characterises all her work.’ You can read more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Verve Poetry Press site.

In 2018 Katrina Naomi received a BBC commission for National Poetry Day. Her poetry has appeared in the TLS, Poetry London, The Poetry Review and The Forward Book of Poetry 2017, as well as on BBC TV’s Spotlight and Radio 4’s Front Row and Poetry Please. Her latest collection, The Way the Crocodile Taught Me (Seren, 2016), was chosen by Foyles’ Bookshop as one of its #FoylesFive for poetry. Katrina was the first writer-in-residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in West Yorkshire. She has a PhD in Creative Writing (Goldsmiths) and tutors for Arvon, Ty Newydd and the Poetry Society. Learn about Katrina’s work via her website and follow her on Twitter.

Verve Poetry Press is a new press focussing intently on meeting a local 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, the press was voted Most Innovative Press at Saboteur Awards 2019 and has been described as ‘always exciting’ by Andrew McMillan. 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 such as Luke Kennard, Katrina Naomi and Claire Trévien – 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 about Verve Poetry Press here and more about the festival here.

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.

Two selections from Running Rings

August 1, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Words by **Phil Madden;** prints by **Paul L. Kershaw**

Our International Poetry Competition is still open for entries until 2 September. There are two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. Our judge is Jackie Kay, and you could win £1000! Find out more and enter here.

The Poetry Centre’s ignitionpress has just launched its three newest pamphlets by Joanna Ingham, Jennifer Lee Tsai, and Sarah Shapiro. You can read more about them and buy copies here.

Phil Madden’s fourth book in collaboration with Paul L. Kershaw, printmaker and printer. Running Rings was a winner of the Judges’ Choice Award at the Oxford International Fine Press Fair in 2018. It is a limited edition of 70 copies, bound in quarter cream cloth with suminagashi marbled paper, 28pp, 365 x 255 mm. It was inspired by the trees in Studley Park, a World Heritage Site near Ripon.

As with their other collaborations, the images and words by Phil and Paul do not sit side by side artificially mirroring each other. Instead they are organically intertwined, using concrete poetry, fragmentation and varying focus and complexity. Together they invoke the essence of trees and woodlands in their glorious states of life, death, decay and renewal. You can find out more about the book and see further images from it on Paul’s website.

Broken Waters

July 25, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Most people drown
without making
a noise or splashing. See me

here Baby, watch
me lying
out plank, below the surface,

all that stillness, all that
peace, see
how long I can breathe

down here alone. You must
trust me,
I am your mother after all,

don’t think about the firefighter
who lies
to the woman on the phone inside

the burning building, says he’s on his
way up
to save her, then hands her brother

back the phone, tell her you
love her,
knowing all his tears

won’t be enough to quiet the
flames, I am
your mother after all, I am made

to do this. When the mother harp seal
leaves its cub,
nobody calls it a mistake,

I have been at this much longer than
twelve days –
just let me float here a while, Baby

you will still remember my face.
It will be
the same one you wear every time

live cuts in such a way – the serration
drags the exact
formation of ripples upon its shape.

by Amelia Loulli

We’re delighted to say that the Poetry Centre’s ignitionpress has just launched its three newest pamphlets by Joanna Ingham, Jennifer Lee Tsai, and Sarah Shapiro. You can read more about them and buy copies here.

Our International Poetry Competition is still open for entries until 2 September with two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. Our judge is Jackie Kay, and you could win £1000! Find out more and enter here.

This week’s poet, Amelia Loulli, is one of the three poets to appear in the latest volume of Primers, a mentoring and publishing scheme which showcases the work of emerging poets (see more about the scheme below). This year’s scheme is open now until 10 September, and you can find out how to enter it on the Nine Arches website.

Amelia Loulli lives in Cumbria with her three children and an undisclosed, but significantly large, number of books. Her poetry was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2016 and 2017, and last year she was shortlisted for Primers Volume Three. You can follow her work on Twitter.

In 2018, The Poetry School and Nine Arches Press launched their nationwide Primers scheme for a fourth time, in search of exciting and emerging talent in contemporary poetry, with Kim Moore and Jane Commane as selecting editors. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, three poets emerged as clear choices: Lewis Buxton, Amelia Loulli and Victoria Richards. Primers: Volume Three now collects together a showcase from each of the three poets. It is an irresistible invitation to step out of ourselves and our bodies and drop your expectations on the dancefloor, to take the plunge on the rollercoaster-ride of grief, motherhood and new life, and to meet desire in all its outrageous, dazzling and joyous forms. Secrets, disclosures, changed names and brilliant disguises make a vivid, adventurous and often deeply moving selection of new work from some of poetry’s most talented emerging voices.

Doing the heart in Lower Five

July 17, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

We try not to think of the cows, the empty churches
of their chests. Their hearts are grey now, filmed
and tubed, bigger than two fists and the air smells
like we’ve swallowed money, like we’ve licked
the edge of a knife. My partner retreats to the sickroom
so I probe alone, fingers where the blood should be,
aorta a handless glove. The valves are bell tents
like Christian Union camp in the RE teacher’s garden,
each ventricle a mouth that opens again and again
when I squeeze it, the preacher from St Matthew’s
telling us he can help us speak in tongues. It’s heavy,
this meat, this site of love we haven’t felt yet
and I wonder if the cow did, if the beating quickened
for the bull, for the wet slicked nose of its calf.
The notes in my drawing are neat – mitral, tricuspid,
inferior venal cava – as if I’m striking a bargain
with knowledge, like the words will keep me safe.
Then it’s break and we can wash our hands, drop
our hearts in a bucket like the babies in the abortion
video they made us watch, let the portacabin,
its swollen walls, pump us out into the light.

by Joanna Ingham

You can hear Joanna read the poem here (scroll down).

The Poetry Centre’s ignitionpress is very pleased to share with you a poem from the final one of its three new pamphlets to be published imminently! After we featured ‘Love Token’ from Jennifer Lee Tsai’s Kismet, and Sarah Shapiro’s poem ‘When I Turn Thirty, I Have an Epiphany’ from her pamphlet The Bullshit Cosmos, this week we feature work by Joanna Ingham that is included in her pamphlet Naming Bones. All three pamphlets will be available on Monday from the Brookes Shop and will be launched in London on 22 July and in Oxford on 23 July. Please join us for those by signing up here!

And don’t forget that we have launched our International Poetry Competition for 2019! This year we are delighted to say that our judge is the internationally-acclaimed writer Jackie Kay! There are two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language, and the winners in each category receive £1000. The competition is open until 2 September, and full details can be found here.

‘Doing the heart in Lower Five’ is copyright © Joanna Ingham, 2019. It is reprinted from Naming Bones by permission of ignitionpress.

Joanna Ingham grew up in Suffolk and now lives in Hertfordshire. Her work has been published in Ambit, Brittle Star, Envoi, The Fenland Reed, Iota, Lighthouse, Magma, Mslexia, The North and Under the Radar. Her poems have also appeared in the anthology The Best British Poetry 2012 (Salt) and in ‘Poet’s Corner’ in The Sunday Times. She won second prize in BBC Wildlife magazine’s Wildlife Poet of the Year Competition 2008. She studied creative writing at Birkbeck College and was awarded the Michael Donaghy Prize for Poetry on graduating. In 2017 she was a poet-in-residence at London Open Garden Squares Weekend.

Joanna also writes fiction and is represented by Thérèse Coen of Hardman & Swainson. She has facilitated creative writing workshops in a wide variety of settings including schools, day-centres for older people, prisons, drop-in centres for homeless and vulnerable adults, and with young and adult carers.

In Naming Bones, her engrossing debut pamphlet, Joanna Ingham writes of the things it is difficult to say – about bodies, love, motherhood, the past. Drawing on nature, and a tangible sense of place, she explores the relationships and moments that make us what we are. These are poems of the tongue and the heart, of finding voice and speaking revealingly about what we think we shouldn’t feel.

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. Our latest pamphlets are by Joanna Ingham, Jennifer Lee Tsai, and Sarah Shapiro, and they will be published in July 2019. The first five pamphlets to be published by ignitionpress: There’s No Such Thing by Lily Blacksell, A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan (Poetry Book Society Summer Pamphlet Choice, 2018), Glean by Patrick James Errington, Shadow Dogs by Natalie Whittaker and Small Inheritances by Belinda Zhawi, 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.

When I Turn Thirty, I Have an Epiphany

July 10, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I will forever be in second grade    acutely aware my classmates’ gold star
reading comprehension    voices sliding over words like snakes slither grass
great at self-flagellation    no one can hurt me like me    I deserve my
teachers’ neglect    my classmates’ sneers and taunts    I am not good enough
pretty enough    smart enough    to learn to read    each day my failure
reteaches me    the depths of my inabilities    my (dys)abilities

When I turn thirty, I still stumble aloud, mind ever split
between recognizing letters and

processing meaning, in tandem. What’s wrong
with me? stings the old shame.

I continue to try and out-chess my falterlurch,
my vocal careen, but I also lift

my chin and push my pawn
two daring spaces forward:

I ask myself how
do I think,

how do I get the
answer.

***

This year, I question friends on their hows of reading
and understanding. My classroom curse word

reading comprehension is examined,
thought through, discussed.

Epiphany lands casually
one Tuesday afternoon:

reading out loud,
with ease and grace,
has nothing to do
with understanding.

****

It took me all these years to divine this travel outside my own head
shame and into others’ vocality others’ processors and understandings

so I write this to remind myself to smile    when others read smoothly
and smile when I falter for you here and now    because
when I read    I comprehend

by Sarah Shapiro

You can hear Sarah read the poem here.

The Poetry Centre’s ignitionpress is excited to share with you a poem from another one of its new pamphlets. After we featured ‘Love Token’ from Jennifer Lee Tsai’s Kismet last week, this week’s offering is from Sarah Shapiro’s pamphlet The Bullshit Cosmos. The pamphlet will be available later this month and will be launched in London on 22 July and in Oxford on 23 July. Please join us to celebrate the launch of Sarah’s pamphlet and the pamphlets by Joanna Ingham and Jennifer Lee Tsai. Sign up here for the launches.

Don’t forget that we recently launched our International Poetry Competition for 2019! This year we are delighted to say that our judge is the internationally-acclaimed writer Jackie Kay! There are two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language, and the winners in each category receive £1000. The competition is open until 2 September, and full details can be found here .

Sarah Shapiro was born in Chicago and lives in Somerville, MA. She is a poetry MFA candidate at University of Massachusetts Boston. Sarah also holds an MA in Place, Environment, and Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a BA in Environmental Studies from Mount Holyoke College. Sarah’s academic career was not a guarantee; she grew up with learning (dys)abilities and did not begin to read until the age of eight. Now, her poems for this project explore the gap between those who read with ease and those who struggle to read.

Sarah believes that as many people as possible should have access to reading and writing poetry. She teaches university analysis and writing at Suffolk County Correctional Facility in Boston, undergraduate writing and the environment at UMass Boston, and an itinerant writing workshop at the Osher Longlife Institute for adult education at UMass Boston. She has completed a residency with Cove Park, and had an audio-text poem published in TIMBER. Her poems have also appeared in glitterMOB, SheGrrrowls, Bunbury, and Poetica Magazine.

The Bullshit Cosmos is a highly distinctive pamphlet that celebrates triumph over adversity, defiance against the system, success over predicted failure. The poems explore the gap between those who read with ease and those who struggle to read. Honestly written, they provide a starkly refreshing approach to our language in a poetry that is provocative and challenging, compassionate and engaging.

Our latest pamphlets are by Joanna Ingham, Jennifer Lee Tsai, and Sarah Shapiro, and they will be published in July 2019. The first five pamphlets to be published by ignitionpress: There’sNo Such Thing by Lily Blacksell, AHurry of English by Mary Jean Chan (Poetry Book Society Summer Pamphlet Choice, 2018), Glean by Patrick James Errington, Shadow Dogs by Natalie Whittaker and Small Inheritances by Belinda Zhawi, 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.

Love Token

July 3, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

after Andrés Cerpa

If anything, I’m a witchy vagrant locked inside an
endless hall of mirrors, patterns and repetitions,
wandering. I’ve often been in the wrong place at the
wrong time, my wasted youth traded for a ghostly
ride in a fairground, crazy merry-go-round music
haunting my memories. Family, friends, ancestors and
spirits: light a candle when I’m gone, so the pretty
moths can come closer to the flame but not be burnt.
I don’t want to go, just yet. The moon is so elegant
tonight. All week long shit storms and hailstones
raged. Thank you for the damned and wild beauty
you have given me here, though most days I couldn’t
find the words to tell you, the way a Chopin
nocturne plays inside my head every time I think of
you. It remains unknown. I smash through the glass.
I leave you the key.

by Jennifer Lee Tsai

You can hear Jennifer read the poem here.

The Poetry Centre’s ignitionpress is delighted to share with you a poem from one of its new pamphlets, Kismet by Jennifer Lee Tsai. The pamphlet will be available later this month and will be launched in London on 22 July and in Oxford on 23 July. Please join us to celebrate the launch of Jennifer’s pamphlet and pamphlets by Joanna Ingham and Sarah Shapiro, whose poems will feature in the next two Weekly Poems. Sign up here for the launches.

Jennifer Lee Tsai is a poet, editor and critic. She was born in Bebington and grew up in Liverpool. An alumna of St Andrews and Liverpool Universities, she holds an MA in Creative Writing with Distinction from the University of Manchester. Jennifer is a fellow of The Complete Works III and a Ledbury Poetry Critic.

Her poems are featured in Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe, 2017) and have been published in Oxford Poetry, The Rialto, SMOKE, Soundings, Ambit, Wild Court and elsewhere. Her poetry reviews are published by The Poetry School, the Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Modern Poetry in Translation, Ambit and Poetry Review. Jennifer is an Associate Editor for SMOKE magazine and a Contributing Editor to Ambit. She was a runner-up in Poetry in the 2018 Bi’an Writing Awards. Follow Jennifer on Twitter here.

Kismet opens with the poet as ‘the only Oriental at a primary school in Birkenhead’, a state of isolation – and rupturing of identity – intensified by the unfolding of both personal and ancestral traumas. But this is ultimately a work of hope and renewal. Jennifer Lee Tsai shows us how taking control of our own stories can create a profound sense of connection to life that transcends individual suffering.

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.

Our latest pamphlets are by Joanna Ingham, Jennifer Lee Tsai, and Sarah Shapiro, and they will be published in July 2019. The first five pamphlets to be published by ignitionpress: There’s No Such Thing by Lily Blacksell, A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan (Poetry Book Society Summer Pamphlet Choice, 2018), Glean by Patrick James Errington, Shadow Dogs by Natalie Whittaker and Small Inheritances by Belinda Zhawi, 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.

Miss Armstrong: Invisible woman

June 25, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

After Maya Angelou

The after-office diners by the window
laugh and move in duplicate,
blonde highlights echoed by the glass.

But I have no reflection, not a glimmer.
They have twins against the night
where I, who dine alone, have none.

I search for traces of my movement,
lift my beer glass. It exists.
Its substance glints in recognition.

None of me reveals itself.
The girls’ reflections leave with them
while I remain a silent shadow.

I’m invisible, unseen,
uncertain as a ghost that plays
from time to time along the walls.

by Kathy Gee

The Poetry Centre recently launched its International Poetry Competition for 2019! This year we are delighted to say that our judge is the internationally-acclaimed writer Jackie Kay! There are two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language, and the winners in each category receive £1000. The competition is open until 2 September, and full details can be found here.

We also recently announced the winners of our first PoetryFilm competition in which filmmakers responded to poetry from our ignitionpress poets. You can view the winning films – by Gabrielle Turner, Marie Craven, and Jane Glennie, here.

Finally, don’t forget about the final few events in our academic year: firstly, there’s our final reading in the current series on Wednesday 26 June at Waterstones in Oxford, which features Ilya Kaminsky and Shara Lessley. Ilya has been receiving extraordinary acclaim in the US and UK for his latest book, Deaf Republic (perhaps you heard it dramatized on BBC Radio 4 last week?), and Shara’s collection, The Explosive Expert’s Wife, has received enthusiastic reviews and award nominations. There are a few spaces left for this event here. Then join us and an international group of poets and critics for ‘Our Poetry and Our Needs’, a symposium at the University of Reading on Tuesday 9 July. More details here. Finally, we’re launching three new ignitionpress pamphlets by Jennifer Lee Tsai, Joanna Ingham, and Sarah Shapiro on 22 and 23 July. More information here!

Kathy Gee studied history and archaeology, later turning this into a career in museums, heritage and leadership coaching. Having published books, articles and pamphlets on the local history of South Devon and National Trust properties in Cornwall, she now lives in Worcestershire and started writing poetry in 2011. Widely published online and in print, her first collection, Book of Bones, was published by V. Press in 2016. In the same year, she wrote the spoken word elements for a contemporary choral piece, Suite For The Fallen Soldier. You can hear Kathy read a poem from her new pamphlet, Checkout, here.

Poet Rhian Edwards writes that Kathy Gee’s new pamphlet ‘Checkout is a sequence of character portraits and vignettes based on the ephemeral characters that cross a corner shop’s bell-chiming threshold. Told from every side of the social spectrum, this is a play for voices, voices in verses, a cross between Under Milk Wood and Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. This is a bold and brave collection from the distinctive voice of Kathy Gee.’ Read more about the pamphlet on the V. Press website.

V. Press publishes poetry and flash fiction that is very very, with emphasis on quality over any particular style. Established with a launch at Ledbury Poetry Festival 2013 and shortlisted in The Michael Marks Publishers’ Award 2017, V. Press poetry knows what it wants to do and does it well. For more, visit the V. Press website.

Rise

June 19, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

the job grinds people down
until they feel like bits of dust,
the job they have to keep hold of
like a dying sparrow in their hands
grinds people down

all of the hours spent dipping their shoulder
and charging at the sun
carrying this dying little sparrow
in their hands
has made them feel bone-tired,
they are exhausted
and close to giving up
the dying little sparrow has almost killed them,
the bills the CCJ’s
the rent arrears utility bills dentist bills internet payments
food roof beer shoes shirts, all of it,
has almost killed the very centre of them

the fear of losing everything
has made them supple enough
to accept
almost anything

but only almost
because the holding of hands with a woman under a blood-red sun
and the wine that drips down from rib to rib
to form puddles in the gut
and the music
that lifts sparrows up
back onto their feet,

makes them want to rise, burst out of hands,
head towards the sun, sit
on wires tin roofs chimney pipes
to sing sing sing
about that unconquerable little bit of them,
how that will never die
like a little sparrow in a pair of hands
however tightly they squeeze it

by Martin Hayes

The Poetry Centre has recently launched its International Poetry Competition for 2019! This year we are delighted to say that our judge is the internationally-acclaimed writer Jackie Kay! There are two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language, and the winners in each category receive £1000. The competition is open until 2 September, and full details can be found here.

Finally, don’t forget about the final few events in our academic year: firstly, there’s our final reading in the current series on Wednesday 26 June at Waterstones in Oxford, which features Ilya Kaminsky and Shara Lessley. Ilya has been receiving extraordinary acclaim in the US and UK for his latest book, Deaf Republic, and Shara’s collection, The Explosive Expert’s Wife, has received enthusiastic reviews and award nominations. Spaces for this event are full, but you could add your name to the waiting list here. Then join us and an international group of poets and critics for ‘Our Poetry and Our Needs’, a symposium at the University of Reading on Tuesday 9 July. More details here. Finally, we’re launching three new ignitionpress pamphlets by Jennifer Lee Tsai, Joanna Ingham, and Sarah Shapiro on 22 and 23 July. More information here!

Notes from Smokestack Books:

Martin Hayes’s new collection is a roar of frustrated rage and pain at the way we live and work in the twenty-first century. It’s a book about 11-hour shifts, sick-days, lay-offs, computer systems crashing and the joy of Friday afternoons. Dermot, Stacey, Shaq, Big Bri, Dexter the old-timer, Antoine, Mohammed, Jim the Letch and Harry the head supervisor work for Phoenix Express couriers, located somewhere ‘between Stockholm Street and Syndrome Way’, making money for other people and trying to make themselves heard above the roar of an economic system that ‘has us in its mouth and is shaking us about in its teeth’. Find out more about the collection 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). David Cain’s Truth Street, an epic-poem that is part oral history and part documentary theatre, draws on eye-witness testimonies of the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium Disaster and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019. You can find Smokestack on Facebook and on Twitter.

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.

Back they sputter

June 11, 2019April 20, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Back they sputter like the fires of love, the bees to their broken home
which they’re putting together again for dear life, knowing nothing
of the heart beating under their floorboards, besieged here, seeking
a life of its own. All day their brisk shadows zigzag and flicker

along a whitewashed gable, trafficking in and out of a hair-crack
under wooden eaves, where they make a life for themselves that knows
no let-up through hours of exploration and return, their thighs golden
with pollen, their multitudinous eyes stapled to a single purpose:

to make winter safe for their likes, stack-packing the queen’s chambers
with sweetness. Later, listen: one warm humming note, their night music.

by Eamon Grennan

This week’s publisher, Candlestick Press, will be launching its latest pamphlet, Ten Poems about Horses (featured in a Weekly Poem recently ), next 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.

Finally, don’t forget about the final few events in our academic year: firstly, there’s our final reading in the current series on Wednesday 26 June at Waterstones in Oxford, which features Ilya Kaminsky and Shara Lessley. Ilya has been receiving extraordinary acclaim in the US and UK for his latest book, Deaf Republic, and Shara’s collection, The Explosive Expert’s Wife, has received enthusiastic reviews and award nominations. This is an event not to be missed! Register for a free place here . Then join us and an international group of poets and critics for ‘Our Poetry and Our Needs’, a symposium at the University of Reading on Tuesday 9 July. More details here . Finally, we’re launching three new ignitionpress pamphlets by Jennifer Lee Tsai, Joanna Ingham, and Sarah Shapiro on 22 and 23 July. More details here !

‘Back they sputter’ is copyright © Eamon Grennan, 2019. It is reprinted from Ten Poems about Bees, introduced by Brigit Strawbridge Howard (Candlestick Press, 2019) by permission of Candlestick. You can read more about the pamphlet here.

Eamon Grennan was born in 1941 and educated at University College Dublin where he studied English and Italian. He went on to complete a PhD in English at Harvard. He has published a number of poetry collections, as well as reviews and essays including Facing The Music: Irish Poetry in the 20th Century (Creighton University, 2000). His poetry books include Wildly for Days (Gallery Press, 1983), Out of Breath (Gallery, 2007) and There Now which won the 2016 Pigott Poetry Prize for Best Collection published in Ireland. Leopardi: Selected Poems won the 1997 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Until recently he was Dexter M. Ferry Junior Professor of English at Vassar College. He now teaches on the graduate writing programmes at the Universities of New York and Columbia but spends as much time as he can in the west of Ireland. You can read more about his 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 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.

The Europeans

June 4, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I saw the Europeans drinking wine under trees.
It was August and their children seemed wise
beyond their years, moving with the dappled light.

Later the Europeans were wearing bright uniforms,
simultaneously grand and preposterous,
their cigarillos discolouring their moustaches.

When the winter came, the Europeans retreated
into forests. People were wolves or wolves
were people. These matters were increasingly unclear.

Every village had good bread, indolent officials,
its own throat-clenching hooch. Occasionally,
its peace was disturbed as love ended in some alleyway.

The Europeans were volatile or taciturn, hearty
or shiftless. Really, you could take your pick.
The only constant was the scrape and shudder of those trams

in the very early morning. In their cities,
the streets were museums. Someone had been shot
heroically on every corner. You could still put your finger

into the bullet holes in the masonry, just as a violin started
up in that apartment over the café. The Europeans
had much to say of poetry and much silence to say it into.

I became convinced they knew something
they would not tell me, but I did not dare
to ask the veterans on the parched square.

by David Clarke

The deadline for our PoetryFilm competition is this Friday (7 June)! Respond in a short film to a poem by one of our award-winning ignitionpress poets and win prizes and screenings! You can find the poems and more about how to enter here.

The Poetry Centre has also just launched its International Poetry Competition for 2019! This year we are delighted to say that our judge is the internationally-acclaimed writer Jackie Kay! There are two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language, and the winners in each category receive £1000. The competition is open until 2 September, and full details can be found here.

Finally, don’t forget about the final two events in our academic year: firstly, there’s our final reading in the current series on Wednesday 26 June at Waterstones in Oxford, which features Ilya Kaminsky and Shara Lessley. Ilya has been receiving extraordinary acclaim in the US and UK for his latest book, Deaf Republic, and Shara’s collection The Explosive Expert’s Wife, has received enthusiastic reviews and award nominations. This is an event not to be missed! Register for a free place here. Then join us and an international group of poets and critics for ‘Our Poetry and Our Needs’, a symposium at the University of Reading on Tuesday 9 July. More details here.

Notes from Nine Arches:

David Clarke, winner of the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2013, returns with his second collection, The Europeans. Simultaneously close to home and looking outward beyond these shores, these wry and perceptive poems revel with form and encompass journeys, ideas of nationhood and national identity, and the optimism of a time when Europe and the UK enjoyed a quite different ‘entente cordiale’. They are a warning against nostalgia, a lucid and prescient exploration of how we see ourselves and how we are seen. Read more about the collection on the Nine Arches website.

David Clarke was born in Lincolnshire. His first pamphlet, Gaud, won the Michael Marks award in 2013. His first collection, Arc, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2015 and was longlisted for the Polari Prize. Another pamphlet, Scare Stories, was published by V Press in 2017 and was named a Poetry School ‘Book of the Year.’ His poems have appeared in magazines including Magma, Tears in the Fence, Long Poem Magazine and The Interpreter’s House. You can follow David on Twitter.

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 seventy poetry publications, and 20 issues of Under the Radar magazine (and counting). Follow Nine Arches on Facebook and Twitter.