Catullus 51 Noir

October 25, 2017April 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: Noir

Lesbia, smoking hot in shifting satin,
a red Schiaparelli number, cut-to-kill,
spaghetti strap artfully loose on one bare
white arm. Her hooks tonight are in
millionaire Crassus. He’s slavering,
luckiest grifter in Little Italy, Straight Flush,
Full House, Jack in the Hole. Rufus,
I tell the barman, hit me with another.
Lesbia. She was Clodia back then.
The shock when she walked through
my door. Like the sizzle that twitched
Antonius. I wired him up to the factory mains.
He went pasty, his legs shook, sawdust-mouthed,
he fizzed inside, talked, and blacked out.
Catullus, I tell myself, here’s the angle:
trouble comes when there’s time to burn.
Time on your hands, Christ, you’re an animal.
Flagrant time. It’s what got Philoctetes
the Greek wasted. It did for Babylon.

by Ian McLachlan

News from the Centre: next Thursday sees the first event in our poetry reading series at our exciting new venue, Society Café in Oxford city centre. The first reading pairs two distinct voices in contemporary poetry: Kirsten Irving (also one of the editors of Sidekick Books) and Caroline Smith (whose poem ‘Teenager’ we featured back in January). Buy your tickets here and join us from 7-9pm. For future events in our reading series, including details of our reading on 9 November with Siobhán Campbell and Kate Clanchy, visit our website.

After the recent announcement of the winners of our International Poetry Competition, judged by Helen Mort, we would be delighted to see you at our awards event on Friday 24 November, which will feature readings from the winning and shortlisted poets and from Helen Mort herself. If you’d like to attend, please e-mail poetrycomp@brookes.ac.uk

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Ian McLachlan was the Republic’s favourite tragedian. Due to an unfortunate incident involving Pompey’s son-in-law and the Cloaca Maxima, Ian now lives in remote Britain where he is a student of Stoicism and an assiduous writer of curse tablets. You can follow him on Twitter.

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.

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.

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.

This Is Not A Rescue

October 9, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I want to tell you it will not be as you expect. For years
you have hammered in stakes, handed men the rope and said
consume me with fire. Most have run – one does not burn
a witch lightly. This one is water. He’ll unbind you, take
your hands in his and say remember how you love the ocean?
Come with me. You’ll go to the beach on a cloudy day, watch
foam rise from the sea’s churn until sun appears. In turn
you’ll say let’s go in and even though he hesitates, this man
will kick off his shoes and wade to his shins. Jellyfish,
shot with pink like satin dresses, will dance between you, flash
iridescent. His body is all whorls and planes like smoothly sanded
planks used to make a boat, his ears are pale shells you hear
the waves in, he smells of sandalwood and salt, his eyes
are ocean. He’ll spot the pebbles that in secret you have sewn
into your skirts and give you his penknife to unpick them. 
You can’t swim with those. He’ll teach you to skim. The pebbles
break the surface like question marks. You’ll throw each last one in.

by Emily Blewitt

Notes from Seren:

This Is Not A Rescue is a sparkling debut collection from Carmarthen-born Emily Blewitt, featuring poems on varied subjects from being a ‘woman poet’ to the heroes of Jane Austen. There are also some winning, unusual love poems and work inspired by crows and a couple of characters from ‘Star Wars’. Read more about the collection on the Seren website.

Emily Blewitt read English Language and Literature at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and has an MA in Film and Literature from the University of York. In 2010 she returned to Wales to begin a PhD in English Literature at Cardiff University, where she specialised in poetic representations of pregnancy in nineteenth-century and contemporary women’s writing, graduating in 2016. She has published poetry widely, her work appearing in The Rialto, Prole, The Interpreter’s House, Ambit, Poetry Wales, Furies, Cheval, Nu2: Memorable Firsts, and in Brittle Star. The title poem from her debut collection, This Is Not ARescue, was Highly Commended for best individual poem in the 2016 Forward Prizes, and is published in TheForward Book of Poetry 2017 . You can read more about Emily’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.

Storm petrel

September 28, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A pocket. A fistful
of sky in a small
gut
lined with
water lustrated of salt.
You,
almanac,
gathering storms
under windslip wings,
a slice of
clean water, parting
miles out to sea where
oil-spills are tumbled with
algae and plastic:
gyres vast & unequivocal in their
stranglehold over tides and land –
circular, massive,
holding us fast
but you
hold steady,
pelagic (storm-driven,
waif and tendril, fluff
and beak).
Were we wise,
we might learn from you,
learn to make love at midnight,
brief and fast in the shadows
cast by stones

chikka-chikka-chikk

the trill of a warning
sharp as the sting of a lighthouse beam

a whip
of light before the sinking:

andwe walked on water as we dreamed
beyond a horizon your shadow eclipses, and eclipses.

You scavenge for rotting flesh,
swoop and dive to tenderise the chum for your
one, fluffed chick

who knows gale-swept European islands,
and the kiss of Tunisian sands
but no language. You know no language,

only storm.

by Aki Schilz

Happy National Poetry Day! We hope you enjoy celebrating with this poem by Aki Schilz, and if you’d like to read some more poetry today, why not check out previous Weekly Poems, which are all available from 2007 to the present? Just visit our website. And if you haven’t yet heard about our exciting new venture, ignitionpress, please visit this page to learn about our plans to publish poetry pamphlets, and the three poets Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington in particular.

The programme for the Woodstock Poetry Festival (10-12 November) has been announced, and features readings by a host of celebrated writers, such as Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, George Szirtes, and David Harsent. For more information and to book your tickets, visit the Woodstock Bookshop website.

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Aki Schilz is a writer and editor based in London. She is co-founder of the #LossLit Twitter writing project alongside Kit Caless, and co-editor of LossLit Magazine. Her poetry, flash fiction, short stories and creative non-fiction have been published online (And Other Poems, Mnemoscape, tNY.Press, The Bohemyth, CHEAP POP, Annexe) and in print (An Unreliable Guide to London, Popshot, The Colour of Saying, Kakania,Best Small Fictions 2015), and she is the winner of the inaugural Visual Verse Prize (2013) and the Bare Fiction Prize for Flash Fiction (2014). Aki works at The Literary Consultancy, where she is the Editorial Services Manager. She tweets micropoetry at @AkiSchilz , and you can read more about her work on her blog.

With this poem we continue our selection of poems from Sidekick Books’ four volumes of Birdbooks. In 2009, with two micro-compendiums under their belt, Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone, the editors at Sidekick, discussed the idea of a book of bird poetry – but one in which less well known species were on equal terms with the popular ones. There are dozens of poems about herons, eagles, ravens and nightingales, not so many about the whimbrel, the ruff, the widgeon or the hobby. Paper-cut artist Lois Cordelia was recruited to give the series its distinctive covers, and over 150 artists and illustrators were commissioned over six years to complete the series. The first volume is now in its second printing. Find out more about the Birdbook series on the Sidekick website.

Iohanna of Sprotburgh

September 18, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Lord, saue vs; weperischen.

Matheu, VIII: 25

Drowned thieving from fish-traps.
Gaffed to the bank
by punting bargees –
glass-eyed, gaping.

Swan-complected, scabbed with leeches,
oozing like the fen.
Maids tore weeds
and wailed to Richard.

She hiccoughed a frog;
eels squirming from her petticoats.
In Hampull’s chapel,
her guttering candle flared.

by Steve Ely

Last Friday (and as promised in last week’s Weekly Poem!), the Poetry Centre announced the launch of its new pamphlet press, ignitionpress. If you missed the announcement, you can read about the new press here , and find out about the three poets we will be publishing (Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington) here . We look forward to sharing more details about the press indue course.

On Sunday 15 October, local poets Dorothy Yamamoto and Sarah J. Bryson will be running a poetry workshop in Kirtlington Village Hall entitled ‘Terra firma, or all at sea?’ The workshop will feature writing exercises, writing time, sharing and discussion, and runs from 10-3.30pm. All are welcome, and the event costs £25. For more details and to book a place, contact Dorothy on dorothy.mccarthy@btopenworld.com

Notes from Smokestack:

Steve Ely’s new book takes its inspiration and its title from Incendium Amoris (‘The Fire of Love’) by the fourteenth century saint and mystic Richard Rolle, ‘the hermit of Hampole’. The book offers a vision of pre-Reformation and post-industrial England through the eyes of the trespasser, the poacher, the recusant and the revolutionary, in solidarity with the swinish multitude against the landed power. Contesting language and landscape and addressing issues including carnality, class, scepticism and belief, Incendium Amoris is a peasant’s revolt against the accelerating cultural, social and environmental devastations of globalising capital, a guerrilla-pastoral prophecy of a yeoman-anarchist utopia. Read more about the book on the Smokestack website.

Steve Ely’s previous works include Oswald’s Book of Hours (nominated for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and for the Ted Hughes Award), Englaland, Werewolf and Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire; Made in Mexborough (2015). He lives in the Osgoldcross wapentake in the West Riding of Yorkshire, close to Richard Rolle’s Hampole. You can read more about Steve’s work on the Poetry International website, and follow him on Twitter.

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.

Lesser Whitethroat

September 11, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Something disappears
Is it knowledge?
Or is it something more precious?
Pressed grass where weight should have been,
a tree limb uncontrollably shaking,
leaves on their way down,
the mind rattling under a hat-brim
a cat, blank off the ground –

nightfall.

Make this the opening that you prayed for.

You can change sides,
scale the wall, distill every one of your wishes
into the bandit’s bliss. Lift yourself,

and you will flow through a thousand airs –
with each adjustment you might lose strength,
Nevertheless,
climb and take height
climb and take one story at a time.

Land light above a window, a busy kitchen
is best,
the room with the burning hearth will also do.
Take in the fragrance of daily life,
but do not take part. Your feet might walk rooftops,
but your head graces heaven
shoulder to shoulder with the incense and the graspless.

Wherever you find doorways slip in as if indigenous,
or a hole –
keep your breathing pressed,
less, lesser, less…
Yes!

You are the size of a mouse
the introverted house guest,
whether you are dressed in monk’s grey,
the dusty cloak of an old mountain hag…

if you are seen
to be a man, not a man –
your feathers remain the same.
If anyone should ask, your Western name
is Sylvia.
Do you understand?

Remember, if you are caught, you are neither
our son nor our daughter.
You are an orphan,
but you also have many kin –
in the Sahara, Arabia, India, Mongolia…
even Siberia, such ideas are comforting.

Remember everything you have accomplished
everybody you love… then drop them over the edge.
Now you are lesser,
more enlightened,
Yes?
If you should be mistaken for a common
thief, if you are about to lose your hand –
make your heart stay red,
seal your mouth and freeze your throat.
At your centre you shall hurt
until you glow
and become so beautiful.
Silence is so…
I am afraid
you will find there is nowhere else to go,
There are so many thorns in the hedgerow – the land fruitless.

The mountain pass? Impossible
under this new snow.

by Eileen Pun

The Poetry Centre has some very exciting news to announce this week, as we begin a wonderful new chapter (or stanza) in our work. Tune into our social media or check our website for details this Friday…

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Eileen Pun was born in New York, US and now lives in Grasmere, Cumbria where she works as a freelance writer, poet and artist. Her work has recently been published in several young poets anthologies, including a showcase of new Black and Asian writing in the UK: Ten, The New Wave published by Bloodaxe (2014). In 2015, Eileen was a recipient of the UK Northern Writer’s Award (England). She also received a Lisa Ullmann Travelling Scholarship (LUTSF) to China in support of her interdisciplinary work in movement and poetry. In March 2016 Eileen was invited as a guest reader for a residential to the Ted Hughes Arvon Centre, Lumb Bank for Creative Writing. Read more about Eileen’s work on her website.

from The Barrow Seven

September 4, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Walter Lewis Goodchild

Hanger-on, aged 35

Polished like brown saddle leather, the penny
he left under the pillow for his lad.
The tooth had been loose for days
and the night time groans
would stir him to nudge Lizzy
to tend to the child
and avoid a chorus.
Then yesterday, between forefinger
and thumb it took some fiddling
to loop string to incisor,
leading twine to door handle.
The fourth attempt pulled it
followed by a shrill scream
that would ring through the house for weeks.

by Karl Riordan

Notes from Smokestack:

‘The Barrow Seven’ is a sequence of poems commemorating the seven men killed in the Barrow Colliery in 1907.

Karl Riordan spent much of his late teens in a tattooist’s studio, fascinated by the declarations of love, badges of pride and intricate designs that reminded him of the Stilton legs of his grandfather, a miner tattooed by a working life spent underground. In his powerful debut collection, Riordan recalls and celebrates growing up in the South Yorkshire coalfield – holidays and haircuts, football pools and pool halls, Mackeson and Temazepam, Saturday night and Monday morning. The Tattooist’s Chair is a study in working-class history from the Barrow Colliery disaster of 1907 to the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, St Francis in a Sheffield pet shop, Connie Francis on the dansette and Charlie Williams always having the last laugh. You can read more about the book on the Smokestack website.

Seamus on the Tube

August 21, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Looking away, not looking away –
The happenstance of what may change everything;
Those standing commuters moving off at Charing Cross
For the Bakerloo Line and then your eyes lifting

Above those seated opposite, as one does, to read
Between faster Broadband and Las Vegas –
“Where your accent is an aphrodisiac,” it says,
And where “what happens here, stays here,”

The Railway Children where in the white cups 
Of the telegraph wires a young boy knows 
That words are carried in the shiny pouches of raindrops.
Like this poem carried for you in the red and white Tube

On the Northern Line in cold January’s real freeze;
Snow is promised in the suburbs so everyone’s scarved
Against the weather. Words taking you back to the fifties
And his boyhood summers before everything changed.

Reaching Warren Street, you’ve read it 
Four or five times, absorbed the innocent wisdom 
And sense of the thing. Those people opposite 
See a crazy old man mouthing words, appearing to sing.

by Tony Curtis

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries for just one more week! Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. First Prize in both categories is £1000, with £200 for Second. The competition is open for submissions until 11pm BST/10pm GMT on 28 August 2017. Visit our website for more details and to enter, and please feel free to share news of the competition with friends and colleagues.

The TOAST Poets scheme is now open for applications until midnight on 25 August! TOAST is a professional development project for mid-career poets. It takes the form of eleven workshops over the course of a year from September 2017 – Summer 2018. Each TOAST poet is offered two, hour-long mentoring sessions with an established poet or editor to discuss their work and what steps they might take to progress. This year’s mentors are Hannah Lowe and Kayo Chingonyi. Visit the TOAST website for more details and to apply.

Notes from Seren:

Seren celebrates the 70^th birthday of the Welsh poet Tony Curtis with the publication of his From the Fortunate Isles: New and Selected Poems. This landmark book features poems from ten of his previous collections, in addition to a substantial number of new poems: marking a career in poetry fifty years in duration. This is a poet whose themes and variations remain consistent: a deep affection for his roots in West Wales, tender attachments to family, a profound interest in the wars of the last century, and an abiding fascination for all art forms, particularly painting and poetry. Writing about Tony’s poetry, the late Helen Dunmore commented: ‘The poems reverberate with present, sensuous experience, but beyond their immediacy there is a deep hinterland of public and private histories, of grief and delight.’ You can read more about the new book on the Seren website.

Tony Curtis was born in Carmarthen in 1946. He studied at Swansea University and Goddard College, Vermont, USA and is the author of a number of poetry collections and pamphlets, including: Taken for Pearls (1993), War Voices (1995), The Arches (1998), Heaven’s Gate (2001) and Crossing Over (2007). He is the editor of a number of popular anthologies on subjects ranging from war to Pembrokeshire, Snowdonia, coal, and orphans in the charitable anthology Tokens for the Foundlings (2012). His many critical books include The Art of Seamus Heaney (1982), and Dannie Abse (1985), How Poets Work (1996) and Welsh Painters Talking (1997). Curtis has won the National Poetry Competition, the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Cholmondeley Award. He is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at the University of South Wales, where he established and was Director of the MPhil in Writing, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has toured widely, reading his poetry to international audiences. You can read more about Tony’s work on his website and on his Facebook page.

Hurricanoes

August 14, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Fifteen years before I’d heard of King Lear I walked home
from a party through a storm, daring the sideways rain to
stop me, clenching my jaw, livid to the gills in a stretched-
arm soaking.

Turns out I’d also lost a girl, I kissed her in the disco the week
before, fell immediately to lovesickness, dry-mouthed, way
off the pace during 5th-form games, nights spent praying
to any god who’d listen that her crowd would show and I
could get to know her name, and in doing so use my tongue
again.

The late evening sun lit up the crosstown bus, but by the
time I saw her in the kitchen I’d had three ciders and the sky
outside was heavy as a boxer’s eyes.

She was sat on the stovetop wrapped around a Mod while
his Fred Perry friends stared into their vodkas and orange
squash. I remember a hot throat and a cold torso. Not the
spot for a New Romantic. Inner chatter took over.

Tearing up in the street I bated the wind, beckoned it over,
butted it for seven miles, drove into the rain with my
promontory chest, a deposed king wailed his misfortune to
the only gods left.

They ordained a fever slow to subside and the next fort-
night in bed. I no longer talk to the elements though they
often whisper in my head.

by Daniel Roy Connelly

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries for just two more weeks! Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: English as an Additional Language and Open category. First Prize in both categories is £1000, with £200 for Second. The competition is open for submissions until 11pm GMT on 28 August 2017. Visit our website to enter, and please share with fellow poets or poetry lovers!

The TOAST Poets scheme is now open for applications! TOAST is a professional development project for mid-career poets. It takes the form of eleven workshops over the course of a year from September 2017 – Summer 2018. Each TOAST poet is offered two,hour long mentoring sessions with an established poet or editor to discuss their work and what steps they might take to progress. This year’s mentors are Hannah Lowe and Kayo Chingonyi. Visit the TOAST website for more details and to apply.

Notes from Little Island Press:

At once personal and hauntingly universal, Extravagant Stranger is the compelling memoir of self-professed ‘global scalliwag’ Daniel Roy Connelly – former diplomat, theatre director, Shakespeare scholar and conscience-stricken father. Laced with international intrigue and hilarious moments of well-aimed self-scrutiny, here is a book – like the life it relates – truly without comparison. Read more about the book and hear Daniel read from his work on the Little Island Press website.

A former British diplomat, Daniel Roy Connelly is a theatre director, actor and professor of creative writing, English and theatre at John Cabot University and the American University of Rome. He has acted in and directed theatre in America, the UK, Italy and China, where his 2009 production of David Henry Hwang’s M Butterfly was forced to close by the Chinese secret police.

His writing is widely published in print and online. He was the winner of the 2014 Fermoy International Poetry Festival Prize, a finalist in the 2015 Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Prize and winner of the 2015 Cuirt New Writing Prize for poetry. Recent work has appeared in The North, The Transnational (in German), Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Moth, Acumen and Critical Survey and he has a forthcoming pamphlet from Eyewear Publishing as part of their Aviator Series. Follow Daniel’s work on his website and via Twitter.

Little Island Press is an independent publisher of fiction, poetry and essays. Founded in 2016, it publishes innovative, intellectually ambitious writing in elegant, hardback editions designed by the award-winning design studio typographic research unit. Find out more about the press on its website and follow its activities on Twitter.

The Spoonbill Tastes the New Menu

August 7, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The table was laid with tureens, deep dishes – even vases
were shaken of flowers and filled with the tasting menu
of the season: steaming broths and stews, delicate and hearty.

The visitor trod slowly among the dishes, then, stepping carefully
into each one as if testing bathwater, paddled the fragrant
silt of herbs, undissolved stock cubes, churning up the bed

of each pot. The maitre’d pursed his lips at the scaly feet
wading about in the china, his stomach rumbling at wafts
of french onion, vichyssoise, bisque (it wasn’t his idea to invite

their esteemed guest or her unorthodox methods to the table
but the chef marked noone as more adept at judging the calibre
of soups). One by one she lowered her open bill into each

tureen, waving it in an infinity sign from side to side, filtering
for morsels, pausing to hoik a crouton into her pale throat.
She made no noise, no sign of joy. The chef peered through

the porthole of the kitchen door, his brow beaded with sweat
until the last soup was uncovered: a bouillabaisse, dense
with clams and chunks of fish. The visitor raised her wings

in ecstasy and plunged her utensils straight into the broth,
grabbing at squid tentacles and shrimp, garlicky stock clagging
her feathers, then gave the only applause ever reported

in her career. A clack of spoons, like castanets, resounded
through the room, and the critic pressed oily prints
on the tablecloth in the run-up to flight: five lopsided stars.

by Jasmine Ann Cooray

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries for less than one more month! Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: English as an Additional Language and Open category. First Prize in both categories is £1000, with £200 for Second. The competition is open for submissions until 11pm GMT on 28 August 2017. Visit our website for more details.

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Jasmine Ann Cooray is a poet and therapist from London, of Sri Lankan and mixed European lineage. Spurred by a silent adolescence, she now designs and implements a variety of projects that cultivate emotional literacy through poetry. In 2013 she was Writer in Residence at the National University of Singapore and has just finished tenure as a BBC Performing Arts Fellow with Spread the Word. Her first full collection is almost complete, and she is working on a collaborative poetry and aerial arts show with Upswing about what it means to trust. To balance her frequent reclusiveness, she does an excellent line in hugs. You can follow Jasmine on Twitter, and watch her read one of her poems, ‘Ice Cream Box of Frozen Curry’, here.

With this poem we continue our selection of poems from Sidekick Books’ four volumes of Birdbooks. In 2009, with two micro-compendiums under their belt, Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone, the editors at Sidekick, discussed the idea of a book of bird poetry – but one in which less well known species were on equal terms with the popular ones. There are dozens of poems about herons, eagles, ravens and nightingales, not so many about the whimbrel, the ruff, the widgeon or the hobby. Paper-cut artist Lois Cordelia was recruited to give the series its distinctive covers, and over 150 artists and illustrators were commissioned over six years to complete the series. The first volume is now in its second printing. Find out more about the Birdbook series on the Sidekick website.

End of the Year Blues

July 31, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The days will slowly stretch themselves,
I know, and I’ve watched many winters
come and go through different eyes.
Nothing should surprise.

Once they were those of a raw young
boy cycling home in the evening gloom
full of promise and expectation, eagerly
awaiting summer’s invitations, cricket
and tennis on seamless lawns, endless
seaside days, and, later, girls to cavort with
beneath the sun’s fading rays.

And now these eyes have become those
of an ageing man, and each turning year
another hurdle, an unkind countdown
from a time whose end, one always
thought, would never come, too young
to care, illusion’s snare.

Yet seeing dear ones vanish each fragile
year stiffens the resolve, reminds that
dark, light, dark, light is the way our world
revolves, gives you the will to fight on,
value all you have as, once more, the dark
dissolves around you, and light restores.

by Jeremy Robson

Notes from Smokestack:

After breaking a thirty-five year writer’s block with Blues in the Park, Jeremy Robson’s new collection of poems is his second book in three years. Subject Matters takes us into a world that is both contemporary and timeless. Many of these poems are personal, recalling the pleasure of a smile, a landscape or a song, and the lives of friends like Ron Moody and Dannie Abse. Others evoke scenes and subjects from an earlier era – Dick Barton, Roy Rogers, Paris in the 1950s, London jazz clubs, CND rallies, telephone exchanges with sexy names – occasionally drawing on his Jewish experience to give context to his depiction of a modern world where violence explodes with increasing fury and the sirens rarely stop. All subjects that matter. You can read more about Jeremy’s new book on the Smokestack website, and more about Jeremy’s work in this interview.