Meteor

April 3, 2017April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

And this is how everything vanishes,
how everything that vanishes begins,
the hinged moment looking forwards and back.
Like that night when we sat with the back door open,
the summer distilled to the scent of jasmine,
the scrape of cutlery, the chink of glass.
A robin stirred in the dusty hedgerow.
Clothes held our bodies as a mouth might a kiss.
Then the meteor brought us to our feet:
a stripped atom, trapping electrons
to excite the darkness with its violet light.
I remember how it disturbed the heavens,
burned against the air to leave no trace.

by Deryn Rees-Jones

The Poetry Centre is delighted to announce the launch of this year’s Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition! We are also excited to say that this year our judge is the award-winning poet Helen Mort. With two top prizes of £1000 on offer, the competition seeks to celebrate the great diversity of poetry being written in English all over the world. Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: English as an Additional Language – for poets who write in English as an additional language, and Open category – for poets whose first language is English. 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.

This Saturday, head along to the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Oxford for ‘Nevertheless, she persisted: an evening of feminist/equality poetry in Oxford’. Presented by The Persisters, this event will encourage poetry, equality and empowerment for all. The headliners are Kelley Swain and Rowena Knight, and there will be an open mic open to all. Sign up from 19:00. Entry £4. Profits will be donated to Oxfordshire Sexual Abuse and Rape Crisis Centre. You can find more details on the Facebook page.

Notes from Seren:

‘Meteor’ is included in What It’s Like to Be Alive: Selected Poems from the highly-regarded poet, Deryn Rees-Jones. A milestone in the career of this author, the book includes generous selections from her previous individual collections including her debut, The Memory Tray; her subsequent Signs Round a Dead Body; her murder-mystery in verse: Quiver; her T.S. Eliot prize-nominated, Burying the Wren; and her long poem inspired by Edward Thomas’ wife, And You, Helen. A poet of intimate lyricism, of thoughtful speculation, close to the natural world, or ‘creaturely’ as John Burnside puts it, this is work which balances a singular musical quality with a profound intelligence as well as a deep emotional power. Read more about the book on Seren’s website.

DerynRees-Jones was born in Liverpool, and educated in North Wales and London. Her debut, The Memory Tray, was nominated for the Forward Prize, and her most recent collection, Burying the Wren, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and nominated for both the Roland Mathias and the T.S. Eliot prize. Her other collections published by Seren include Signs Round a Dead Body; a murder-mystery in verse, Quiver; and a collaboration with the artist Charlotte Hodes, And You, Helen, that includes images alongside a long poem inspired by the wife of the poet Edward Thomas. She has edited the influential Modern Women Poets anthology and a companion critical book, Consorting with Angels, for Bloodaxe. In addition to being chosen as one of the Next Generation Poets in 2004, Deryn has received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and was picked as one of the top ten women poets of the decade in Mslexia magazine. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Liverpool where she co-directs the Centre for New and International Writing, and edits the Pavilion Poetry Series for Liverpool University Press. You can find out more about Deryn’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.

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.

THE POET ASKS HIS LOVE ABOUT THE ‘ENCHANTED CITY’ OF CUENCA

April 1, 2017April 20, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Did you like the city the water carved
drop by drop in the centre of the pines?
Did you see dreams and faces and paths
and the walls of pain the air lashes?

Did you see the blue crevice of a broken moon
that the Júcar moistens with crystal and trills?
Did your fingers kiss the thorns
that crown the remote stone with love?

Did you remember me when you climbed
to the silence the snake suffers,
prisoner of crickets and shade?

Did you not see in the transparent air
a dahlia of sorrows and joys
that my burning heart sent you?

by Federico García Lorca

‘The Poet Asks His Love about the ‘Enchanted City’ of Cuenca’ is copyright © the Lorca Estate, 2016. It is reprinted from Sonnets of Dark Love (Enitharmon Press, 2016) by permission of Enitharmon Press.

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

In The Tamarit Divan and the Sonnets of Dark Love, written toward the end of Federico García Lorca’s brief life, desire and death come together in poetic chiaroscuro. In these dark and final meditations and flashes of passion, the poet pays homage to Spanish mystics, to Italian masters of the sonnet, and to the Arab poets of his native Andalusia. This poem appears in the bilingual edition translated by Jane Duran and Gloria García Lorca with essays by Christopher Maurer and Andrés Soria Olmedo. Read more about the poem on the Enitharmon website, and join Jane Duran for an evening of ‘Love and Resistance’, a salon event presented by Hope Road and Enitharmon Press, where she will be reading with author Leo Zeilig. The event takes place on Tuesday, March 28 from 6-8pm at Enitharmon Editions, 10 Bury Place, London WC1A 2JL. For more details, visit Enitharmon’s site.

‘William Blake dreamed up the original Enitharmon as one of his inspiriting, good, female daemons, and his own spirit as a poet-artist, printer-publisher still lives in the press which bears the name of his creation. Enitharmon is a rare and wonderful phenomenon, a press where books are shaped into artefacts of lovely handiwork as well as communicators of words and worlds. The writers and the artists published here over the last forty-five years represent a truly historic gathering of individuals with an original vision and an original voice, but the energy is not retrospective: it is growing and new ideas enrich the list year by year. Like an ecologist who manages to restock the meadows with a nearly vanished species of wild flower or brings a rare pair of birds back to found a colony, this publisher has dedicatedly and brilliantly made a success of that sharply endangered species, the independent press.’ (Marina Warner.)

You can sign up to the mailing list on the Enitharmon site to receive a newsletter with special offers, details of readings & events and new titles and Enitharmon’s Poem of the Month. You can also find Enitharmon on Facebook.

In the Orchard

March 28, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Black bird, black voice,
almost the shadow of a voice,
so kind to this tired summer sky,
a rim of night around it,
almost an echo of today,
all the days since that first
soft guttural disaster
gave us ‘apple’ and ‘tree’
and all that transpired thereafter
in the city of the tongue.

Blackbird, so old, so young, still
happy to be stricken with a song
you can never choose away from.

by Anne Stevenson

There are only a few places left for our next poetry workshop this Saturday! It will be led by poet and teacher Sarah Hesketh and is entitled ‘“more than skin can hold”: Writing People’. The workshops runs from 10.30-4.30pm in the John Henry Brookes Building here at Oxford Brookes University, and will consider the questions that arise when we attempt to represent and remember others in our writing. All are welcome! Visit our website for more information and to sign up.

Alongside poet Kelley Swain and Claire Hamnett from the Oxfordshire Science Learning Partnership, Niall Munro (Poetry Centre Director), is one of the judges for the Oxfordshire Science Festival poetry competition! If you know pupils in Oxfordshire schools aged 7-16, please encourage them to enter! Full details (and information about prizes!) are available on the OSF website.

This Sunday, as part of the Oxford Literary Festival, actor Toby Jones talks to Oxford Brookes’ Professor Simon Kövesi about his life and career and how he interprets the written word in his performances. You can book tickets for the discussion on the OLF website and hear Toby read Blake’s poem ‘London’ at this link.

‘In the Orchard’ is copyright © Anne Stevenson, 2016. It is reprinted from In the Orchard (Enitharmon Press, 2016) by permission of Enitharmon Press.

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

In the Orchard is not so much a collection of poems about birds as a book of memories and rare moments in which a number of familiar birds have played a spark-like role in bringing poems about. They are chiefly lyrical in character and range in time from ‘Resurrection’ written over fifty years ago to recent poems like ‘The Bully Thrush’, but they are not ordered chronologically and shouldn’t be associated with events in the poet’s private life. The etchings by Alan Turnbull are the result of his patient and painstaking study of each bird as it relates to the poem in which it appears. You can read more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

Anne Stevenson, an Anglo-American who has lived in Britain for many years, published eleven collections of poems with OUP before Bloodaxe Books brought out two further volumes incorporated into her Collected Poems 1995–2005. Her Selected Poems were published by The Library of America, after she won The Poetry Foundation of America’s Neglected Master’s Award in 2007. In the same year she received the Lannan Prize for a Lifetime’s Achievement in poetry. In recent years Bloodaxe has published Stone Milk (2007) and Astonishment (2012). Find out more about Anne Stevenson’s work and hear her read from her poems on her website.

Willow Tit

March 21, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Her beak is a split thorn
carving a zipline,
undressing the seedpod.

Ignore her calls,
those sudden shudders
of breath in a pinetree.

Ignore her completely.
Some birds in China
sculpt nests from spit;

she’ll hammer a home
in your huge neglect,
eyeshadowed, black-capped.

In the land of the dead
the judges will balance
your heart and her feather.

by John Clegg

Happy World Poetry Day! This Thursday, our Visiting Professor Michael Parker and Aleksandra Parker discuss the new English edition of Andrzej Franaszek’s biography of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, which they have translated and edited, and his relationship with Seamus Heaney. There is more information about the book on the Harvard Press website. The event takes place in room JHB 205 of the John Henry Brookes Building at Oxford Brookes University, is free to attend, and refreshments will be served. All are welcome!

Our next poetry workshop will be led by poet and teacher Sarah Hesketh and is entitled ‘“more than skin can hold”: Writing People’. It will take place on Saturday 1 April from 10.30-4.30pm in the John Henry Brookes Building here at Oxford Brookes University. The workshop will consider the questions that arise when we attempt to represent and remember others in our writing, and all are welcome! Visit our website for more information and to sign up. Please note that places are limited!

Finally, this Sunday, the Director of the Poetry Centre, Niall Munro, will be in conversation with poet and publisher Andy Croft at the Oxford Literary Festival about why poetry matters. More details can be found on the OLF website.

John Clegg was born in Chester in 1986, and grew up in Cambridge. In 2013, he won an Eric Gregory Award. He has published a pamphlet, Captain Love and the Five Joaquins (The Emma Press, 2014) and a full-length collection, Holy Toledo! (Carcanet, 2016) He works as a bookseller in London.

Notes from Sidekick Books:

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.

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.

I found my father’s love letters

March 14, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

To my unknown father

I found my father’s love letters
in strange and obscure places,
hidden in dark secret spaces,
where memories had closed the doors.

I found blank letters, with matching cards and envelopes.
A small drawer filled with letters unfinished,
crossed through, curling at the edges,
turning in the colour of time.

There was one in Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera
sandwiched somewhere between
Fermina’s rejection of Floretina
and a lifetime of loving, waiting for true love.

I found some penned in a note pad, half-written, half-thought,
scribbled to capture fleeting thoughts,
earnest in writing the emotional overflow
that time edits into streams flowing over with love.

I found one folded
lost in the attic
an elegy to love
that time had forgotten.

I searched to find the true name to those letters entitled my love.
A secret lover? Distant lover? First time lover?
or even my mother of whom you gave a thousand names
but I never heard you call her my love.

by Roy McFarlane

The Centre is co-sponsoring an exciting symposium called ‘Poetics of Home: Place and Identity’ which will be in London this Saturday 18 March. It will feature presentations and dialogues by a diverse range of established and emerging poets and poet-researchers whose work engages with and interprets the meanings of homeland and cultural identity. It also includes a reading by George Szirtes and Hannah Lowe. There are a few tickets remaining, so sign up via this page.

Notes from Nine Arches:

This debut collection of poems by former Birmingham Poet Laureate Roy McFarlane explores love, loss, adoption and identity in powerful, precise and emotionally-charged poetry. From bereavement comes forth a life story in poems; the journey of sons, friends, lovers and parents, and all the moments of growing-up, discovery, falling in and out of love and learning to say goodbye that come along the way. Themes of place, music, history, and race interweave personal narratives, with poems that touch on everything from the ‘Tebbitt Test’ and Marvin Gaye to the Black Country, that ‘place just off the M6’. Distinct and memorable, McFarlane’s poems are beautifully crafted, intricately focused, moving their readers between both the spiritual and the sensual worlds with graceful, rapturous hymns to the transformative power of love. Read more about the book on the Nine Arches website, and more about Roy’s work on his own website. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets (The Terrors by Tom Chivers and The Titanic Cafe closes its doors and hits the rocks by David Hart) were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2012, Nine Arches launched the Debut New Poets Series of first collections and the press has now published more than 30 collections of poetry and 10 issues of the magazine. We continue to build a reputation as a publisher of well-crafted and innovative contemporary poetry and short story collections. Follow Nine Arches on Facebook and Twitter.

The House on Fire

March 8, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Paper burns the fastest. And the dried flowers
you leave on all the windowsills, and the piano
flaring its final silence. All that silver
running to mercury. The noise of it fills each room
until the roof angles up off its beams.
In the bathtub your hair splays out like white
weed. The wallflowers dozing against the porch
slump into their own scorched scent.
Each room breathless and slamming its doors,
flames leaning down to touch the water –
Then we’re walking through the ruts of the frozen field again,
my red wellies, the dry sheets of ice that crack like toffee,
the horses echoing out the mist and nuzzling velvet
into the palms of our hands. And you’re in the kitchen
cutting puffballs with the bread knife, and you’re sowing
crumbs into the flowerbeds, and saying not yet.
Then you’re striking matches at the cooker
with your swollen fingers all bent
and the phone is ringing,
and the light is in my eyes. I’ve seen ghosts
pour like water through a dim room, white things,
weak things that scatter in a draught, and now I see you,
and how your ghost is like fire: roaring,
laughing, eating.

by Rhiannon Hooson

Our next poetry workshop will be led by poet and teacher Sarah Hesketh and entitled ‘“more than skin can hold”: Writing People’. It will take place on Saturday 1 April from 10.30-4.30pm in the John Henry Brookes Building here at Oxford Brookes University. The workshop will consider the questions that arise when we attempt to represent and remember others in our writing, and all are welcome! Visit our website for more information and to sign up. Please note that places are limited!

The Centre is co-sponsoring an exciting symposium called ‘Poetics of Home: Place and Identity’ which will be in London on 18 March. It will feature presentations and dialogues by a diverse range of established and emerging poets and poet-researchers whose work engages with and interprets the meanings of homeland and cultural identity. It also includes a reading by George Szirtes and Hannah Lowe. For more information, contact the organizer, Jennifer Wong, via poeticsofhome2017@gmail.com

And finally, Happy International Women’s Day! To celebrate, this week’s publisher, Seren, is offering its acclaimed anthology, Women’s Work at half price! Visit the website for more details.

Notes from Seren:

A thoughtful, complex and lyrical first collection of poems by Rhiannon Hooson, The Other City is inspired by personal history as well as stories from classical mythology, and in the book the poet uses gorgeous specific details that bring her poems to life. She also has a lively way with a narrative, pulling one into a story that might be about Zeus, a lover’s infatuation with her hair, or a cat that tracks ‘finches/ across the thin crust of snow’. There are quite a few poems about her childhood in Wales: the farm where she grew up, the rooms presided over by her father and mother: ‘…the fizz of green kindling,/the line of boots in the porch’.

Rhiannon Hooson was born in Mid Wales in 1979, where she lived until moving to the north of England in 1998. She studied and later taught at Lancaster University, where she was awarded first an MA in Creative Writing (with Distinction), then a PhD in poetry. Her first pamphlet, This Reckless Beauty, was published in 2004, and in 2008 she received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. Her work has appeared in a number of literary magazines and anthologies. She now lives in the Welsh marches after time spent living in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Writing about her new book, The Other City, Graham Mort has commented: ‘This is a beguiling debut from a poet who already has a recognizable voice and emotional register. Sensuous, musical, darkly involved, the poems make and confound their own realities.’ You can read more about TheOther City on the Seren website, and more about Rhiannon’s work on her site.

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’ MyFamily 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.

The Snow Bunting

February 21, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A mason times his mallet
to a lark’s twitter
Basil Bunting Briggflatts

Big Voice Ben sings the Monday Morning song to Susie.
Finn Balor hits the coup de grace to pin Samoa Joe.
Chloe Sevigny is 41 years of age. I know Timothy Hutton
starred in The Falcon and the Snowman, which was directed
by Snow Bunting.

Two birds, one one legged, the other bipedal, sing.
One’s song operatic, the other popular.
I own no birds, and so feel terrible to find that worm
in the road, inching towards cars near Harlesden.
What waste, they need those nutrients in the Arctic.

The Snow Bunting holds a sign that says Don’t Leap.
It’s fire-born in a box, the enemy of salamanders
and as it enter the galaxy, its main thing is stolen
from the Black Library.

One day you’ll work for me says the Snow Bunting,
on the way out. So the other bird pursues,
and punches the Snow Bunting.
Why couldn’t it just have kept its mouth shut?

The Snow Bunting stars in movies with the most impossible
combination of words, like Black Dawn, Half Past Dead,
and Point Blank. It runs like a little girl covered in bees,
but you can’t say anything about that.

What’s the best cartoon to watch when you’re smoking
your home made cigarettes, Snow Bunting?
The call is the distinctive rippling whistle
of the monogamous snowflake, arctic specialist.
It’s not your friend. You don’t know anything about it.

by SJ Fowler

This weekend, three of our students will take part in The University Camarade, curated by this week’s poet, SJ Fowler. Jennifer Wong, Abigail J. Villarroel, and Christina Murphy have been paired up with other students from different universities to produce collaborative poetry that they will perform this Saturday 25 February at Rich Mix in London from 7.30pm. This promises to be a very exciting event and it is free to attend! You can find more information about it on the Rich Mix website.

‘The Snow Bunting’ is copyright © SJ Fowler, 2016. It is reprinted from Birdbook IV: Saltwater and Shore (Sidekick Books, 2016) by permission of Sidekick Books

SJ Fowler is a poet and artist. He has published five collections of poetry and been commissioned by Tate Modern, BBC Radio 3, The British Council, Tate Britain and Wellcome Collection. He is the poetry editor of 3am magazine, Lecturer at Kingston University, teaches at Tate Modern and is the curator of the Enemies project. He is a high functioning vegan bear, befriends birds and will protect their eggs with electric technologies. Currently he is writing an autobiography of the famous Hyde Park Mud Crow. Find out more about his work on his website.

Notes from Sidekick Books:

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.

Lip Service, or La Haine

February 13, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Kiss you, take your children.
Riotous though it is, this shit’s not for kids.

La Haine is bloating through drive-in speakers, serenading ‘68
miasma, she and Humbert staring down the barrel of the same
animal gun, wincing.

I will cross you if you come over all drunk-like,
tarantella con dolcezza with your latest organ grinder.
Find Slovenia with your head full of black, black wine
— dim donkey piñata —
an industry of collagen in scapegoat giallo.

How can I follow the winters,
archangel of interns; doubting Thomas
and his motives. Intimate metastasis
intrigues the censor, his biting wounds
inwardly glow

and Venus infers her worth from a table.
Her onus, her offending isotopes,
eyes big as gum balls, swings rapidly,
a timeshare in blazing saddles and
neat little ellipticals.

I hope, I know as you do,
we’ll settle kindly out of court;
— you form –isms like Christmas —
sweet Mary shares her sweat with an ostler,
a meek swearing cross to milk.

by Charlotte Newman

Poetry news! Award-winning Danish poet Pia Tafdrup visits the UK this week in a short tour organized by the Poetry Centre. Pia will be in Reading on Wednesday, reading with Peter Robinson, will be in discussion with Fiona Sampson in Ledbury on Thursday, and will be reading withPhilip Gross in Oxford on Friday. For more details, visit the dedicated page on the Centre’s website. To coincide with Pia’s visit, the Story Museum is running two exciting workshops for primary-age children about the work of Hans Christian Andersen (a significant source of inspiration for Pia Tafdrup). The workshops, based on Andersen’s stories ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and ‘The Princess and the Pea’ take place on Friday 17 February from 11-12.15pm and1-2.15pm, and are suitable for children aged 5-8. Visit the Story Museum website for more information and to book places. Tickets are £6.

Poet and critic Sean O’Brien is giving the Weidenfeld Lectures at St Anne’s College here in Oxford over the next few weeks. Tomorrow his lecture is entitled ‘Displacement: Irish poetry and poets of Irish descent in Britain.’ The events takes place at 5.30pm in the Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre at St Anne’s College. He will also be giving a reading with Patrick McGuinness at The Albion Beatnik on Sunday 26 February from 6pm. All are welcome to these events, and you can find more details on the St Anne’s website.

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

Trammel is a radical book of poetry for an uncertain future. Voracious in her critique of modernity, Charlotte Newman ranges across the spectra of social and sexual politics – from Brexit to the Bechdel Test via Renaissance art and vintage computer games. These poems are stylish, muscular and linguistically agile. Always driven by a musical engine, Newman weaves the hard language of politics, technology, finance, science and the law into a new lyric texture. Urbane yet uncompromising, Trammel is the powerful debut collection from a voice that demands to be heard. You can read more about the book on the Penned in the Margins website, and read a further sample here.

Charlotte Newman was born in Surrey in 1986. She read English at Selwyn College, Cambridge and holds an MA with Distinction in Modern and Contemporary Literature from Birkbeck, University of London. She won the inaugural Sabotage Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet in 2013 and was featured in The Salt Book ofYounger Poets in 2011. After a brief stint indexing the entire back catalogue of The Erotic Review, she worked as a journalist and publicist for a leading family law rm, writing articles for national newspapers while also contributing freelance reviews to The Observer, The New Statesman and Poetry Review, among others; she was shortlisted for The Scotsman’s Allen Wright Award for theatre criticism. Charlotte lives in London with her husband, the poet James Brookes, and works as a political communications consultant, specialising in healthcare. Trammel is her first full collection. You can follow Charlotte on Twitter.

Penned in the Margins creates publications and performances for people who are not afraid to take risks. The company believes in the power of language to challenge how we think, test new ideas and explore alternative stories. It operates across the arts, collaborating with writers, artists and creative partners using new platforms and technologies. Read more about its work on its website. You can also follow Penned in the Margins on Twitter and on Facebook.

To Kill a Robin

February 6, 2017April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Come January, the pair of us clarted out to pluck
the morning, feet bound in brushwood – plumage
flying out of my Mother’s mouth. It was us
or the birds. If you kill a robin on New Year’s Day,
give a feather to a rodman and he’ll always sail clear.
She would not be a widow, not yet. You could say
I had a mind for the birds, the hunch of me
hunkered in spitting distance of the river, so still
and part of everything in my brown coat, I wanted
to grab my cold breath and pull it back in.
Ma stood listening for the tek tek, a cough hanging
frayed streamers over our heads. I caught the robin
in nithered fingers I barely dared open. There,
the bird perfectly refused to have its neck snapped.
It simply stopped in the cave of my grasp, one
last trill like water rolling a silence over my hands.

by Angela Readman

News from the Centre: leading Scandinavian poet Pia Tafdrup is visiting the UK from 15-17 February in a tour organized by the Poetry Centre. She’ll be in Reading (reading with Peter Robinson), Ledbury (with Fiona Sampson), and in Oxford (with Philip Gross). More details about the tour are on the Poetry Centre website, and there are only 10 tickets left for the date in Oxford. Book via our Shop now!

Be sure to tune in to BBC Radio 4‘s In Our Timeprogramme this Thursday to hear our colleague Prof Simon Kövesi discussing the poet John Clare with Prof Jonathan Bate and Dr Mina Gorji. There’s more about Simon’s research on his webpage.

Angela Readman’s The Book of Tides is a treasure trove of luscious, visceral poems that are delightfully risky, utterly thrilling and always close to the bone. Readman’s poetry teems with the rare and beautiful, the dark seaweed sparkle of a particular strand of skewed folklore; here we encounter fishermen and mermaids, a man with a beard of bees, a Tattooist’s daughter, Joan of Arc, and Beatrix Potter’s bed – a rich swell of voices with an irresistible and peculiar power.

Salt-speckled and sea tinged, these poems possess a distinctive eye for disconcerting and uncanny details – from notes in bottles and knotted handkerchiefs, to sequin fish-scales and drowned rats. To read Readman’s poetry is to be simultaneously unsettled and enraptured, and to encounter witchcraft, murder, love and loss. As The Book of Tides unfolds, will you dare to put your ear to its seashell, tune into its siren song and cast yourself adrift on its strange and alluring current? Read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

Angela Readman’s stories and poems have appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines, including London Magazine, Staple, Ambit and Mslexia, and she has won awards including the National Flash Fiction Competition. In 2012 she was shortlisted for the Costa Short Story Award for ‘Don’t Try This at Home’ – an award she would go on to win in 2013 with the story ‘The Keeper of the Jackalopes’. Her previous collections of poetry include Strip (Salt, 2007). The Book of Tides (Nine Arches Press, 2016) is her third collection of poems. You can read more about Angela Readman on the Nine Arches blog, and follow her work on Twitter.

Teenager

January 30, 2017April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The only thing he remembered
about the burglary was the dog
as he’d dragged it across the floor,
its claws out in resistance,
fur hooding its eyes.
His own teeth were bared
as he shook and twisted
the folds of its neck.
The dream of his father!
His mute mother
had brought him here to
join him and he’d found
a drunk, violent man
who beat her.
He knew at court, that he
had an extra punishment.
He would be deported when
the others were released.
At the time he didn’t care,
he hated this shit-hole of a country
as much as it hated him.
But inside, he found
he was good at maths,
got certificates in fitness,
reflected on his life.
But it was down in writing
that he hated his mother
so now they said he hadn’t
got family life.
He’d told them he was glad
he’d hurt the dog
so they said he had no remorse.
They told him he was now
nineteen and no longer a child
and would be deported with £46.
They asked him which airport
he wanted to go back to
but he didn’t know
what ones there were.
He’d left when he was seven.

by Caroline Smith

News from the Centre! Celebrated poet and teacher Tamar Yoseloff will be returning to Brookes to lead a workshop entitled ‘Poetry and Identity: Creating Character’. The workshop will take place on Saturday 11 February from 10.30-4.30pm and is designed to coincide with an exhibition by acclaimed French photographer Claude Cahun running in Brookes’s Glass Tank Gallery. The cost is £45 (£40 for Brookes staff and students!), and spaces are limited. There are currently only a few left. Please visit our website for more details and to book a place.

We are also excited to invite you to join us at one of the stops on a UK tour by Pia Tafdrup, one of Scandinavia’s leading writers. In a series of events from 15-17 February organized by the Poetry Centre and supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, Pia will read at the University of Reading with Peter Robinson, at Ledbury, where she will be in conversation with Fiona Sampson, and in Oxford, where she will read at Oriel College alongside T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet Philip Gross. You can find out more and book tickets via the Centre’s website. Again, places are limited!

Notes from Seren:

Vividly detailed and emotionally powerful, The Immigration Handbook is as revealing as it is timely. Here we meet with the traumatised individuals that the news stories only speak of as numbers. These are lives fraught with violence and tragedy that Caroline Smith has encountered in her work as the asylum caseworker for a Wembley MP. We journey with them through the labyrinthine government bureaucracies they must navigate to survive. With clarity and integrity she lays before us stories of stoic resilience and humorous forbearance, of kindness to others and of joy in the midst of sorrow. These are poems that step out of the headlines and into our hearts. You can read more about the book on the Seren website.

Caroline Smith was born in Ilford and grew up in Hertfordshire. She originally trained as a sculptor at Goldsmith’s College. Her first publication was a long narrative poem ‘Edith’ about a Lancashire-born woman who works as a nanny in Glasgow, but is haunted by a secret from her pre-war life. Smith’s first full collection, The Thistles of the Hesperides, is about the community of West Pilton in Scotland where Caroline lived in the 1980s when it was one of the most deprived housing estates in Europe. Published widely in literary journals, she has twice won prizes in the Troubadour Poetry Competition. Smith has had work set to music, broadcast on the BBC and is also the author of a musical play, TheBedseller’s Tale, that was performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. She lives in Wembley with her family. Find out more about Caroline’s work on her website or by following her on Twitter.

‘These poems are very moving and it’s hard to do justice to the way Caroline Smith conveys the anxieties, hopes and disappointments experienced by immigrants. She never allows the reader to forget that behind the refugee statistics there are suffering human beings; very often the victims of a seemingly insensitive and overstretched bureaucracy.’ Lord Alf Dubs (formerly a Director of the Refugee Council and Chair of Liberty. He was one of 669 Jewish children saved from the Nazis on the Kinderstransport.)

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.