I was a lightning rod salesman

February 20, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I was a lightning rod salesman
preaching copper
past the imaginary hills

settlers construct
to forsake every direction but dirt.My handshake was a bird,
all getaway
by the time knife fights traced

the sky’s nightly veins.

Between the grave of a man
persecuted for wearing his beard
and a well-governed Florida,

the thunder repeated itself
like a prizefighter who couldn’t bear to leave
a clean stage.

Would you prefer a wife
or a heap of charred offal?
I reasoned with the terrible farmers.

To demonstrate what might happen,
I tried on shivers.

To stand for the sky’s jagged flesh,
my hands turned to rain.

by Christopher DeWeese

We are delighted and excited to say that this week’s poet, Christopher DeWeese, will be visiting Oxford this Saturday 24 February, where he will be reading with the Poetry Centre’s own Andy Eaton at the Society Café. Don’t miss this wonderful chance to hear two award-winning writers! You can buy tickets on the door or book them via our website, where you can also find details of the rest of the spring series.

Our three brand new ignitionpress poetry pamphlets: A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan, Glean by Patrick James Errington, and Lily Blacksell’s There’s No Such Thing, are now on sale from the Brookes online Shop! We will be holding launch events on 7 March (at the Poetry Café in London), 8 March (at the Society Café in Oxford), and on 25 March (at the Oxford Literary Festival), and all are welcome. You can find out more about these events on our website.

Christopher DeWeese is the author of three books of poems: The Confessions (Periplum, 2017), The Father of the Arrow is the Thought (Octopus Books, 2015), and The Black Forest (Octopus Books, 2012). He is currently Associate Professor of English at Wright State University. He lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Read more about Christopher’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.

The Confessions is a book about diving bells, automatons, living insignias, detectives, garden mazes, flea circuses, murder dollhouses, Esperanto, twenty-one gun salutes, spirit photography, company towns, daredevils, forgery, circuses, turning to soap, auctioneering, fake pirates, and anarchist bullfighters.

Based out of Plymouth University’s English and Creative Writing Department, Periplum aims to publish and promote the best new poetry being written in English from around the world. The press’s most recent publication is The Confessions by Christopher DeWeese, winner of the Periplum Open Book Competition, and the next pamphlet will be by the poet and artist Heather Phillipson.

Previous authors have included Mark Ford, Peter Gizzi, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and you can watch interviews with some of the writers here. Pamphlets are between 18 and 24 pages, printed on good quality paper, and designed by members of Plymouth’s Illustration department. Periplum also runs a bi-annual poetry pamphlet competition, which is open to anyone writing in English. The winner receives £300 and publication in Autumn 2018. The deadline for submissions is Sunday 1 April 2018.

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.

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Practice

February 14, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

As a teenager, fencing was the closest thing
I knew to desire, all the girls swapping one

uniform for another before practice, their white
dresses replaced by breeches. I thought we were

princes in a fairy tale with a twist, since
there were no princesses to be taken, wed.

As knights, we were told to aim for an imaginary
spot just above our opponent’s left breast. Often,

I left a bruise: the blade’s tip ricocheting off chest-
guards onto flesh. Just as often, I would feel yellow

blooms of ache where the girl I thought was beautiful
had pierced my heart. Hours later, I would transform.

I would head back home with a deepening
sense of dread, my bruises fading to quiet.

by Mary Jean Chan

Hear Mary Jean read the poem by clicking here

The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre is proud and delighted to introduce you to the final poet whose work our ignitionpress is publishing in our first poetry pamphlets! A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan, Glean by Patrick James Errington, and Lily Blacksell’s There’s No Such Thing, are on sale TODAY from the Brookes online Shop.

We will be holding launch events on 7 March (at the Poetry Café in London), 8 March (at the Society Café in Oxford), and on 25 March (at the Oxford Literary Festival). You can find out more about these events on our website. Visit our website to also read and hear Lily’s poem ‘Brook’ and Patrick’s ‘Still Life with Approaching Crow’, and to find out about all three poets here.

Mary Jean Chan is a poet from Hong Kong. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, such as The Poetry Review, PN Review, Ambit Magazine, The Rialto, Callaloo Journal, and Wasafiri Magazine. In 2017, Mary Jean was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, and won the Poetry Society Members’ Competition and the Poetry and Psychoanalysis Competition. In 2016, she won the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition (ESL), and was shortlisted for the 2016 London Magazine Poetry Prize, the 2016 Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition and the 2016 Resurgence Poetry Prize. Mary Jean received the 2015 University of London MA Creative Writing Prize, and is currently a PhD candidate and Research Associate in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London and Co-Editor at Oxford Poetry. In 2019, her first full collection of poetry will be published by Faber & Faber.

ignitionpress is a new 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. You can learn more about the press on the Poetry Centre website.

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Still Life with Approaching Crow

February 7, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

There’s nothing to distinguish
this from the last three-or-so
hundred fields they pass, but
for whatever reason they call it
far enough. The engine shaking
off its sound, voices dripping
from their mouths to the ground.
When they say let’s go they won’t
mean everyone, this time. Beyond,
a field frozen solid, expression-
less, stubbled with broken grain.
They’ll leave him loose as teeth
in his life, lashed to a fencepost.
Blood gently unlacing the features
from his face and every wound
unwinding from its pain like wire.
It’ll be days before anyone can tie
the term missing to what it has
to mean. The field and his flesh
grow significance against their will.

by Patrick James Errington

Hear Patrick read the poem by clicking here

The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre is proud and delighted to introduce you to the second of the three poets whose work our ignitionpress will be publishing in our first poetry pamphlets! Glean by Patrick James Errington, together with A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan and Lily Blacksell’s There’s No Such Thing, will be on sale on 14 February from the Brookes online Shop, and there will be launch events on 7 March (at the Poetry Café in London), 8 March (at the Society Café in Oxford), and on 25 March (at the Oxford Literary Festival). You can find out more about these events on our website. Last week we shared one of Lily’s poems with you, and next week we will be showcasing work by Mary Jean.

Patrick James Errington is a writer, translator, and researcher from the prairies of Alberta, Canada. As an undergrad at the University of Alberta (2007–2011), he studied English literature and creative writing with Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. He received his MFA from Columbia University (2013–2015) in creative writing and literary translation, where he also received a Program Scholarship and a Chair’s Fellowship. He has worked as an editor or editorial assistant for magazines like The New Yorker and The Columbia Journal, and is currently the editor-in-chief of The Scores, an online literary magazine based at the University of St Andrews. Patrick is currently a George Buchanan PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews and his research, under the supervision of Professors John Burnside and Don Paterson, is in the field of poetics and hermeneutics.

Patrick’s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from: Boston Review, Copper Nickel, Passages North, Oxford Poetry, CV2, The London Magazine, Long Poem Magazine, Best New Poets 2016, The Iowa Review, Horsethief, West Branch,The Adroit Journal, Cider Press Review, DIAGRAM, American Literary Review and others. He was Commended in The National Poetry Competition 2016, and has won, among other competitions, The London Magazine Poetry Competition (2016) and the Wigtown Poetry Competition (2017). Together with Laure Gall, Patrick also translated Au creux de la main (The Hollow of the Hand), by PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy (Paris: Éditions l’Âge d’Homme, 2017).

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Brook

January 31, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It’s so easy for me to imagine it I don’t even have to try. It’s why
I lost interest in the postcard maker. I hardly needed him anymore,
with his surfboard. I think he understood. That view
is stamped on my brain already, clear as day, except the grass
in the foreground is so dark it could almost be dusk overturned.
He told me the landslides are increasingly frequent, one for every
nice drop of rain. And so the cliff slips and the houses get closer
to the edge of it and the cliff gets weaker and so it goes on, and so
I take my love and I take it down. I think my mind’s eye is in my gut.
The lifeboat house is so low now it looks like a bunker, some kind
of air-raid shelter, to be on the safe side twice over. Little does it
know. The sunset takes longer these days, of course, with
further to go and less to hide behind. I’d give a whole limb to be
there again. I’d know the right-handed cliff anywhere, with its slow
morning stretch, its curve, its crumble. Then there’s the section
where clay turns to chalk and the peregrines were nesting last time.
Elsewhere, we’d lost a good chunk of car park, and the seagulls didn’t
know where to land. Have you ever seen tarmac carried out to sea?
Like a jagged black ode to Noah’s Island? It was not good
news at all. May it never appear in a photo.

by Lily Blacksell

Hear Lily read the poem by clicking below

The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre is proud and delighted to introduce you to the first of the three poets whose work ignitionpress will be publishing in our first poetry pamphlets! Lily Blacksell’s pamphlet, There’s No Such Thing, together with A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan and Glean by Patrick James Errington, will be on sale on 14 February from the Brookes online shop, and there will be launch events on 7 March (at the Poetry Café in London), 8 March (at the Society Café in Oxford), and on 25 March (at the Oxford Literary Festival). You can find out more about these events on our website. We will be showcasing work by Mary Jean and Patrick in the next two instalments of the Weekly Poem.

Lily Blacksell is a British writer recently returned from New York, where she was working towards a poetry MFA on Columbia University’s Writing Program and also held a Teaching Fellowship. Lily writes poems for the page and the stage. Her work has appeared in Rockland Lit, Lifejacket, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Poet’s Country, Foothill and Magma Poetry. She has written reviews and interviews for Boston Review, Sabotage and Prac Crit and was herself interviewed by Columbia School of the Arts and Impakter.

Lily has performed her work at numerous venues, such as Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop, Bowery Poetry Club, and Dead Rabbits (US), and Cheltenham Poetry Festival, Battersea Arts Centre (as part of Battersea Literature Festival), Howl, Word Up, and Boomerang (UK). In 2013, Apples and Snakes commissioned a piece of original spoken word theatre from Lily, which was performed at Lit Fuse, and in 2015 she was a finalist in the Roundhouse Poetry Slam. In 2017 Lily was nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets (United States and Canada).

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Ramadasi

January 26, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Return
to me, beloved
and take me on your lap.

Undo my braid
stiff
as buffalo horn

and draw your
fingers
through my hair.

Untie my belt, open
the silk cloth
covering my waist,

let my oiled limbs, my
perfumed skin
envelop you

as the rose
swallows
the bee.

by Shazea Quraishi

News from the Centre: there are only a few weeks left before we launch our first ever poetry pamphlets through ignitionpress! There’s No Such Thing by Lily Blacksell, A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan, and Glean by Patrick James Errington will be on sale from 14 February, and there will be several launch events . More details will follow soon!

The Poetry Centre’s exciting reading series gets underway on Saturday 24 February at the Society Café in Oxford with a reading by American poets Christopher DeWeese and Andy Eaton. You can book tickets via our website , where you can also find details of the rest of the spring series.

The acclaimed Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson will be visiting Brookes on Friday 16 February to give a lunchtime reading . Although this event is aimed at Brookes staff and students, there will be places available for members of the public. If you’d like to attend, e-mail niall.munro@brookes.ac.uk

‘Ramadasi’ is copyright © Shazea Quraishi, 2018. It is reprinted from Ten Sexy Poems by permission of Candlestick Press.

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Shazea Quraishi is a Pakistani-born Canadian poet, playwright and translator based in London. Her first pamphlet, The Courtesan’s Reply, was published by flipped eye in 2012. The Art of Scratching is her first full-length collection and was published by Bloodaxe in 2015. In 2015 Quaraishi was awarded a Brooklease Grant by the Royal Society of Literature and she also received awards from the British Council and Arts Council England in the same year.

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. Shazea Quraishi’s poem ‘Ramadasi’ appears in Ten Sexy Poems published in January 2018 in time for Valentine’s Day. You can read more about the pamphlet on the press’ website. Candlestick Press titles are stocked by chain and independent bookshops, as well as by galleries, museums and garden centres.

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The Red Man

December 16, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Snow is falling. Who comes laughing
over the fields? Stars are falling.
Canals are freezing. Who brings
like nothing on his back
the shape of our life, the hopes
of our life, lumped
obdurate in a reindeer skin sack?

Trees are chiming in orchards of glass.
If childhood’s white and cold, then love’s
the overgrown, evergreen dark. Two rings
of apple peel, our fingers dipped in wine.
Two pale root rings from the frozen earth,
your fingers wound in mine.
Our vows we can see on the air.

by Jacob Polley

This is the final Weekly Poem of 2017! We wish you a very Merry Christmas and a lyrical start to 2018. Our poems will resume in late January – thank you for reading in 2017! As well as the launch of ignition , we have some very exciting readings planned for early 2018, so please follow us on social media , keep an eye on our website, or stay tuned to the Weekly Poem for more details!

‘The Red Man’ is copyright © Jacob Polley, 2017. It is reprinted from Christmas Garland: Ten Evergreen Poems (Candlestick Press, 2017) by permission of Candlestick Press.

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Jacob Polley was born and grew up in Cumbria. He has published four books of poems, winning the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry for his fourth, Jackself. He has also been awarded the 2013 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for The Havocs, and the Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel, Talk of the Town (2009). Jacob teaches at Newcastle University and lives with his family on the North East coast. You can find more about Jacob’s work on his website.

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. This year Candlestick is publishing six Christmas titles featuring newly-commissioned poems and a short story by poet Sean O’Brien. You can read more about them on the press’ website. Candlestick Press titles are stocked by chain and independent bookshops, as well as by galleries, museums and garden centres. They can also be ordered online on the Candlestick website, where you can find out more about the full range of titles. You can follow Candlestick on Twitter or find it on 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.

Follow the Poetry Centre on Facebook and Twitter.

Santa circa 2092

December 4, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

On the Eve, when tongues of hung dead bells
lay silent, smog scraped the landscape
stretched its wrath across the shivering city.

Below a growling sky, the grey track of a sleigh
lugged by a pack of nine empty dogs
weaved between mounds of bones and rust.

Like a swarthy pioneer he handled the reins
hoping for a place to slap his sack, retrieve a song
from his memory, hang a sprig of mistletoe above a hearth.

Between carcasses of once lit haunts he dug
barehanded, searching for a glint of glitter, broken shells
of decorated baubles, a wayward ring of a bell.

He swept the musty ground, tore over hills,
followed a path of fallen fern, hooked his thumbs
into his belt, bellowed until the withered trees shook.

Night after night he roamed, scraped the days
from his boots, tugged at his bedraggled beard,
listened for life under the covering of dark.

With a sag for a smile and holes for eyes, he sat
whimpering amongst the ashen landscape, there
he set himself, back to a tree, slumped for the last.

As midnight struck, a wail clogged itself to the cracks
in his heart. Hidden in an undergrowth, threadbare
and faint, a woman, swollen, ready.

by Panya Banjoko

This Friday, don’t miss our final poetry reading in this semester’s series! It features celebrated haiku and performance poet Mark Gilfillan alongside Ted Hughes Prize-shortlisted writer and translator Chris Beckett, and will take place from 7-9pm at the Society Café in Oxford. You can find more details and buy tickets here . Tickets will also be available on the door.

‘Santa circa 2092’ is copyright © Panya Banjoko, 2017. It is reprinted from Christmas Crackers: Ten Poems to Surprise and Delight (Candlestick Press, 2017) by permission of Candlestick Press.

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Panya Banjoko is a performance poet and writer whose first collection is forthcoming from Burning Eye Books in 2018. She performed at the 2012 Olympic Games and is a patron for UNESCO Nottingham City of Literature. Her work has been widely published in anthologies and by Bloodaxe Books and in 2008 she won a Women in the Arts Award for Outstanding Achievement. You can find more details about Panya’s work on her Facebook page or on her website and 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 Sheep to Tea, Kindness, Home and Puddings. This year Candlestick is publishing six Christmas titles featuring newly-commissioned poems and a short story by poet Sean O’Brien. You can read more about them on the press’ website. Candlestick Press titles are stocked by chain and independent bookshops, as well as by galleries, museums and garden centres. They can also be ordered online on the Candlestick website, where you can find out more about the full range of titles. You can follow Candlestick on Twitter or find it on Facebook.

When Beasts Most Graze

November 21, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

1

left their houses weeping and became unemployed
and finally… died in poverty
and so ended their days

(Commission of Inquiry Returns, 1517)

Tenant at Will, Wharram Percy (c.1500):

They found me at Milndam, at the fish pond,
the landmaster’s men. they said
Leave your nets, William. We’re fishers of men.
Come with us to the Lord’s house. Come,
and receive the Word.
I followed,

sharp as a fox out of cover. Squire Hilton
hung like a cloud on his front step.
His smile axed at my heart.
He gave me till Michaelmas –
‘Tell the whole village the same.’

I looked up to the furlongs, the skyline
of corn. I heard children laugh
by the stream. I turned from his gate.
For Hilton a sheep-run.
For the cottar death with the plough.

Our young men wanted to fight, but
I counselled acceptance: To sever one stoat
will summon the pack. We have no rights here,
leave behind little. Our tears
like our toil will fade into the land…

We gathered below Town Field.
Swallows twitched from the church tower,
bellied the shallows. Next year
they’ll nest in the houses, singing
to idle spindles and empty hearths.

by Ian Taylor

This Friday lunchtime (24th November) from 12-1pm, join us at the launch of Steven Matthews’ new critical/creative book Ceaseless Music, a response to Wordsworth’s The Prelude.Through a series of poetic responses and critical reflections, Ceaseless Music explores the afterlives of Wordsworth’s landmark autobiographical poem in literature, philosophy and life writing, together with the insights it can offer into the writing of poetry today. Steven will be reading from the book in the Special Collections room in the basement of the Main Library, John Henry Brookes Building, where he will be joined by Paul Whitty who will be playing some of the sound recordings of the Lake District he made to accompany the book. All are welcome!

On Friday evening from 6.30-8pm at Oxford Brookes, the Poetry Centre presents its annual International Poetry Competition Awards event, featuring readings by the winning and shortlisted poets and the judge, Helen Mort. You can find more details on our website.

Notes from Smokestack:

Ian Taylor has been writing about the lost landscapes of the North for over forty years – old earthworks, ruined churches, derelict mineworkings, Neolithic barrows and deserted villages. Bringing together the best of this work in a single volume, Dusk is a book about enclosure, famine and deforestation, about bleak moorlands, sunken roads, nettles and cobwebs. Exploring between the pages of history, superstition, myth and the ‘threadbare cloak of folk tradition’, Taylor listens to the drovers, peat-cutters, ironstone miners, seasonal labourers, landless farmers and tramps in whose ‘hollow voice of loss’ he hears a renegade and still undefeated Albion, like a fox running from the ‘cleanshaven faces and privileged profiles’ of the Hunt, the Green Man still dancing in the trees. You can read more about Dusk on the Smokestack website.

I.P. Taylor was born in Shipley, West Yorkshire. He has been a forestry operative, a market gardener, a farm worker, a drystone waller and a millhand. Winner of the Stroud Festival international poetry competition and the Poetry Society’s Greenwood Prize, his publications include A Poetry Quintet, The Grip, The Passion, The HollowPlaces and Killers. He lives in York.

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.

About cows

November 7, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

They shit a lot and at first it is a warm pat
ridged with raised circles as it dries.
Water stopped in its tracks or a viscous jelly
hardening from the outside in.
I think of dying in a pool of shite,
the one my mother meant –
Go take a running leap in the slurry pit for all I care.
We had lost three cats that summer.
Seeing them stiffed, legs rigid and shining
made an art of death.
But this was to be about cows,
their lumbering walk to the gap to be milked
as if they know more together than apart.
They can smell a stream of fresh water from a mile.
They can hear grass growing under the bull.
They hold time in their four stomachs, chewing it down
till the evening milking, feeling the hours move on through.
They do not miss the calves they have had taken.
No attachment is apparent in three days.
Perhaps like the farmer in a unit of money,
they count on exchange.
Cows know their own patch but they’ll stray to graze another’s.
Swung towards the hedge in rain, heads dripping,
tail swatch taking a rest from flies.
Apparently rural but worldly wise, cows know that loss
is our only measure, expellation a passing pleasure.

by Siobhán Campbell

News from the Centre: this Thursday we are delighted to welcome this week’s poet, Siobhán Campbell, to Oxford to read with Kate Clanchy as part of the Poetry Centre’s reading series. Everyone is very welcome to hear two internationally-acclaimed writers. The reading takes place at the Society Café, St. Michael’s Street, Oxford, from 7-9pm. Tickets (£4) can be bought on the door or via the Brookes Shop.

Tomorrow (Wednesday), Oxford Writers’ House presents ‘Writing for Audio Drama and Podcasting: an Evening with Robert Valentine and Liz Campbell’. All are welcome, but places are limited! Find out more and sign up here.

On Saturday 11 November, don’t miss an Armistice Day reading with Adnan Al-Sayegh, Jenny Lewis, Peter King & Jude Cowan Montague, together with the launch of Seeds of Bullets, a book on Adnan’s work. Albion Beatnik Bookshop, Oxford, 7.30pm.

Finally, the Woodstock Poetry Festival runs from 10-12 November. A very impressive programme includes readings by the likes of Douglas Dunn and Anne Stevenson. More details here.

Notes from Seren:

Siobhán Campbell was born in Ireland and has lived in Dublin and London as well as San Francisco and Washington DC. Widely published in the USA and UK, she has won awards in the National Poetry Competition, the Troubadour International Poetry Competition, the Templar Poetry Prize and most recently was awarded the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Prize (Open category). She has an MA from the University College Dublin, a PhD from Lancaster University and has pursued postgraduate study at NYU and the New School in New York. She joined the Open University Department of English from Kingston University London where she was Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing. Heat Signature is her fifth collection of poems, and you can read more about the book on the Seren website. Find out more about Siobhán’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 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.

Bunny Says

October 30, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I’m hovered by the gate post again, waiting for Bunny
with my bag full of sour bread, just like Bunny
wanted, and jimjangled, can’t see Bunny.
Have I come dog-keen too early
Have I worn the right red boots
Have I stopped you raging Bunny
and Bunny says Bunny says Bunny says

Now we’re chasing my sister and Bunny
is joyful, but trickster and thug he is, is Bunny
he loves the way the brambles bite, does Bunny
so does she love the scramble too
so does she cry for being alive
so does she gasp for young night, Bunny
and Bunny says Bunny says Bunny says

In the garage, we unjunk some purple paint but Bunny
is not in think of plans or undead dusk. No, Bunny
charcoals out his plans for an everyoung Bunny
Will he do this thing and name it servant
Will it lollop methodically, coughing out washers
Will you will it to kill me, Rust Commander Bunny?
and Bunny says Bunny says Bunny says

by Kirsten Irving

News from the Centre! We are excited to say that this week’s poet, Kirsten Irving, will be reading alongside Caroline Smith this Thursday from 7-9pm at our new venue, the Society Café in central Oxford. (We featured ‘Teenager’, a poem from Caroline’s book The Immigration Handbook – shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award – back in January.) All are welcome to the reading, and you can buy tickets (£4) via the Brookes Shop and also on the door. We hope to see you there! Next Thursday, the Society Café hosts another reading – this time with Siobhán Campbell and Kate Clanchy, and you can find tickets for that event here.

We would also be delighted to see you at our International Poetry Competition awards evening on Friday 24 November at Oxford Brookes. The event, which runs from 6.30-8pm in the John Henry Brookes Building, will feature readings from the winners and shortlisted poets in this year’s competition, and also a reading from our judge, Helen Mort. And cake. To book a place, please e-mail poetrycomp@brookes.ac.uk

Kirsten Irving is a poet, editor, copywriter, and voice actor. Her poems have appeared widely in various online and print magazines. She has published three pamphlets – No, Robot, No! with Jon Stone, What To Do, Riotous with Jon Stone and a debut full-length collection Never NeverNever Come Back (Salt Publishing, 2012). The poem ‘Bunny Says’ is from her forthcoming collection, tentatively titled Popgun. Kirsten is also one of the founding editors of experimental poetry press Sidekick Books. You can read more about Kirsten’s work on her website, follow her on Twitter, or come and hear her read this Thursday!

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.