Poem

May 28, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I let him come.
He sneaks on tiptoe
right up to my ear;
under its ribs my heart
quivers, quickens
as the excitement mounts:
first the forest appears,
then the woodland-sequel,
more mist than snow to the touch –
from the new poem’s
very first line the paper sucks up
every waif-word
and an ugliness steals in,
a cunning hungry thing
crouching there incognito,
pretending to be tame and yet so wolfish
that he’s the kernel of light
and then the noise of its cracking;
he’s lithe on the path,
doubling back on himself,
running with the pack, loping alone;
pussy-footing through the night
he trails moonlight behind him
like a mink coat.
I feel him when the hairs on my skin
lift, and in the delicious dizziness
of my private pulse –
in the midst of my writing, in my dream-life,
I slip all his clothes slowly off
and slide him down beside me.

by Maria Teresa Horta; translated from the Portuguese by Lesley Saunders. You can read the original poem on the Stephen Spender Trust website.

News from the Centre: this Friday at 7pm, we are delighted to welcome the distinguished Canadian poet Richard Harrison to Oxford. Richard is a multiple award-winning poet, essayist and editor. His latest collection, On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood, was awarded the 2017 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. You can find out more and buy tickets for the reading via our website or on the door at the Society Cafe.

The Poetry Centre has just launched its 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.

This week’s poem was the winner of the 2016 Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation, and the 2018 Prize is currently open for entries until 6 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. 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.

Lesley Saunders is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Nominy-Dominy (Two Rivers Press). She is currently working on a book of translations of selected poems by Maria Teresa Horta, one of the most revered poets of modern Portugal who has published more than twenty volumes of poetry over a lifetime’s writing career. Horta was born in 1937 and was writing before and during the revolution against the fascist Estado Novo regime; her early work was banned for being ‘an outrage to public morals’. She is renowned for her novels, short stories and journalism, but considers herself a poet first and foremost. As this particular poem indicates, Horta’s work has a syntactical compactness coupled with a psychological passion, even wildness, which makes translation a deeply pleasurable challenge. The book of selected poems in English translation, Point of Honour, will be published by Two Rivers Press in the spring of 2019. You can hear Lesley read the poem and find her reflections it on the Stephen Spender Trust’s website.

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.

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.

Building Materials

May 14, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

If I lie on the kitchen floor,
my back shrinking from cold quarry stone,
I can see the night’s purple sky.

The roof isn’t yet fixed. He tries,
works hard against the weather,
but this is only one of many jobs.

His arms, that used to reach for me,
are always full of bricks,
his mouth full of clay.

I watch the moon through fallen tiles.
Tomorrow we must steady them
against the threat of rain.

by Claire Walker

News from the Centre: we urge you not to miss the chance to hear three of the leading poets writing in the UK when they visit us in Oxford next week. Do tell your friends! Tickets to hear Kei Miller (22 May), Sinéad Morrissey (23 May), and Clare Pollard (24 May) are free, but you do need to book. Book for Kei here, Sinéad here, and Clare here, or all three here!

These readings are part of the Think Human Festival at Oxford Brookes, during which we’re also helping to run an exciting event on 25 May called Stanza and Stand-Up, in which poetry and comedy battle it out! Tickets are available here.

Finally, tomorrow at Keble College, Stephanie Burt (US) and Hera Lindsay Bird (New Zealand) will be reading from their work at 6.30pm in the Pusey Room – full details here.

Notes from V. Press:

Claire Walker is a poet based in Worcestershire. Her work has been published in magazines and on websites including The Interpreter’s House, Prole, Ink Sweat and Tears, And Other Poems, The Poetry Shed, Obsessed with Pipework and Clear Poetry, and in anthologies such as The Chronicles of Eve (Paper Swans Press) and Crystal Voices (Crystal Clear Creators). She is a Poetry Reader for Three Drops Press, and Co-Editor of Atrium poetry webzine. Her most recent pamphlet – from which this poem was taken – is entitled Somewhere Between Rose and Black, and it was shortlisted in the Saboteur Awards for Best Poetry Pamphlet. Her first pamphlet, The Girl Who Grew Into a Crocodile, is also published by V. Press. You can read more about Claire’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

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.

Tic tacs at the track

May 2, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

They stood out beaconed on their boxes.
I could only see them from the shoulder up:
White gloves weaving those magic odds
out the ear, top of the head, or on the nose.

Punters would follow their semaphore to see
an Up-the-arm, an Ear’ole, or a Major Stevens
flying overhead. Dad joked they were sending
messages to the deaf. The odd time a Double Carpet

flew past the line by a short head, the bookies
cracked a smile, plus the punter whose pin
had pricked the right spot for once. The serious
men, long coated with cigars in hand, strode
up with bags of sand to take on a short one;

if it wasn’t odds on it’d be straight up,
a shoulder maybe, a bottle max. I’d watch them
walk back like cons, pick out their bins and scan
the track like Churchill overseeing the troops.

My old man had less money but no less sense.
He often lost me amongst the legs when putting
on his bet, laying a sky diver or cock and hen – lowest
he took was top-of-the-head, carpet, or Burlington Bertie,

up to a cockle. If a top jockey was on a macaroni
he’d drop a couple on. Each way he wasn’t going to win
enough for a long coat. He always tried to leave though
with a cigar, blowing smoke all the way home.

by Peter Raynard

News from the Centre: we have a number of exciting poetry readings coming up over the next couple of months, including a reading by this week’s poet, Peter Raynard, who will be with Richard Skinner tomorrow (3 May) at the Society Café in Oxford from 7pm. All are welcome! Tickets (£4) are available here or on the door. For more details, visit our website.

We will also be hosting (as part of the Think Human Festival): Kei Miller on 22 May; Sinéad Morrissey on 23 May; and Clare Pollard on 24 May. We’re also helping to organize Stanza and Stand-Up on 25 May where poetry competes with comedy and the audience decides who wins! Don’t miss these exciting events! You can book tickets here.

Next week, join psychoanalyst and critic Adam Phillips at Keble College for the latest in his seminar series entitled ‘The Poet’s Essay’. The seminar takes place on Wednesday 9th May at 4.30pm in the Pusey Room at Keble, and you can find full details here.

And if you haven’t yet seen copies of our ignitionpress pamphlets, including work by Lily Blacksell, Patrick James Errington, and Mary Jean Chan (whose pamphlet A Hurry of English is the Poetry Book Society’s Summer Choice), visit our website. There you can find sample poems as well as audio and video of the poets reading from their work.

‘Tic tacs at the track’ is copyright © Peter Raynard, 2018. It is reprinted from Precarious (Smokestack Books, 2018) by permission of Smokestack Books. An earlier version of the poem was published in the Morning Star in February 2015.

Notes from Smokestack Books:

Peter Raynard’s debut collection Precarious takes questions of masculinity, class, mental health and work head on; issues that many people, especially men and boys, find difficult to address. Rosa Luxemburg, Orgreave, 11-plus failures, tic-tac men, a priest from central casting and a man who only eats sandwiches – it’s a book about precarious times, hard lessons and fragile lives, a defiant celebration of British working-class life and the people ‘who make the wheels go round’, provocative, funny, poignant and bloody angry.

Peter Raynard is the editor of Proletarian Poetry: poems of working class lives. His debut collection, Precarious, was published by Smokestack Books in April 2018. He has also completed a poetic coupling of The Communist Manifesto, to be published by Culture Matters in May 2018.

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.

The Malvern Aviator

April 24, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My father’s watch. One of only a few hundred.
Dark blue face, Arabic numerals.
It keeps terrible time. I wear it now
only to counterweigh the days,
the equinoxes and leap years.

When there is an odd jump in time
(the clocks going forward),
it even-keels me, like bike stabilisers,
swimming wings.
I do not fall down, I do not drown.

But if I were to take it off and abandon it
by my large granite basin,
its hands would fail with the iron
and I would venture out in the world,
ending up as a heap of ashes.

by Richard Skinner

We have a number of exciting poetry readings coming up over the next couple of months, including a reading by this week’s poet, Richard Skinner, who will be reading with Peter Raynard on 3 May at the Society Café in Oxford. Book tickets here.

Notes from Smokestack Books:

In language that is both precise and strange, Richard Skinner’s poems tip certainties on their heads, making familiar objects in the world unfamiliar: a mountain is not what it seems, a skull contains a universe. Alongside this process of ‘making-strange’ lies a deep connection with sound, colour, temperature and scent that brings the poems fully to life. Questions of faith run through many of these poems, with subjects ranging from the Lollards and Buddhist Bardos to Saint Fabiola. There are personal poems too: a summer affair, family narratives about his grandmother’s difficult marriage and his mother’s time abroad as a young au pair. These poems engage with form – the cento, the cinquain, the unrhymed sonnet, cut-ups and free verse – in enigmatic, other-worldy ways that constantly surprise and please. Find out more about The Malvern Aviator on the Smokestack website.

Richard Skinner has published three novels with Faber & Faber and three books of non-fiction. His previous books of poetry, the light user scheme and Terrace are both published by Smokestack. His work is published in eight languages. He is Director of the Fiction Programme at Faber Academy. You can read more about Richard’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.

St Jerome and the Chaffinch

April 17, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

More usually with a lion he can’t shake off,
and always with a book – but,
sometimes, he appears with a chaffinch.

Animals love him. And it’s a symbol
of celibacy to be accompanied by a chaffinch.
The colourful male winters less far away than his mate.

He becomes known as the bachelor bird
and also the harbinger of rain.
But only sometimes does he sing for rain,

other times he sings for sun, or for his mate.
The French say gay comme un pinson
but we are not always so gay

or so serious. Bosch paints him this way.
I cannot say why he sings, only that
the chaffinch, sometimes, appears with St Jerome.

by Emily Hasler

News from the Centre! We have a number of exciting poetry readings coming up over the next couple of months, including a reading by Peter Raynard and Richard Skinner on 3 May; Kei Miller on 22 May; Sinéad Morrissey on 23 May; Clare Pollard on 24 May; and Richard Harrison on 1 June. We’re also helping to organize Stanza and Stand-Up on 25 May where poetry competes with comedy and the audience decides who wins! You can book tickets for all of these events here.

Also on our website you can read a new interview with poet and critic Yvonne Reddick, and a review of Jos Smith’s book Subterranea by Jennifer Wong.

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Emily Hasler was born in Felixstowe, Suffolk and studied at the University of Warwick. Her work won second prize in the 2009 Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition, and she won an Eric Gregory Award in 2014. She has published a pamphlet, natural histories, with Salt and writes for Prac Crit. Her first collection, The Built Environment , has just been published by Pavilion Poetry (Liverpool University Press). You can follow Emily 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.

The last fare collector of Hiroshima

April 11, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

They found her fingers in a jelly of yen,
her skin one with the standard issue fare-bag –
a dove in a sen of silver to go to the mountains,
oh, if only she went.

I have read of a woman
who cooled her burns with figs and persimmon.
She pared away old skin for years; it was the finest paper,
writing its kanji into the papyrus sky. I wish I knew her.

In the ritual of tea-making,
I learnt how to sip from a widow’s eyes
and learn that some stories are like Hiroshima streetcars –
they always arrive on time then the hour takes them.

They found her omen in the evening crow
hopping by the river: it is time to see how atoms rise
when another survivor dies;
their story closes with their eyelids.

I have read of a God-fearing woman
who feared man so much more;
she sliced a cucumber each night for years to cool her skin
and hate had left her years ago with five generations of
fishermen
horse-breakers
librarians
mothers
fathers
fare-collector.

by Antony Owen

Sen: Old Japanese coins. The sen was taken out of currency in 1953.

Poetry news! If you’re around St. Andrews or Edinburgh, catch our ignitionpress poets (Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan and Patrick James Errington) today (Wednesday) and tomorrow as they launch their pamphlets in Scotland! Find more details on the St. Andrews reading here and the Edinburgh event here. You can buy their pamphlets here.

There are still a few places left for this Saturday’s one-day poetry workshop by ignitionpress editor and Oxford-based poet Alan Buckley. The workshop is entitled ‘First, are you our sort of person? – I, you, they and us’, and will explore how writing in the second and third person and first person plural can broaden our range as writers. Tickets are £45 (£40 for Brookes students and staff). To sign up, visit our website.

Sphinx Theatre will presents the award winning show ‘A Berlin Kabaret’, a vibrant presentation of lyrical anti-war songs, at the Old Fire Station, Oxford on 20 and 21 April. The show features previously undiscovered and newly translated poems by Bertolt Brecht and provocative new voices from Crisis Skylight writing workshops. There is more information on the OFS website.

Finally, John Hegley is in town this Saturday with his family-friendly show ‘All Hail the Snail’, and you can find more information about the event on the North Wall Arts Centre’s website.

Notes from V. Press:

Antony Owen was born in 1973 in Coventry, and raised by working class parents. The Nagasaki Elder is his fifth collection of poetry, jointly inspired by growing up in Cold War Britain at the peak of nuclear proliferation and, more recently, a self-funded trip to Hiroshima in 2015 to hear testimonies of Atomic bomb survivors. Owen’s war poetry and haiku have been translated into Japanese and Mandarin. In recognition of his 2015 peace trip to Hiroshima, CND Peace Education (UK) selected Owen as one of their first national patrons, and he won a Peace & Reconciliation award in 2016 for Community Cohesion from his home city of Coventry. The Nagasaki Elder was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry in 2017.

Catullus 51 High fantasy translation

March 27, 2018April 20, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Ille mi par esse deo videtur,
ille, si fas est, superare divos,
qui sedens adversus identidem te
spectat et audit
dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis
eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi
vocis in ore,
lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures, gemina teguntur
lumina nocte.
Otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:
otio exsultas nimiumque gestis:
otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes.

Catullus 51: High Fantasy translation

In the tavern, they sat near the fire, which created a companionate halo around the small company. Food was served, with ale and mead, and they started to feel merry, though tired and shaken by the terrors of the road. Snorri was elbow height to the rider in the green cloak, whose pitted face now seemed moon-like, lit by the elf woman who sat opposite, talking and smiling. Her laughter was like purses of silver poured out liberally and pocketed by that mortal. None of it was spent on the dwarf, who sat in shadow and twice looked at her and quickly turned away as he felt flames dart along his limbs. He tried once to speak, but his tongue was lead and he knew he could not speak and look at her still. His senses eclipsed, he heard only the pounding on the worn anvil of his heart. His eyes were shut in darkness, like the closing of the doors into the mountain. Confused by these new emotions, he applied himself with greater energy to the meal. Idleness, thought Snorri, taking great bites of the bread and roast meat in his trencher. Only idleness. The idle axe rusts and the lazy smith lets his fire go out.
by Rowyda Amin

Poetry news! We are delighted to say that one of our ignitionpress pamphlets, A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan, is the Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice for Summer 2018! You can read more about the PBS selection here, and find details of all three ignitionpress pamphlets (by Mary Jean, Lily Blacksell, and Patrick James Errington) here. There are two further launches for the press in Edinburgh and St. Andrews on 11 and 12 April, where you can hear all three poets.

On Saturday 14 April, ignitionpress editor and Oxford-based poet Alan Buckley will be leading a day-long workshop for the Poetry Centre entitled ‘First, are you our sort of person? – I, you, they and us’. It will explore how writing in the second and third person and first person plural can broaden our range as writers, and enable us to write more deeply into our own experience. Participants are invited to bring two of their existing poems to be worked on by themselves and others. Tickets are £45 (£40 for Brookes students and staff). To sign up, visit our website.

Have you seen our poetry reading series schedule? We have five readings coming up – with Peter Raynard and Richard Skinner; Kei Miller; Sinéad Morrissey; Clare Pollard; and Richard Harrison – and you can book tickets here.

Finally, Sphinx Theatre will presents the award winning show ‘A Berlin Kabaret’, a vibrant presentation of lyrical anti-war songs, at the Old Fire Station, Oxford on 20 and 21 April. The show features previously undiscovered and newly translated poems by Bertolt Brechtand provocative new voices from Crisis Skylight writing workshops. You can find more information on the OFS website.

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Gaius Valerius Catullus was Ancient Rome’s most notorious scandal-monger, filthsmith and lovelorn wretch. In this interactive handbook, Bad Kid Catullus, his famously sexy, savage, tender and scurrilous poems have been transformed and mutated in myriad ways: compressed, expanded, bricolaged, Catullus in six pulp genres, Catullus as playlist – even a Catullus karma sutra. And then there are pages for you, the reader, to fill in, in your own obscene fashion. You’ll never look at a sparrow the same way again. Find out more about the book on the Sidekick Books website.

An itinerant scribe, Rowyda Amin lived in the capital until she was sent into exile in the far west for an ill-judged remark about the emperor’s hairpiece. You can read more about Rowyda’s work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

The Clinic Bomber’s Mother

March 19, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The trick, she guesses, is: be seen. Offer
coffee to police, walk among the living
without thinking of the dead. Never

apologize for being his mother. Keep
his photos on the mantel, his boyhood
room the same. Bring daisies to his plot,

ignore the other graves. Who really knows
who knows. She donates blood, is comforted
that strangers wear his clothes, irons

linens for St. Paul’s, whose confessionals
have never felt so cramped. Bless me, Father,
she admits, the bathroom hook still holds

his robe. There’s little time to think or rest.
More and more, the wafer tastes like flesh.

by Shara Lessley

The Poetry Centre is delighted to say that this week’s poet, Shara Lessley, will be reading from her work in Oxford this Thursday 22 March, when she will be launching her new collection The Explosive Expert’s Wife. Shara will be reading with Yvonne Reddick, whose work we featured last week and will be reading from her award-winning pamphlet Translating Mountains. Join us for what will be a terrific evening – from 7-9pm at the Society Café. Find more details on our website. Yvonne will also be discussing her academic research about Ted Hughes earlier in the day at Oxford Brookes – contact us for more details.

Have you seen our new ignitionpress pamphlets yet? We have another launch event at the Oxford Literary Festival this Sunday 25 March. To get a taste of what’s in store, watch videos of the poets: Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington, on our ignitionpress pages, and buy the pamphlets here!

‘The Clinic Bomber’s Mother’ is excerpted from The Explosive Expert’s Wife by Shara Lessley. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2018 by Shara Lessley. All rights reserved. The poem was originally published in 32 Poems, 13.2 (Fall/Winter 2015).

‘Somewhere in the Middle / East, you sip coffee while I sleep…’ In sparse, powerful lines, Shara Lessley recalls an expat’s displacement, examines her experience as a mother, and offers intimate witness to the unfolding of the Arab Spring in her new collection, The Explosive Expert’sWife. Veering from the strip malls and situation rooms of Washington to the markets and mines of Amman, Lessley confronts the pressures and pleasures of other cultures, exploring our common humanity with all its aggressions, loves, biases, and contradictions. You can read more about Shara’s book on the publisher’s website.

Shara Lessley is a writer and teacher. The author of Two-Headed Nightingale and The Explosive Expert’s Wife, and co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, she is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Shara’s poems and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Missouri Review, and New England Review, among others. A recipient of scholarships from ArtsBridge and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Shara holds Bachelor’s degrees in Dance and English from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in Poetry from University of Maryland. She was recently awarded Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Oxford. Find out more about Shara’s work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

Above the Northeast Shoulder

March 13, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Face the flawless white
of profound frostbite,
she stoops at the porch of my tent,
pale hair brushing my forehead.
One hand touches my arm,
scaldingly cold.

She points to the western arête –
a fin with skirls of cloud
building its north face
to a shell of rime.

That night, I arrange
my oxygen bottles, hunch
under canvas, and wait
for clear sky over the Lhotse Face.
She unzips the tent-flap
and lets in a swirl of blizzard.

She sits writing
a one-cigarette poem
by torchlight, brow knitting.

As the temperature drops
she creeps into my sleeping bag –
her kiss sucks the air from my lungs.
I spend all night trying to thaw her.

In the morning,
the pad propped on her knees,
she begins a two-fag poem.
I pass her my Zippo.

by Yvonne Reddick

The Poetry Centre is delighted to say that this week’s poet, Yvonne Reddick, will be reading from her work in Oxford next Thursday 22 March. She will be reading with Shara Lessley, who will be launching her new collection The Explosive Expert’s Wife. Join us for what will be a terrific evening – from 7-9pm at the Society Café. Find more details on our website. Yvonne will also be discussing her academic research about Ted Hughes earlier in the day at Oxford Brookes – contact us for more details.

Have you seen our new ignitionpress pamphlets yet? We have another launch event at the Oxford Literary Festival on Sunday 25 March. Read and hear from the poets: Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington, on our ignitionpress pages, and buy the pamphlets here!

Notes from Seren:

Yvonne Reddick was born in Glasgow and grew up in Aberdeen, Berkshire and Kuwait. She won a Northern Writer’s Award for poetry in 2016. Her poems have appeared in magazines such as Stand and Shearsman, and been translated into Greek and Swedish. She lives in Manchester and works as an academic researcher and lecturer. Her book Ted Hughes: Environmentalist andEcopoet was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. ‘Above the Northeast Shoulder’ comes from her Mslexia-prize winning pamphlet, Translating Mountains, which features elegies to her father and a friend who both died in mountaineering accidents. You can read more about Yvonne’s work on these pages, 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.

When I lived alone

March 6, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

When I lived alone I was clean. Good.
I drank jasmine tea in the afternoons
working by lamplight in the gloom. At night
I read by candlelight. Drank Rooibos. Played
piano to the guitar, guitar to the piano.
Sometimes I sang, to them both, to the room,
to myself, alone. Sometimes I went out.
If I left for more than a day I’d stroke
the walls and tell the house to be good
without me. Occasionally, people came round
and made the still, contained air busy. 
Mostly though it was only me,
me and the house, being good together.
I slept curled up against the cool
stretch of its ribs like a cub. It breathed 
gently into me. How I loved
its scent of damp sandstone and old warm
wood. I loved how it touched on my mind
and shifted its light to my mood. How
it helped me be good. In the mornings
I’d sit in its eye with a pot of good black coffee,
reheating it on the hob as it cooled.

by Polly Atkin

This is a very exciting and busy week for the Poetry Centre, and we hope you’ll join us at one of our events! Tonight (Tuesday), we’ll be hosting an open mic at Oxford Brookes on the topic of identity, together with the Oxford Human Rights Festival and Oxford Brookes LGBT+ Staff Forum. All are welcome! This week also sees the launch of ignitionpress and our first pamphlets by Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington: we’re in London on Wednesday and Oxford on Thursday. Both events are free and we’d love to see you! We also have a series of readings and a workshop with Alan Buckley lined up for the coming months. Find more information about those here.

Notes from Seren:

Polly Atkin lives in Cumbria. Her second poetry pamphlet, Shadow Dispatches (Seren, 2013) won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize. In 2014 her poem ‘A Short History of the Moon’ won the Wigtown Poetry Prize, and she was awarded New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse Prize for work in progress ‘reflect[ing] a strong sense of place or the natural environment’. Her 2017 collection from Seren is Basic Nest Architecture. She has taught at the Universities of Lancaster and Strathclyde. You can read more about Polly’s work on her website 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 Familyand 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.