Toaster

February 18, 2019March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Each Sunday morning
the bread would often get stuck
or launch itself high

across the kitchen
where dad would catch it, juggling
each flapping bird with

blackened wings. His dance
made us laugh. Tea, marmalade,
homemade jam, honey –

again and again
we would wait for its metalled
cough, to watch salmon

leaping through currents
of sun. I ate six slices
one weekend, enthralled

with how happiness
was the colour of butter,
best eaten hot. Toast.

I believed I could
save each tiny crumb of you,
thinking aged just four

that every Sunday
would stay like this, love landing
soft, the right way up.

by Olga Dermott-Bond

News from the Poetry Centre! We’re delighted to be hosting MacGillivray and Niall McDevitt at Waterstones, Oxford on Tuesday 5 March as they launch their new books. Join us from 6.30-7.30pm to hear from two uniquely powerful voices. Tickets are free, but space is limited. Sign up via Eventbrite.

In addition to this Weekly Poem e-mail, don’t forget that you can follow our work on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We look forward to seeing you there!

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Olga Dermott-Bond is originally from Northern Ireland and lives in Warwickshire. A former Warwick Poet Laureate, she has had poetry and flash fiction published in a range of magazines including Rattle Magazine, Under the Radar, Magma, Ink Sweat and Tears and Paper Swans Press. In 2018 she was commended in both the BBC Proms Poetry and Against the Grain poetry competitions, and was shortlisted in The Poetry School’s Primers competition. She is a teacher and has two daughters. Follow her on Twitter.

Candlestick Press 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 Rivers 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 where you can find out more about the full range of titles. Follow Candlestick on Twitter or find it on Facebook. In 2017 Candlestick sold over 70,000 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.

Ymir’s skull

December 19, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Scraped clean of its skin, the ice-white skull
of Ymir, first and greatest of the frost giants,
still rinsed in a thin wash of sunset blood,
was shoved and shouldered like blue stone and sarsen;
rigged over the earth like a bone awning.

This brain-hall filled quickly with bright guests;
the go-cart sun; the hospital-trolley moon
wheeled through on its cast-iron casters;
planets like wandering lute players;
shoals of stars swimming in circles.

Some, the sources note, evolved to live
further from earth in the thinnest air.
Polaris, the North Star, say the sagas
is furthest of all, as it moves least –
a piece of false but plausible logic

held like a hand towel over this tall tale
to lend it some shreds of specious sense
perhaps. Or perhaps to counterpoint the truth
that we are as ephemeral as thoughts
bubbling and bursting under a bone sky.

by Ross Cogan

News! The Poetry Centre is delighted to announce three new ignitionpress poets, whose work will be appearing in 2019. They are: Joanna Ingham, Jennifer Lee Tsai, and Sarah Shapiro, and we’re excited to share their poetry with you soon! You can find out more about these three writers on the ignition press pages.

To coincide with the publication of this week’s poem, our Brookes colleague Brian McMahon (an expert on Old Norse), has written a review of Ross Cogan’s Bragr, and you can read it on our blog.

This is the final Weekly Poem of the year. We wish you a very happy and poetical Christmas and look forward to sharing more poems with you in 2019. Thank you for reading!

Notes from Seren:

Ross Cogan studied philosophy, gaining a PhD from Bristol University and, in 1999, received a Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. He has published two collections, Stalin’s Desk (2005) and The Book I Never Wrote (2012) and his verse play Achyncourt was performed at several literary festivals and broadcast on radio. Bragr is the Norse God of Poetry and this book is inspired by readings of Norse myth. Ross now works as a freelance writer/editor, as well as being Creative Director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival and an Associate Tutor at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Widely published, he has won first place in The Exeter Prize, The Staple Open Poetry Competition, The Frogmore Poetry Prize, The Crabbe Memorial Prize, and The Cannon Poets Sonnet Competition and second prize in the Troubadour International Poetry Competition. Ross takes a keen interest in environmental matters and is semi-self-sufficient, growing most of his own vegetables, raising goats, ducks and chickens, and brewing his own mead.

Whether it’s myth intended to explain the constellations, the secret of eternal life, or the bloodthirsty tale of the mead of poetry, Ross Cogan’s collection Bragr (meaning ‘poetry’ in Old Norse) is a reimagining of Norse mythology for our times. In particular, the collection focuses on environmental concerns. The earth’s incredible beauty seems all the more fragile in the face of habitat loss and global warming. Read more about the book on the Seren website, and read an assessment of the poems in Brian McMahon’s review.

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.

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.

I Am My Own Parent

December 13, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I love my red shoes,
all of the shoes I have loved,
they are.

I swing my legs against the wall,
scuffing them slightly.
My Dad is not here to pick them up

by the scruffs of their dirty necks
and leave them shining in the morning.
Instead, the arc of my swing

not quite so high,
the shoes every day a little duller.
At night I leave them in the hall like hope.

In the morning,
absentmindedly dreaming of old loves
and reading poetry until it hurts,

I spring out of bed and decide
to roll up my life into a fist,
smelling of patchouli and roses, and then

unroll it; and to my surprise
it becomes a snail’s yellow shell,
unravelling. On and on it goes,

I tap tap my red shoes,
find I’m already home.

by Deborah Alma

Deborah Alma’s debut poetry collection Dirty Laundry is raucous, daring and honest, drawing contemporary women’s lives and those of our foremothers into the spotlight. It voices bold, feminist songs of praise: of persistence, survival, adventures of sexual rediscovery, each reclaiming the space to speak its mind and be heard and seen. A perfect remedy for the heartsick and weary, Alma’s intimate and particular poems are resolute enchantments, a form of robust magic.The collection brims with poems which are unafraid of airing secrets, desires and untold stories. From growing up mixed-race and learning to survive as a woman in the world, to tales of the countryside and themes of escape and finding joy, this book of poems is as vivid as it is frank and fearless. There’ll be no need for any tears, it’ll all come out in the wash… Read more about the collection on the Nine Arches website.

Deborah Alma was born in North London, has lived on the Welsh/ Shropshire borders for the last 25 years where she brought up her 2 sons and she lives with the poet James Sheard. She teaches creative writing, works with people with dementia and at the end of their lives and is the Emergency Poet in her 1970’s ambulance. She edited The Emergency Poet: an anti-stress poetry anthology and The Everyday Poet: Poems to Live By (Michael O’Mara Books) and was the editor of the landmark #MeToo poetry anthology, published by Fair Acre Press. Her first poetry pamphlet True Tales of the Countryside was published by The Emma Press. She is currently Honorary Research Fellow at Keele University. You can follow Deborah 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.

Unspoken Conversations

December 4, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The fate of words is
to emulate the river.
I had seen her there before,
the Asian woman by the weir,
rapt in a greyhooded shawl,
watching the water go over.

Police posters faded
on lamp-posts and trees.
A body washed up
nine miles away and I flinched,
shamed by the figure
of a drowning thought.

She had hired an afternoon taxi
to take her from roads and rooms.
She had a secret to keep
and disappeared like footprints
across a snow-black wood.
Would talking have helped?

They tried to fathom her,
all those unspoken conversations.
The river she embraced
swept her away and then forgot.
Each day is an unopened letter
behind the Town Hall clock.

by Jim Greenhalf

Notes from Smokestack Books:

Breakfast at Wetherspoons is a meditation on the idea that ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chainstores.’ It’s a book about freedom and necessity, mortality and time, Tolstoy, Diogenes and Jihadi John. It’s a book about poetry and comradeship, and old friends like Sebastian Barker, Barry MacSweeney and David Tipton. It’s a late-flowering 40-year old love story. And it’s a kind of bleak Bradford noir, in which Greenhalf explores life among the Struldbrugs queuing in the Co-op, stays too long in the Hard Day’s Night Hotel and catches the last train to Skipton. And at the end of Dead Pan Alley there is always a view of Salts Mill and the green hill rising steeply to Baildon, where John Wesley preached love’s holy connexion on the eve of the French Revolution. Read more about the book on the Smokestack website.

Jim Greenhalf was born in 1949 and grew up in East London. A news and feature writer for the Bradford Telegraph & Argus for almost forty years, he has written eighteen books of poetry, including The Dog’s Not Laughing, The Unlikelihood of Intimacy in the Next Six Hours, Hinterland, Blue on Blue, Grassington’s Reflex and The Man in the Mirror. He lives in Saltaire, West Yorkshire.

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). You can find Smokestack on Facebook and on Twitter.

Out of Range

November 25, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Up here there is no signal;
it died at the cattle grid
where even the trees can’t pass.

In the listening station of these hills
bracken has its own system
to intercept the clandestine

wavelengths of streams and airs;
and the rain’s dark radiance
registers its impressions

on stonewalls and grey rocks
where highly sensitive mosses
gather the information of the stars.

At night, in the pitch black
of the wrong side of the moon
I stand with my fading torch

in the last phone box on earth,
a windowed coffin, a haunted mini-crypt
where a spider’s devised seven webs

then died inside the phone;
for down this cold receiver
which smells of strangers, mouth to mouth,

your voice is five thousand miles away;
so I shout can you hear me? I love you, I love you
until I hear through the rush-hour babble

of horns, airbrakes and squawking parrots
your delayed echo I love you too
while here I stand

in this crazy dark, feeding my last coins
to the insatiable seconds
counting down to silence.

by Nick Drake

News from the Centre: we are delighted to be involved in two exciting events this week in Oxford – do join us if you can! On Tuesday 27 November, our ignitionpresspoet Belinda Zhawi will be reading from her work and discussing critical issues in contemporary African poetry and publishing alongside TORCH visiting professor and esteemed poet, editor and writer, Kwame Dawes. They will be joined by authors JC Niala and Nana Aforiatta-Ayim. The panel discussion, from 5.30-6.30pm, will be followed by the launch of the African Poetry Book Fund exhibition. You can register for the event on Eventbrite. This event is part of Prof Dawes’s week-long visit to Oxford, which also includes the wonderful opportunity to attend a poetry workshop with him on Saturday 1 December. You can find the full listing of events here.

Then on Thursday 29 November from 6.30-7.30pm at Waterstones Oxford, we will be helping to launch the poetry anthology Wretched Strangers: Borders, Movement, Homes, edited by JT Welsch and Ágnes Lehóczky. For the Oxford launch of this book, which is designed to mark and celebrate the contribution of non-UK born writers to the country’s poetry scene, we will be joined by both editors, and poets Mary Jean Chan, Iris Colomb, and Jennifer Wong. To register, visit this link.

Notes from Bloodaxe Books:

Nick Drake’s fourth collection, Out of Range, explores the strange interconnections and confronting emergencies – the signs, wonders and alarms – of the early 21st century. Here are elegies for the Whitechapel Fatberg and incandescent lightbulbs; the life stories of plastic bottles and ice-core samples; portraits of those living on the margins of the city streets, and of Voyager 1 crossing the threshold of the solar system. Here too are poems registering the shock and impact of ‘Generation Anthropocene’ on Earth’s climate and ecology. Above all, the poems seek to tune in to what is out of range; the dark matter of mystery, wonder and deep time at the edge of our senses, at the back of our heads, which poetry makes visible.

Nick Drake was born in 1961. He lives and works in London. His first book-length collection, The Man in the White Suit (1999), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and was selected for the Next Generation Poets promotion in 2004. His collection From The Word Go was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2007. His recent projects include stage plays and adaptations, screenplays, and a trilogy of historical novels about Egypt (including Nefertiti, shortlisted for CWA Best Historical Crime Novel). In September 2010 he was invited to join Cape Farewell’s trip to the Arctic to explore climate change, and poems inspired by that visit appear in his collection The Farewell Glacier (2012). Nick worked as a librettist in a collaboration with the composer Tansy Davies and director Deborah Warner on Between Worlds, a 2015 opera inspired by the events of 9/11. A new music theatre collaboration with Tansy Davies followed, Cave, performed at Printworks London in June 2018.

Christmas Lights

November 15, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

They’re putting up the lights strung out on poles
along the harbour wall, the dark young lads
in oily overalls; and there’s a tree
built out of creels out at The Point, as though
a pagan pendant on a flimsy string
of beads, defiant, and alluring as
the Sirens’ phantom lighthouse.
And upstairs
in dim bedrooms the girls undress and dress;
the boys smirk at the mirror mouthing chat-
up lines from movies.
Now the village is
en fête: dressed for a party in the dark,
across the fields, along uneven paths,
a low-roofed barn with steamed-up windows and
a fiddler and her band. And Christmas lights.

by Stephen Keeler

News from the Centre: this evening we are excited to host the prizewinning and shortlisted poets from this year’s International Poetry Competition, judged by Kayo Chingonyi. You can find the winning poems and the shortlist here. Everyone is very welcome to attend; just visit this page for more details.

On Thursday 29 November at Waterstones in Oxford we will be helping to launch a new poetry anthology called Wretched Strangers. Featuring work by an exciting range of contributors, the anthology – edited by JT Welsch and Ágnes Lehóczky – marks the vital contribution of non-UK-born writers to this country’s poetry culture. You can find more information and register to attend the event here, and find out more about the book here.

Feeling festive? This week’s poem comes from the brand new pamphlet Christmas Lights: Ten Poems for Dark Winter Nights published by Candlestick Press. Candlestick has also just published another Christmas pamphlet, Ten Poems about Robins.

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Stephen Keeler worked in educational publishing and international education for 35 years before moving from London to ‘the edge of the map’, to write, in 2010. He won the first Highland Literary Salon Poetry Prize in 2012 and a Scottish Book Trust New Writing Award in 2015. His poems have appeared in Northwords Now, South Bank Poetry, the Glasgow Review of Books, Gutterand The Poets’ Republic. He was shortlisted for the 2018 Winchester Poetry Prize. His pamphlet While You Were Away(2018) is published by Maquette Press. A full-length collection will be published by Red Squirrel early in 2020. You can follow his work on Twitter.

ii rye lane (foul ecstasy)

October 27, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

black girls don’t do drugs
said the bouncer
at Bussey,
without searching
me. Well, let
me tell it, some
of us sit smug
in our youth.
Full of white
silver powders
in cold smoking
areas, waiting
for the come up
to hit us;
chase the cold
that’s set in
our bones.

We gurn
on hand rolled cigs;
pray for the peak.
Our mouths dressed,
tongues, the taste
of the foul
ecstasy
curdled in our
gums. We sink in
this. Buzzed smiles
under drooped eyes
sharpened towards
blue lights
which flood the wet
dance floor.

Our skins
stay open, each
touch from the bass
sending us
in upward spirals
of bright starlight.

We beg
the night not
to end, plead
with it to spend
its morning cloaked
in darkness.
We want to stay
alive in
this wide blackness
our pupils
become; in this ache
of clenched jaws.

by Belinda Zhawi

You can hear Belinda read this poem on our website.

This is the second of two poems this week from our two newest ignitionpress pamphlets (on Monday we shared a poem by Natalie Whittaker). We are excited now to share with you a poem by Belinda Zhawi, which comes from her pamphlet Small Inheritances. Writing of the work, Kayo Chingonyi says: ‘Small Inheritances is a masterclass in what a poem is and can be for in the present moment. There is protest in these pages, but also a glimpse of what healing might look like, whether in a moment of intimacy or in different kinds of intoxication. There are intergenerational kinships and echoes in these poems that illuminate a poetics that so many of us have been crying out for.’

The pamphlets were launched on Thursday at the Poetry Café in London, and we’ll also be at the Woodstock Poetry Festival on 10 November. Do join us there if you can! You can buy the pamphlets via our website.

Finally, if you haven’t yet booked to come and see the award-winning poet Jay Bernard at Brookes this coming Wednesday, please visit this link to register (for free). Jay will perform from and talk about their extraordinary work Surge. This is an event not to be missed!

Belinda Zhawi is a Zimbabwean-born writer and educator. She is an alumnus of the University of Westminster and Goldsmiths, University of London, where she studied on the BA in Politics and the Writer/Teacher MA, respectively. Belinda was a 2015/16 London Laureate and the 2016/17 Institute of Contemporary Arts Associate Poet. She is co-founder of BORN::FREE – a community-based literary movement and zine press. She currently lives and works in South East London. You can follow her work on Twitter.

ignitionpress, based at Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre, is a poetry pamphlet press with an international outlook which publishes original, arresting poetry from emerging poets, and established poets working on interim or special projects. The Managing Editor of the press is Les Robinson, who is the founder and director of the renowned poetry publisher tall-lighthouse. The first group of pamphlets, by Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington, were published in February 2018. Mary Jean’s pamphlet, A Hurry of English, was selected by the Poetry Book Society as its Summer Pamphlet Choice 2018. You can learn more about the press and buy the pamphlets on the Poetry Centre website.

96

October 22, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A chicken box ricochets down the aisle: Hot
& Tasty – just the way you like it! Tonight,
the pigeon-shit town washes by, under a cold
and tasteless sky; this place where we’ve wasted
our lives like two spiders circling a sink.
And the plastic seats swing through the streets
and the STOP button shrieks at you to STOP,
but the silver trace of everyone’s day has fogged
the top deck windows, and you dare to wipe
your name in the breath that’s censed a hundred
rain-bedazzled hoods; knowing that the cost
of those letters in condensation – your
wet syllables ghosting sodium light –
is the use of all of those strangers’ breaths.

by Natalie Whittaker

Listen to Natalie read the poem on our website.

This week we will be sharing two poems from our newest ignitionpress pamphlets which are being launched in London on Thursday (we’ll also be at the Woodstock Poetry Festival on 10 November).

We are delighted to introduce you first of all to Natalie Whittaker, whose pamphlet is called Shadow Dogs. Writing about the pamphlet, John Stammers notes: ‘[t]here is so much to admire in this collection, the reader will surely return repeatedly to the poems to find more to enthral them. The current poetry scene has gained a fresh, exciting voice.’ We very much hope that you’ll be able to join us at the Poetry Café in London to launch Natalie’s pamphlet and Small Inheritances by Belinda Zhawi. We’ll be sharing a poem from Belinda’s pamphlet later this week, and the pamphlets will be available to buy via our online Shop very soon.

Natalie Whittaker is from South East London, where she works as a secondary school teacher. She studied English at New College, Oxford. Her poems have been published in Poetry News, Brittle Star, Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual, #MeToo: A Women’s Poetry Anthology and South Bank Poetry. Natalie was awarded second place in the Poetry on the Lake short poem competition 2018 and the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition 2017. You can follow Natalie on Twitter.

ignitionpress, based at Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre, is a poetry pamphlet press with an international outlook which publishes original, arresting poetry from emerging poets, and established poets working on interim or special projects. The Managing Editor of the press is Les Robinson, who was the founder and director of the renowned poetry publisher tall-lighthouse until 2011. The first group of pamphlets, by Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington, were published in February 2018. Mary Jean’s pamphlet, A Hurry of English, was selected by the Poetry Book Society as its Summer Pamphlet Choice 2018. You can learn more about the press and buy the pamphlets on the Poetry Centre website.

Winter in the town of three smells

October 12, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Polish is spoken here
and mountains have appeared
behind the closed down meat-pie factory.
Bears roll their snouts like drunks,
lumber down, lick sticky locked-up gates,
dots of gristle stuck in rusted padlocks.

All of us, bears, wolves, humans,
raise our heads on windswept days,
inhale traces of bubbling hearts,
intestines, ears, blood.
Where there was once a brewery
there is now a flood of frozen weather.

They’re playing violins around the edges,
frying herrings, the smell of beer rising
as skating couples bite into the ice.
Someone has bought clippers
to shave young men’s heads
in kitchens, drinking black Economy tea.

Here is number for room,
for work in nice, clean-smelling factory.
Outside the Catholic Church, old women stamp snow,
wear fur at their throats, dab holy water like cologne.

After Christmas, we’ll open our windows,
fill our houses with tripe and sweetened cabbages.
New Year will drift in
from the sewage treatment works.

by Josephine Corcoran

The Poetry Centre is excited to announce the winners of this year’s Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, judged by Kayo Chingonyi! First Place in the Open category was awarded to Eleni Philippou, Second to Katie Hale, and a Special Commendation to Isabella Sharp. In the EAL category, First Place was awarded to Helena Fornells, and both Second Place and the Special Commendation went to Rachel Ka Yin Leung. Many congratulations to all! You can read the winning poems and see the shortlist on our website. The awards event will take place on Thursday 15 November, and everyone is very welcome! The winning poets will read from their work, and Kayo Chingonyi will also give a short reading of his own poetry. You can register to attend the event here.

Before that, don’t forget about the wonderful chance to see Jay Bernard at Oxford Brookes on Wednesday 31 October. As part of Black History Month, Jay will be performing from and talking about their work Surge, which won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry last year. Don’t miss it! Tickets are free, but you should register here.

Josephine Corcoran’s inventive and unflinching debut poetry collection, What Are You After?, asks us to consider what it is we’re really here for. Bold and unsentimental, her remarkable poems trace the lifelines of where we’ve been and where we’re going to, and they aren’t afraid to ask difficult questions of where we are now. Read more about the collection on the Nine Arches website.

Josephine Corcoran was born in Southport and moved to London when she was 12, to live with an older sister, after the death of her mother. She now lives in Wiltshire. An Arvon course when she was 30 started her writing and she was a mature student at Bournemouth and Chichester Universities before studying for an MA in Creative Writing at UEA. Her work as a short story writer and playwright has been broadcast on BBC R4 and a stage play has been produced in London. She is founder and editor of the online journal And Other Poems and Writer in Residence at St Gregory’s Catholic College, Bath.

Sedge Warbler

October 1, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

‘The sedge has wither’d from the lake;
And no birds sing.’
John Keats, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’

I live on the sedge. I sing
unseen. It is my song
you do not hear, light as air:
willowdown-dweller, reedwalker.

As a bird I have no country. I sing
there to here. Hear my song:
a ‘noisy, rambling warble’ on the air,
summerlong singer, water-neighbour.

When winter withers, it’s away I sing,
the long length of earth. My song
bends from the Arctic to warmer air:
to an Afrikaaner, Europese Vleisanger.

I am a citizen of sedge, of sedge I sing;
of the edge, the water-margin. My song
is pidgin, weird Birdish: plucking from air
English, Namlish, Suomi, Oshiwambo, Xhosa.

Shared sound of rain on reeds: I sing
low morning mist. Your songs
condense in mine. I fill the encircling air,
pale loiterer, sedge warbler.

by Sophie Mayer

Be sure to join us at Oxford Brookes on 31 October for a special event with poet Jay Bernard. Jay will be presenting Surge, an award-winning multimedia project dealing with the 1981 New Cross ‘massacre’ – a fire at a birthday party in south London which killed 13 young black people. This event is part of Black History Month at Brookes and tickets are free, but you must sign up in advance via the website!

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Sophie Mayer is a writer, curator and activist. Her recent books include Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2015) and (O) (Arc, 2015). She has also been involved in projects such as the touring programme Revolt, She Said: Women and Film After ’68 with queer feminist film collective Club des Femmes, and Raising our Game, a report addressing exclusion in the film industry with campaigners Raising Films. Her current writing projects include ‘Disturbing Words’, a tinyletter about language, and a poetry chapbook <jacked a kaddish>, forthcoming from Litmus. Find out more about her work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Sidekick Books is a cross-disciplinary, collaborative poetry press run by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone. Started in 2009 by the ex-communicated alchemist Dr Fulminare, the press has produced themed anthologies and team-ups on birds, video games, Japanese monsters and everything in between. Sidekick Books titles are intended as charms, codestones and sentry jammers, to be dipped into in times of unease. Sidekick’s latest books collect poems about bats ( Battalion ) and robots ( No, Robot, No! ). You can follow Sidekick’s work on the press’s website and via Twitter.