She Thought Her Father Was a Butcher

September 17, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

watched him smash the arched roofs
of the carcasses into chops,
then line them up
with parsley in the shop.

She could have hidden under a pig,
breathing in the dry smell of blood,
but she preferred the white-tiled corner
where she could watch

the butcher she thought was her father,
his right hand a cleaver,
his left a poker-shaped sharpener,
attacking the skinned animals
whose pink flesh was as plump
as her forearms.

But he would never hurt her.
She was his daughter.

She thought her father was a butcher,
but he was not her father.
by Claire Williamson

Join the Poetry Centre’s own ignitionpress, this week’s publisher, Seren, and a host of our other Weekly Poem publishers like V. Press, Sidekick Books, Nine Arches, Smokestack (and more!) at this year’s Free Verse: Poetry Book and Magazine Fair. The event, run by the Poetry Society and taking place in London this Saturday (22 September), promises to be a wonderful celebration of poetry in the UK. Three of our ignitionpress poets: Mary Jean Chan, Lily Blacksell, and Natalie Whittaker, will also be reading from their pamphlets.

Then do make a note in your diary to be with 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. Tickets are free, but you must sign up in advance via the website.

Notes from Seren:

Claire Williamson’s latest poetry collection Visiting the Minotaur is published by Seren (2018). In the past year Claire has been awarded 2^nd prize in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly (2018), has been highly commended in the Bridport Prize (2017) and was runner up in the Neil Gunn poetry competition (2017). She’s currently studying for a doctorate in Creative Writing at Cardiff University on the subject of ‘Writing the 21^st Century Bereavement novel’. Claire writes libretti and has been commissioned to commemorate the SS Great Britain, the outbreak and culmination of WW1 and most recently St George’s Hall, Bristol. She is Programme Leader for the UK’s only MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes. Read more about Claire’s work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

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.

Travelling North

September 10, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

No-man’s land, each moment a rosary bead
between what was, what will be:

a man waves as the train passes, I lift a hand,
he and his dog shrink, fall away;

a plane spools a white thread, a hundred bodies
cross a continent, time stretches while they sleep.

Shadows congeal, a horse droops in a grey blanket,
a farmhouse with yellow eyes crouches in trees.

I see hammered water, hills creased with streams,
antlers against cloud, a scurf of snow on the tops.

This weathered land hardly registers our passing,
moves at the pace of rocks and mountainsides,

we are irrelevant, and that feels good.

by Jenna Plewes

Welcome back to the Weekly Poem! We hope you had a very good summer!

Join the Poetry Centre’s own ignitionpress, this week’s publisher, V. Press, and a host of our other Weekly Poem publishers like Seren, Sidekick Books, Nine Arches, Smokestack (and more!) at this year’s Free Verse: Poetry Book and Magazine Fair. The event, run by the Poetry Society and taking place in London on 22 September, promises to be a wonderful celebration of poetry in the UK. Three of our ignitionpress poets: Mary Jean Chan, Lily Blacksell, and Natalie Whittaker, will also be reading from their pamphlets.

Notes from V. Press:

Jenna Plewes is a widely published and prize-winning poet. A career in psychotherapy and love of the natural world inform her work and she is at her happiest in quiet places, like the sea, mountains and moorlands. She and her husband live in Worcestershire, with their collie. They have two children and four grandchildren. She has two collections with IDP and her V. Press pamphlet, Against the Pull of Time.

You can read more about her pamphlet on the V. Press website, and more about Jenna’s work on her 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. Find out more on the press’s website.

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.

Kiss

July 23, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I am contorted in this pixie bed,
querulous with your story-time heckling,
your hair-splitting curiosity, 
craving monikers for the anonymous,
under-wrought woodland chorus.

You uncradle the slumber torch,
shadow dinosaurs on the ceiling.
I origami my palms into a pinned
butterfly, flapping for dear life,
an unforgiving crocodile on the prowl.

Bare soles walk the primrose walls,
cold as the rind of the retiring moon.
You complain, no matter how many times
I tuck your feet back into the duvet, 
they kick off the blankets to freeze.

Your sleights of procrastination,
delaying the damnation of bedtime,
the bane of these pristine years,
is why I lie beside you, drafting
magpies until your sleep is composed.

I peck your apple cheek, dented
with the dimples you inherited
from no one. That Sid James chuckle
nipping at the corners of your mouth,
the rifts between your milk teeth.

Nos Da. Are you near or are you far?
You sing your callow kiss, dawdling
the drumroll of its hum. You perch
it with the flourish of a conjuror,
unleashing the dove from the pan.

by Rhian Edwards

This is the final Weekly Poem for a while – we’ll be taking a break over the summer – but we’d like to thank you very much for reading and also thank all the wonderful publishers and poets that we’ve featured over the last year. If there have been any poems you’ve particularly enjoyed, we encourage you to seek out and buy the poets’ books! The Weekly Poem will return to your inbox on Monday 3 September.

But whilst you’re waiting for the next instalment, why not enter our competition? The 2018 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition is open for entries for only two more weeks – until 6 August! There are two categories – Open and English as an Additional Language – and the winner in each category takes home £1000. This year we’re delighted that our judge is the highly-acclaimed poet Kayo Chingonyi. You can find full details and enter via our website.

Notes from Seren:

Rhian Edwards is an award-winning poet and noted stage performer. Her first collection of poems Clueless Dogs (Seren) won Wales Book of the Year 2013, the Roland Mathias Prize for Poetry 2013 and Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice 2013. It was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her pamphlet of poems Parade the Fib (tall-lighthouse), was awarded the Poetry Book Society Choice. Rhian has also been a winner of the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry, winning both the Judges and Audience award. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and magazines and she has performed her work worldwide at festivals and events. Broodis an illustrated pamphlet with pictures by Paul Edwards, and features a long poem in ten parts inspired by the mnemonic for spotting magpies: ‘one for sorry, two for joy’ and detailing the breakdown of a marriage and the birth of a child. You can read more about the pamphlet on the Seren website, find more about Rhian’s work via her own site, and follow her on Twitter.

Seren has been publishing poetry for 35 years. We are an independent publisher specialising in English-language writing from Wales. Seren’s wide-ranging list includes fiction, translation, biography, art and history. Seren’s authors are shortlisted for – and win – major literary prizes across Britain and America, including the 2014 Costa Poetry Prize (for Jonathan Edwards’ My Family and Other Superheroes). Amy Wack has been Seren’s Poetry Editor for more than 20 years. You can find more details about Seren on the publisher’s website and follow Seren on Twitter and on Facebook.

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Mandarin Duck

July 16, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Mandarin Duck

the gold is punches
or the gold lean comes from so
much gore. the heat
down in our heels. the chase. play
what is beautiful it is childlike.
we break for what is
ugly, for lunches, boats caught
at this point in another lake.
for turtles, birds’ bills. golden mornings
from the train & my mouth purple
from all the falling over

the water in my lips.
& here it is not the root,
the first of it. we were not moving
when you hit us but moving from the first
punch. she said home is where they say duck
like hook, like come here & here i am
rotten wood, knees again. i can’t feel them
don’t worry i mean we’re golden
like the gold smudged inside your eye.

by Charlotte Geater

Our 2018 International Poetry Competition is still open for entries – until 6 August! The competition has two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language – and this year is judged by the highly-acclaimed poet Kayo Chingonyi. You can find full details and enter here .

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Charlotte Geater grew up in Ipswich, moved to Oxford for university, and now lives in London. Charlotte was a submissions editor for online magazine Pomegranate, and has previously been published in The Salt Book of Younger Poets and Stop/Sharpening/Your/Knives (3) and (4). You can find her on Tumblr and 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. You can follow Sidekick’s work on the press’s website and via Twitter.

On les tue par le feu, l’eau, l’électricité

July 9, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

On les tue par le feu, l’eau, l’électricité
Eux qui vécurent loin des sources
Et rêvant d’eau toute leur vie
Eux qui grelottaient, sans charbon
Au soleil glacé du Mouloud.
Eux qui veillaient sans lumière
Au fond d’un bidonville obscur.

La première fois qu’il vit
De près
Une baignoire
Fut le dernier jour de sa vie.

by Madeleine Riffaud

They kill them with fire, water, electricity

They kill them with fire, water, electricity
Those who lived far from springs
Dreaming of water all their life
Those who shivered, without coal
In Mouloud’s frozen sun.
Those who lay awake in the dark
Buried in a gloomy slum.

The first time he saw
A bath
Close up
Was the last day of his life.

by Madeleine Riffaud, translated by Alan Dent

We also just released our latest Poetry Centre podcast, in which Niall Munro talks to the award-winning Canadian poet Richard Harrison on his recent visit to Oxford. You can listen to the conversation via the Poetry Centre website.

‘They kill them with fire, water, electricity’ is copyright © Madeleine Riffaud. It is reprinted from Poets and the Algerian War, edited by Francis Combes and translated by Alan Dent (Smokestack Books, 2017) by permission of Smokestack Books.

The Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) was one of the bloodiest post-1945 liberation struggles. Characterised by civilian massacres and the widespread use of torture, it led to the death and displacement of two million people. It was also the first major conflict since the Spanish Civil War to mobilize a generation of writers and artists to protest against the conduct of the war, most notably in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earthand Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. In 1960 many of France’s leading writers and intellectuals – including Simon de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, Pierre Boulez, François Truffaut and Marguerite Duras – signed Le Manifeste des 121, calling on the French government to renounce the use of torture in Algeria. Many writers found themselves on the front-line. The Algerian writer Mouloud Feraoun was assassinated by the OAS in 1962. They tried, unsuccessfully, to kill Madeleine Riffaud (the author of this week’s poem), who reported on the war for L’Humanité. There were two attempts on Sartre’s life.

This anthology, edited by Francis Combes and translated by Alan Dent, features some of the French poets who opposed the war, including Louis Aragon, Jacques Gaucheron, Madeleine Riffaud, Pierre Seghers, Henri Deluy and Guillevic, as well as Algerian poets like Jean Sénac, Kateb Yacine, Bachir Hadj Ali, Noureddine Aba, Messaour Boulanouar, Mohammed Dib, Omar El Bernaoui and Mohamed Saleh Baouiya. It also includes a remarkable series of poems written in memory of Maurice Audin, a young university lecturer and member of the Algerian Communist Party who was murdered by the French authorities. These poets are important, but not only as historical witnesses to a terrible war. They remind us of the possibilities and of the responsibilities of poetry in our own times. You can read more about the anthology 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). You can find Smokestack on Facebook and on Twitter.

Bouquet

July 3, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

No, I won’t throw it out, for the sake of that tulip:
still fresh and so white, that satiny curl –
a sea-captain’s collar folded over his tunic,
a theatrical backcloth, like a windowless wall.
Its petals are like cupped and half-turned palms,
its bloom a head, a gleaming cherry in its mouth.

…If it must go, let somebody else throw it out –
as God will say of me when my turn comes.

by Julia Nemirovskaya; translated by Boris Dralyuk

The Poetry Centre recently launched our 2018 International Poetry Competition! Open until 6 August, the competition has two categories – Open and English as an Additional Language – and this year is judged by the highly-acclaimed poet Kayo Chingonyi. You can find full details and enter here .

If you’re a translator, you have only a few days left to enter the 2018 Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation! Translate any poem from any language, ancient or modern into English, and be in the running for a cash prizeand publication by the Stephen Spender Trust. There are three categories: Open, 18-and-under, and 14-and-under. The judges this year are Margaret Jull Costa, Olivia McCannon, and Sean O’Brien. You can find more details on the Trust’s website .

Finally, we have just released our latest Poetry Centre podcast, in which Niall Munro talks to the award-winning Canadian poet Richard Harrison on his recent visit to Oxford. You can listen to the conversation via the Poetry Centre website .

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Julia Nemirovskaya is a Moscow-born writer and poet who now lives in the US and teaches at the University of Oregon. Her two collections are Moia knizhechka (My Little Book published in 1998) and Vtoraia knizhechka (Second Little Book, 2014). This poem first appeared in Russian in PLAVUCHII MOST: Russian and World Poetry Magazine, 2016 #1 (9), and will be published in Tretia knizhechka (Moscow: Vodolei, 2019).

Boris Dralyuk is an award-winning literary translator and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA where he taught Russian literature for a number of years. He is co-editor of the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry and has translated Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, both published by Pushkin Press.

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 Sheep to Tea, Kindness, Home and Puddings. Julia Nemirovskaya’s poem ‘Bouquet’ appears in Ten Poems from Russia – a first co-publication by Candlestick Press and Pushkin press. Candlestick titles are stocked by chain and independent bookshops, as well as by galleries, museums and garden centres. You can follow Candlestick on Twitter or find it on Facebook.

Pushkin Press was founded in 1997, and publishes novels, essays, memoirs, children’s books – everything from timeless classics to the urgent and contemporary. Our books represent exciting, high-quality writing from around the world: we publish some of the twentieth century’s most widely acclaimed, brilliant authors such as Stefan Zweig, Marcel Aymé, Teffi, Antal Szerb, Gaito Gazdanov and Yasushi Inoue, as well as compelling and award-winning contemporary writers, including Andrés Neuman, Edith Pearlman, Eka Kurniawan and Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Pushkin Press imprints include Pushkin Children’s Books, Pushkin Vertigo and ONE.

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.

Follow the Poetry Centre on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

young woman views Chagall

June 25, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

at Blue Lovers, she is appalled
in a bright room, that storm colour
bruises her cotton suit
the shade of sloe

pictured: a face of static
lips nibbed, eyes closed
mother
it is not, in fact, paint’s pressure
filling, but the nimbus
in her own chest
a wilderness, made numb
it is I

centre right: a muted harlequin
with stiffened ruff, the mask
a blot of dusk
whom you clothed

the young woman touches her cheek
mimicking the gloved mime
who cups that of a widow

her mother’s fascinator is neat
leaves, nature hemmed
indelible as hedgerow
so I cannot speak

as though, in blackthorn
a spider wove her sack
to an iron pin
the young
never found the world
these are my gauzed hands

the room bright, her suit
hoards shadows
tissue in a blue well

by Gram Joel Davies

You can view Chagall’s 1914 painting Blue Lovers, from which this poem draws inspiration, here.

Notes from V. Press:

Gram Joel Davies grew up in Somerset in the ’80s, overlooking the valley town of Taunton, the Quantock Hills and the edge of Sedgemoor. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Magma, The Moth, Envoi and Lighthouse, and has received listings and commendations from Penelope Shuttle, Peter Oswald, Liz Berry and Carol Ann Duffy. In 2014, he and Hannah Linden won the Cheltenham Poetry Festival Compound collaboration competition. Working with Juncture 25 poets, he attends readings and festivals across the Southwest. Bolt Down This Earth (V. Press) is his first collection. You can read more about it on the V. Press website, and more about Gram’s work on his website. He is also on Twitter.

Hare

June 18, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I kept you in bed with me so many nights,
certain I could hold the life into you,
certain that the life in you wanted to leap out, hare-like,
go bobbing off into some night-field.
For want of more eyes, more arms
I strapped you to me while I did the dishes, cooked, typed,
your little legs frogging
against the deflating dune of your first home.
Nested you in a car seat while I showered, dressed,
and when you breastfed for hours and hours
I learned how to manoeuvre the cup and book around you.
Time and friends and attitudes, too.
We moved breakables a height, no glass tables.
Fitted locks to the kitchen cupboards, door jammers,
argued about screws and pills someone left within reach.
I’ll not tell you how my breath left me, how my heart stopped
at your stillness in the cot, and who I became
when at last you moved. There is no telling
what skins of me have dropped and shed in the fears
I’ve entered. What I will say is that the day
beyond these blankets, beyond our door
is known to me now, fragile as moth-scurf,
its long ears twitching, alert,
white tail winking across the night-field.

by Carolyn Jess-Cooke

The Poetry Centre is collaborating on a one-day symposium for a second time with the University of Reading and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI), based at the University of Canberra. The symposium, entitled ‘Contemporary Lyric: Absent Presences, the Secret & the Unsayable’, will take place on Tuesday 26 June from 9.30-5pm at the Museum of Early Rural Life at the University of Reading. The event is free to attend and all are welcome but places are limited. Find out more and sign up to attend via our website

Finally, join Poetry in the Meeting House @ 43 St Giles Oxford on Wednesday 11 July at 7pm to hear American poet Lauren Rusk, who will be reading from and talk about her recent book of poems What Remains To Be Seen. The book is inspired by children’s art from Theresienstadt concentration camp. Everyone is welcome.

Notes from Seren:

Writing Motherhood features a chorus of voices on the wonders and terrors of motherhood and the myriad ways that a creative life can be ignited and/or disrupted by the pressures of raising children. Thought-provoking essays, interviews and poetry by high-profile writers detail experiences of creating art while engaging in the compelling, exhausting, exhilarating work of motherhood.

Editor Carolyn Jess-Cooke introduces this important anthology which re-considers ‘the pram in the hallway’ as explosively nuanced. Entries include an insightful interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Sharon Olds, excerpts from Hollie McNish’s diary, Carol Ann Duffy’s beautiful portrait of being and having a daughter, specially commissioned poems by Sinéad Morrissey, Rebecca Goss, and many others. Crime fiction fans will enjoy C.L. Taylor’s witty essay, ‘How Motherhood Turned Me to Crime’, and Nuala Ellwood’s heart-wrenching depiction of miscarriage and loss. This anthology is a vital exploration of the complexities of contemporary sexual politics, publishing, artistic creation, and twenty-first century parenting. Find out more about the anthology via the Seren website.

Carolyn Jess-Cooke is a poet who has published two collections from Seren, the most recent being Boom. She is also the author of several bestselling novels including the 2017, I Know My Name, which is being made into a television series. You can read more about her work on her website.

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An Irishman Coaches the Beautiful Game in the American South

June 11, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Time was I was the guru of soccer,
a footie svengali in North Carolina.

I gave the Piedmont Triad the sweeper system.
Touchlines hushed to my nuggets of wisdom.

T-shirts were printed with my every word.
The European Cup was played on our road.

I took Rush and Dalglish to the Mason Dixie.
I was asked to lead grace over Domino’s pizza.

I screamed expletives till the sheriff came calling.
‘Take it down a notch, Coach, or we got a problem.’

Time was I was the guru of soccer,
a footie svengali in North Carolina.

I saw Ossie Ardiles in Oriel Park.
‘That a fact, Coach? Well bless your heart…’

I drifted to watch the immigrant workers,
the barefoot pot-bellied dribblers and jugglers

in a circle of dust, playing hooky with a ball,
displaced in a place that’s all about goals.

I watched them till dark and the troops filed past.
‘Night, Coach. Goodnight.’ We were left last.

Time was I was the guru of soccer,
a footie svengali in North Carolina.

by Conor O’Callaghan

The Poetry Centre is collaborating on a one-day symposium for a second time with the University of Reading and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI), based at the University of Canberra. The symposium, entitled ‘Contemporary Lyric: Absent Presences, the Secret & the Unsayable’, will take place on Tuesday 26 June from 9.30-5pm at the Museum of Early Rural Life at the University of Reading. All are welcome but places are limited. Find out more and sign up to attend via our website .

‘An Irishman Coaches the Beautiful Game in the American South’ is copyright © Conor O’Callaghan, 2018. It is reprinted from Eleven Poems about Football (Candlestick Press, 2018) by permission of Candlestick Press.

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Conor O’Callaghan is an Irish poet and novelist. His memoir Red Mist: Roy Keane and the Irish World Cup Blues appeared in 2005. He has published five collections of poetry with The Gallery Press, most recently Live Streaming (2017) which was shortlisted for various awards including the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Conor has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award and has taught at various universities in the United States. He divides his time between Sheffield and Dublin.

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 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 the Candlestick website where you can find out more about the full range of titles. You can follow Candlestick on Twitter or find it on Facebook. In 2017 Candlestick sold over 70,000 pamphlets.

Follow the Poetry Centre on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Pondskater

June 5, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

From the bridge I see teams of rowers
arcross the delilium, cracks
in the eye wave-weave the nameslake.
In flagellar schememes
of diatomic cross-selling
they waterclot concentricity
unsentensing waverlengths of twisight.
This is my longtomb partnerve agile,
fragile sky is hinge to
the parallel dark, foreverending
camerangel. The river commissions
a new meadow where the last heat
in a star burns (the phantom photon
enlarges on this) as moons
are rowed and sent thithaway
trireming intimotions or slap
dashadows in noded disjointment
their mittens petaling the sandbeds.
Presisting the intelligence is
furtile when clouds are falling in.
In this way our passage through
days conjugates a lifelung
seismiotic in distorts and
waterlilt semisphere. The pond
quake cruxes into inscensible
nameslicks, tinetingles and waterrings,
as in the skyline is awrighted what
is writ on water: your name, where.

by Giles Goodland

News from the Poetry Centre: join us tonight at 7pm in the Chapel of Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford for ‘A Crack of Light: Poems of Commemoration, Reconstruction, and Reconciliation’. This event features poetry produced by the poets-in-residence of the Post-War international seminar series, co-organized by Oxford and Oxford Brookes. The poets reading will be Mariah Whelan, Sue Zatland, Patrick Toland, and Susie Campbell. There are only a few tickets remaining and they are free, but do sign up here!

The Poetry Centre is also collaborating on a one-day symposium for a second time with the University of Reading and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI), based at the University of Canberra. The symposium, entitled ‘Contemporary Lyric: Absent Presences, the Secret & the Unsayable’, will take place on Tuesday 26 June from 9.30-5pm at the Museum of Early Rural Life at the University of Reading. All are welcome but places are limited. Find out more and sign up to attend via our website.

Finally,the Poetry Centre recently launched our 2018 International Poetry Competition! Open until 6 August, the competition has two categories – Open and English as an Additional Language – and this year is judged by the highly-acclaimed poet Kayo Chingonyi. You can find full details and enter here.

Notes from Shearsman:

‘Pondskater’ comes from Giles Goodland’s new book, The Masses. It is a collection in which, as Richard Price writes, ‘the creepy-crawlies visibly teem. Adapting the sound-mutating technique Goodland perfected in Gloss, where well-known phrases are minutely changed to sly and comic effect, here the creatures which are usually only glimpsed, only imagined with a flinch, are foregrounded in phonic mutation. Amid the rich density of these playful and sometimes frightening poems are cut-back lyrics, often about fatherhood in a diminished world, and these give the book overall a sense not just of the strangeness of the fauna around us but of the strangeness of our own language nests, of the fragility of the world an older generation has ruined and is now bequeathing to the young.’ You can read more about the book and find further sample poems on the Shearsman website.

Giles Goodland was born in Taunton, was educated at universities in Wales and California, and completed a D.Phil at Oxford. He has published several books of poetry including A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001) Capital (Salt, 2006) and Dumb Messengers (Salt, 2012). He works in Oxford as a lexicographer and lives in West London.

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with a very active translation list. Founded in 1981 as a magazine, with some occasional chapbooks, the press – now based in Bristol – has grown rapidly in recent years, and is now one of the most active poetry publishers in the U.K. You can find out more about Shearsman’s work from the publisher’s website.

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.