After Seven Photographic Portraits of a Grey Connemara Pony

May 28, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Tony Curtis

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

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

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

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

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

Candlestick is a small, independent press based in Nottingham and has been publishing its sumptuous ‘instead of a card’ poetry pamphlets since 2008. Subjects range from Birds and Cricket to Tea, Kindness, Home and Puddings. Candlestick Press titles are stocked by chain and independent bookshops, as well as by galleries, museums and garden centres. They can also be ordered online on the Candlestick website, where you can find out more about the full range of titles. You can follow Candlestick on Twitter and Facebook. In 2018 Candlestick sold over 75,000 pamphlets.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Nearing Warminster

May 20, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Salisbury, solitary, sings as if Isaiah in her –

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Gillian Allnutt

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

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

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

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

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

Landscape

May 15, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

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

I remember the progression
of cars

Montego
Peugeot
Renault
Prius

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

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

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

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

by Julie Morrissy

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Last Year

May 5, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

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

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

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

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

2 January 2018

by Peter Robinson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cat in an empty apartment

April 19, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Dying – one doesn’t do that to a cat.
For what can a cat do
in an empty apartment.
Scratching against the walls.
Rubbing on the furniture.
In a way, nothing here was changed,
and yet it has been altered.
In a way, nothing was moved,
and yet it has been confused.
In the evening, the light burns no more.

Footsteps heard on the stairway,
but not those.
The hand, which lays fish on the plate,
is too not the one, that did it once.

Something does not begin here
at its usual time.
Something does not happen here
as it should.
Someone was, and was here
then at-all-once disappeared
and now he’s persistently gone.

It peered into all the cupboards.
Scampered across the shelves.
Wedged itself under the rug, investigated.
Even went against the rule
and scattered the papers.

What else is there to do.
Sleeping, waiting.

Let him dare return,
let him dare show himself.
Right away he’ll learn,
that one doesn’t do this to a cat.
There will be a stroll in his direction
as though utterly begrudging,
little by little,
on most offended paws.
And no leaps or chirps at first.

by Wisława Szymborska; translated by Amelia Sodhi

Kot w pustym mieszkaniu

Umrzeć – tego się nie robi kotu.
Bo co ma począć kot
w pustym mieszkaniu.
Wdrapywać się na ściany.
Ocierać między meblami.
Nic niby tu nie zmienione,
a jednak pozamieniane.
Niby nie przesunięte,
a jednak porozsuwane.
I wieczorami lampa już nie świeci.

Słychać kroki na schodach,
ale to nie te.
Ręka, co kładzie rybę na talerzyk,
także nie ta, co kładła.

Coś się tu nie zaczyna
w swojej zwykłej porze.
Coś się tu nie odbywa
jak powinno.
Ktoś tutaj był i był,
a potem nagle zniknął
i uporczywie go nie ma.

Do wszystkich szaf się zajrzało.
Przez półki przebiegło.
Wcisnęło się pod dywan i sprawdziło.
Nawet złamało zakaz
i rozrzuciło papiery.
Co więcej jest do zrobienia.
Spać i czekać.

Niech no on tylko wróci,
niech no się pokaże.
Już on się dowie,
że tak z kotem nie można.
Będzie się szło w jego stronę
jakby się wcale nie chciało,
pomalutku,
na bardzo obrażonych łapach.
O żadnych skoków pisków na początek.

by Wisława Szymborska

News from the Centre: in celebration of Jazz Appreciation Month, the Poetry Centre is thrilled to bring together contemporary jazz band Wandering Wires and our Beatin’ the Blues competition winners to create a fusion performance of jazz and poetry on Sunday 28th April from 8-9pm at Cafe Tarifa, Cowley Road, Oxford. Book your tickets (only £5) here.

Then on 30 April, we’re at Waterstones to host four Canadian poets (Chad Campbell, James Arthur, Stephanie Warner, and Jim Johnstone) and celebrate the recent publication of an exciting new anthology of Canadian poetry. Sign up to attend here.

And on 20 May we are collaborating with the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture to bring the acclaimed poet Gillian Allnutt to Oxford – don’t miss her!

Find out more about these and other upcoming events, including a reading by Ilya Kaminsky and Shara Lessley and the launch of three new ignitionpress pamphlets on our Eventbrite page.

This is the second of two poems we are featuring to celebrate the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation, whichis currently open for entries until Friday 12 July. Translate any poem from any language, ancient or modern into English, and be in the running for a cash prize and publication by the Stephen Spender Trust. The categories for the main prize are 14-and-under, 18-and-under and Open (adult), and will be judged by the Poetry Centre’s own Mary Jean Chan, Margaret Jull Costa and Olivia McCannon. For the second year, the Trust is also running a ‘Polish Spotlight‘, with workshops in schools and a special prize for translation from Polish in the categories 10-and-under, 14-and-under and 18-and-under. You can find more details on the Trust’s website.

The winner of last year’s Polish Spotlight in the 18-and-under category was Amelia Sodhi. Writing about her translation of Wisława Szymborska’s poem ‘Cat in an empty apartment’, Amelia says: ‘There are many poems on grief, but never from a cat’s perspective. When I was looking for a poem to translate, ‘Kot w pustym mieszkaniu’ stood out to me. Szymborska captures a beautiful melancholy in this poem, through simplicity, repetition, and notably through the more subjective narration in the last stanza. She is able to recreate a certain feeling of grief that, so far, I have struggled to find in other poems; her illustration of the pain of loss isn’t something over the top but something small, and hence, even more potent.’

The Stephen Spender Trust was established in 1997 to honour Stephen Spender’s achievements as poet and translator of poetry, and as champion of the rights of creative artists and writers to free expression. Founding members who have since died include Valerie Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Czesław Miłosz, Harold Pinter and Natasha Spender. Inspired by Stephen Spender’s literary interests and achievements, the Stephen Spender Trust aims to widen appreciation of the literary legacy of Stephen Spender and his contemporaries and to promote literary translation. You can find out more on the Trust’s website.

Love Song for the Ordnance Survey

April 10, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Love Song for the Ordnance Survey

What measure of time is sluicing
through the dappling rings of immortal hills?

What weight the hollow-hearted burial mounds,
Saxon naves, felled steeples, tribal hill-forts,
ventilation mine-shafts, brick-born water towers,
analogue Cold War transmitters, pillbox viewpoints?

What radius the boundary arcs,
the stamina of forests’ greened retreat
beaten back at the speckled blots of settlement,
the shaded/sloped river ruts, the symmetry of hangars?

What current the canals, descending the lock’s silent-shift,
coal boats and Staffordshire china rising in the hulls
and sidelined, quickened by the railways
rising beside motorways, rising onwards?

What depth the medicinal baths, restoring spas
sought by new townsfolk, the tumulus of mill races
gone save for great unworking gears turning nothing
in damp summering fields?

And what volume the settlements,
slumbering in bracketed old-world italics,
inherited after-other names, lost or erased,
the monikers of places declassified?

What velocity the shifting coastlines
vanishing faster than any paper can skip a heartbeat to?
(and the winter peaks absolved in mists that can neither
be seen or heard, let alone measured?)

Of all the demarcations multiplied
kept in their latitudinal squares, of each known
and unknown quantity, let us sing
of detail and capacity, the map’s measured love.

by Jane Commane

If you’re a student, don’t forget to enter our Beatin’ the Blues competition, for which we are asking you to respond in poetry to a song by Oxford-based jazz/electronic band Wandering Wires. If you’re one of the winners, we’ll invite you to read your work at a concert alongside the band! For more details, visit our website. The deadline for entries is this Friday!

More news! The Centre has teamed up with IF Oxford Science and Ideas Festival and poet Kate Wakeling to run another poetry workshop for families on 15 April in Oxfordshire County Library. We’ll be encouraging participants to write brand new poems, ready for the IF Oxford Poetry of Science Competition . So if you know anyone aged 6-16 who is keen on poetry and science, please bring them along! You can sign up here.

And on 20 May we are collaborating with the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture to bring the acclaimed poet Gillian Allnutt to Oxford – don’t miss her!

Find out more about these and other upcoming events on our Eventbrite page.

Assembly Lines asks what it means to be here and now, in post-industrial towns and cities of the heartlands that are forever on the periphery. From schools and workplaces and lives lived in ‘a different town, just like this’, these poems take a historical perspective on the present day from the ground upwards – whether the geological strata that underpins a ‘dithering island’ or the ever-moving turf under a racehorses’ hooves.

Jane Commane was born in Coventry and lives and works in Warwickshire. Her first full-length collection, Assembly Lines, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. Her poetry has featured in anthologies including The Best British Poetry 2011 and Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam and in numerous magazines. Jane is editor at Nine Arches Press, co-editor of Under the Radar magazine, co-organiser of the Leicester Shindig poetry series, and is co-author (with Jo Bell) of How to Be a Poet, a creative writing handbook and blog series. In 2017 she was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. You can hear Jane talk about and read from her book Assembly Lines on the BBC’s ‘Start the Week’ programme here and read more about her on her website.

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

On the Fjord

April 2, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The night I left you
the fjord lay so still and clear
as if the water itself
had lost all substance
It was like rowing in empty air

Through a night so infinitely clear
that I suddenly knew
I had to live without shadow
Up against the edge of sleep
away from the reach of your dreams

The sound of years
in starless water. Like rowing
in one’s own heart
through a sorrow as deep and cold
as death itself

On the banks of the starlit shores
along the strait, the houses lay
and shone
with your face in every window
And you did not see me

by Stein Mehren; translated from the Norwegian by Alice Fletcher

På fjorden

Den natten jeg forlot deg
lå fjorden så stille og gjennomsiktig
som om selve vannet
hadde mistet all substans
Det var som å ro i tomme luften

Over en natt så uendelig klar
at jeg plutselig visste
jeg måtte leve uten skygge
Helt nær søvnens skillelinje
utenfor rekkevidden av dine drømmer

Lyden av årer
i stjernløst vann. Som å ro
i sitt eget hjerte
over en sorg så dyp og kald
som døden selv

Ved de stjerneklare breddene
langs sundet, lå husene
og lyste
med ditt ansikt i alle vinduer
Og du så meg ikke

– Stein Mehren

The Centre has teamed up with IF Oxford Science and Ideas Festival and poet Kate Wakeling to run two poetry workshops for families on 9 and 15 April in Oxfordshire County Library. We’ll be encouraging participants to write brand new poems, ready for the IF Oxford Poetry of Science Competition. So if you know anyone aged 6-16 who is keen on poetry and science, please bring them along! You can sign up here.

And on 20 May we are collaborating with the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture to bring the acclaimed poet Gillian Allnutt to Oxford – don’t miss her!

Find out more about these and other upcoming events on our Eventbrite page.

This week’s poem was the winner of the 2018 Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation in the Open category, and the 2019 Prize is currently open for entries until Friday 12 July. Translate any poem from any language, ancient or modern into English, and be in the running for a cash prize and publication by the Stephen Spender Trust. The categories for the main prize are 14-and-under, 18-and-under and Open (adult), and will be judged by the Poetry Centre’s own Mary Jean Chan, Margaret Jull Costa and Olivia McCannon. The Trust is also running a ‘Polish Spotlight‘ for the second year, with workshops in schools and a special prize for translation from Polish in the categories 10-and-under, 14-and-under and 18-and-under.You can find more details on the Trust’s website.

The winning translator last year was Alice Fletcher. She writes: ‘I have translated ‘På fjorden’ by Stein Mehren because I think it is a perfect example of a typically Norwegian poem; the language is clean, crisp, and deceptively simple, while also being very evocative. As with so much Norwegian literature and poetry, it is deeply connected to nature, as can be seen from the title itself. The language of Mehren’s poem is simple but so poignant, and I think it is a poem that really makes one stop and think. Moreover, it is a poem about love, however tragic, which I think really brings the poem to life for readers.’ You can read more of Alice’s reflections, and find out more about the other prizewinners for 2018, here.

The New Violin

March 26, 2019March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Total eclipse, May–November 1919

Empires have fallen
and birds hold their breath
as discs embrace in a darkness
that questions the weight of light.
Principe Island: Through cloud. Hopeful.
Sobral, Brazil: Eclipse splendid.

The data speak and Moses descends
from the mountain with a paradigm
carved in Riemannian stone.
Only twelve people understand it
and the public has begun to doubt
that two times two still equals four.

The data speak and starlight bends
to the will of strange geometries,
the language of tensor calculus.
Newton is dragged into the light,
fails to compete with the prophesies
of the Suddenly Famous Dr Einstein.

At forty, the way ahead is clear,
a new wife walking at his side.
To celebrate, he buys another violin
and glances back, half-expecting to glimpse
Mileva limping a few steps behind.
He sees only admirers.

by Martin Zarrop

News! The Centre has teamed up with IF Oxford Science and Ideas Festival and poet Kate Wakeling to run two poetry workshops for families on 9 and 15 April in Oxfordshire County Library. We’ll be encouraging participants to write brand new poems, ready for the IF Oxford Poetry of Science Competition. So if you know anyone aged 6-16 who is keen on poetry and science, please bring them along! You can sign up here.

Thenon 30 April, we’re at Waterstones to host four Canadian poets (Chad Campbell, James Arthur, Stephanie Warner, and Jim Johnstone) and celebrate the recent publication of an exciting new anthology of Canadian poetry. Sign up to attend here.

And on 20 May we are collaborating with the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture to bring the acclaimed poet Gillian Allnutt to Oxford – don’t miss her!

Find out more about these and other upcoming events on our Eventbrite page.

Martin Zarrop is a retired mathematician who wanted certainty but found life more interesting and fulfilling by not getting it. He started writing poetry in 2006 and can’t stop. His pamphlet No Theory of Everything (2015) was one of the winners of the 2014 Cinnamon Press pamphlet competition. His first full collection Moving Pictures was published by Cinnamon Press in October 2016. Read more about Making Waves 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. Read more about the press on the website.

Tailoring Grief

March 20, 2019March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The tailor says you have to get measured
to make sure grief fits right on your body.
If grief fits too tight it will suck movement out of you,
make you as still as the dead you are mourning.
I once wore grief so tight on my body my ribs tangled into a bow.
The tailor also says wearing an oversized grief will turn you
into a tripping hazard. There is only so much a body can take,
even a plane has weight limits.
We lined up at the tailors to get measured
for my grandfather’s funeral. The women for their Aso-oke,
the men for their Agbada. The orange material draped on the table.
It is our culture to celebrate in colour coordination.
I handed the tailor a torn page from Genevieve magazine
and pointed out the style I wanted.
Imagine if Mary wore a Gele for the funeral of Jesus,
tied it so tight she was dizzy
enough to feel absent from her body.
I picked up my cloth from the tailor on the seventh day.
The off-shoulder dress exposed my neck
so my dented collarbones could collect my tears.
At the funeral my grandmother wore a dress
with sleeves puffed like swollen lungs.
I held her, the tassels at the end of my dress dangled
like a rain of breathing tubes.
From afar our orange dresses looked like saliva dripping
from the gaping mouth of the sun.
The whole village watched in holy envy:
envy is only effective from afar, does not see the layers
of blood-stained threads that sew this body together.
Give me a culture that requires grief to be sewn
delicately on the body, I’ll take it any day.

by Theresa Lola

We have a number of exciting Poetry Centre events coming up! They are all free, but please register via these links. Firstly, on Monday 25 March, join us, TORCH, and Paris Lit Up for a discussion about cultural diversity in literature, featuring authors Elleke Boehmer, Karin Amatmoekrim, and Malik Ameer Crumpler. A showcase from Paris Lit Up and an open mic will follow.

On 30 April, we’re at Waterstones to host four Canadian poets (Chad Campbell, James Arthur, Stephanie Warner, and Jim Johnstone) and celebrate the recent publication of an exciting new anthology of Canadian poetry. Sign up to attend here.

And on 20 May we are collaborating with the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture to bring the acclaimed poet Gillian Allnutt to Oxford – don’t miss her!

Find out more about these and other upcoming events on our events page, and remember that in addition to this Weekly Poem e-mail, you can also follow our work on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We look forward to seeing you soon!

Notes from Nine Arches:

Theresa Lola’s debut poetry collection In Search of Equilibrium is an extraordinary, and exacting study of death and grieving. Where the algorithms of the body and the memory fail, Lola finds the words that will piece together the binary code of family and restart the recovery program. In doing so, these unflinching poems work towards the hard-wired truths of life itself – finding hope in survival, lines of rescue in faith, a stubborn equilibrium in the equations of loss and renewal. You can read more about the collection on the Nine Arches website.

Theresa Lola is a British Nigerian Poet, born in 1994. She was joint-winner of the 2018 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2017 Bridport Poetry Prize. In 2018 she was invited by the Mayor of London’s Office to read at Parliament Square alongside Sadiq Khan and actress Helen McCory at the unveiling of Millicent Fawcett’s statue. She has appeared on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, and ASOS Magazine with Octavia Collective among others. She is an alumni of the Barbican Young Poets Programme. Find out more about Theresa’s work on her website and follow her 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.

Beech Wood

March 13, 2019March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Stopped on the track mid echo of screams −
mewls of hawks, clipping the tree tops −
not for that, but for gaps in what’s read as a wood
(could be roe deer, muntjac or the loaded
breath of the dead and rotted-down
held to itself, weighing down),
we hear quiet restored to leaves drifting,
bloating one creak, a snap; that instant relief
from gold bars twinkling.

by Kate Behrens

News from the Poetry Centre! We have a number of exciting events coming up over the next few months and hope you’ll be able to join us for some or all of them! Please book spaces via the links below.

On Tuesday 19 March from 7-9pm we’re helping to host an open mic evening for LGBTQ+ History Month and the Oxford Human Rights Festival. Then on Monday 25 March, join us, TORCH, and Paris Lit Up for a discussion about cultural diversity in literature, featuring authors Elleke Boehmer, Karin Amatmoekrim, and Malik Ameer Crumpler. A showcase from Paris Lit Up and an open mic will follow. And finally (for now!), on 20 May we are collaborating with the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture to bring the acclaimed poet Gillian Allnutt to Oxford– don’t miss her!

Notes from Two Rivers Press:

In Penumbra, Kate Behrensʼ third collection, the poems are linked by themes of dislocation and heredity. If the dead are ever-present here, so is love: the absence of, rewards and longing for it, the endurance and effort of it. We are led from the poetʼs bohemian childhood to the complex grief, in middle age, that followed the death of her painter father, and on to individual animals, people, and even trees that are differently uprooted or burdened. Everything is haunted here, but the boundaries of death and love are permeable, nature full of revelation. Read more about Kate’s book on the Two Rivers website.

Kate Behrensʼ two earlier collections, The Beholder and Man with Bombe Alaska were published respectively in 2012 and 2016 by Two Rivers Press. Other poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Blackbox Manifold, Mslexia,The Arts of Peace, an Anthology of Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, The High Window and Stand.

Two Rivers Press has been publishing in and about Reading since 1994. The brainchild of Peter Hay (1951-2003), one of the town’s most creative champions, the press grew out of his delight in this under-loved town and its recessed spaces. Nearly two decades of publishing and over 70 titles since its inception, Two Rivers Press has been described as ‘one of the most characterful small presses in the country.’ The Press is strongly rooted in the local community and has close links with Reading University, Poets’ Café, RISC, MERL and other local groups. Its contribution to Reading’s culture won for it a Pride of Reading award in 2008. Read more about the press on its website, or follow it on Twitter.