5 (from Clavics)

January 20, 2017April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

         Making of mere brightness the air to tremble
         So the sun’s aurora in deep winter
                               Spiders’ bramble
                               Blazing white floss
                               Silent stentor!—
                      Viscosity and dross
                               No more amass
                               At the centre
         The whole anatomy of heaven and earth
         Shewn as the alchemists declare it
                               Poised beyond wrath
                               Resurrection
                               Of skin and bone
                               To dispirit…
                      The day cuts a chill swath,
                               Dark hunkers down.
         I think we are past Epiphany now.
         Earth billows on, its everlasting
                               Shadow in tow
         And we with it, fake shadows onward casting.

             Trust you to be a comic poet manqué
                    Evidence too sweet to dismiss
                      See above. Well, thank you!
                                (Taking the piss,
                                      Donkey?)
                                       Confess
                                  Melancholy
                      A touch too much my thing.
                       Erasmus, In Praise of Folly:
           Grand antidote no substitute for bling
by Geoffrey Hill

We’re delighted that 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! 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.

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

An elegiac sequence, mourning for the musician William Lawes who was killed at the Battle of Chester in 1645, Clavics is delicately constructed, each page comprised of a section made up of two stanzas, together forming the shape of a key. Before long, however, the tone makes it clear that nothing is to be taken at face value; amongst the lines are provocations and incongruities, playful references and about-turns. Clavics is a celebration of seventeenth-century music and poetry, yet is confrontational and sometimes shockingly modern. From one line to the next you may be pulled out of a potently evoked moment of history, thrust up against the wall of sexual politics and strained meaning in contemporary language, and then dropped back onto a battlefield. Read more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

From working-class Worcestershire roots, Sir Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016) became one of Britain’s most celebrated poets. In his distinguished literary career Hill published 19 books of poetry and also several books of criticism, collated in his award-winning Collected Critical Writings (OUP, 2008). In 2010 he was elected Oxford Professor of Poetry and in 2012 he was knighted for his services to literature. He previously taught at Leeds, Cambridge and Boston University, Massachusetts. His twelfth collection of poems, A Treatise of Civil Power, appeared in 2007, following on Scenes from Comus (2005) and Without Title (2006). Oxford University Press published his Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 in 2013.

‘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.

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.

My Girl

January 10, 2017April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

in the nineties Aunty Ann had all eight
rooms wired into the same Sky station
but since we didn’t know we spent each night
of our weekend watching girls undress
while bored men phoned in, telling them to
climb between each other’s legs/and/or
take a nipple into a yielding/heterosexual
mouth, force a simple moan perfected in adolescence.
We had our double bed with its chintz canopy,
our newly pink hair rubbing onto the pillowcases,
the crochet eiderdown heavy upon our
satisfied bodies; she was
sometimes jealous if I looked at the TV
for too long. We’d discuss
which parts in relation to the girls’ parts were normal
or in the dull and balmy half-light of morning
through semi-drawn blinds
which parts looked beautiful

by Melissa Lee-Houghton

Two exciting announcements from the Centre! This Saturday 14 January, the Poetry Centre is privileged to present a reading by internationally-acclaimed critic and poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Forward Prize-shortlisted poet Nancy Campbell. The event will begin at 7pm at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Oxford, and all are welcome. £2 on the door. More details are available on our Facebook page.

We are also delighted to announce that 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! Please visit our website for more details and to book a place.

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

Sunshine is the new collection from Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. A writer of startling confession, her poems inhabit the lonely hotel rooms, psych wards and deserted lanes of austerity Britain. Sunshine combines acute social observation with a dark, surreal humour born of first-hand experience. Abuse, addiction and mental health are all subject to Lee-Houghton’s poetic eye. But these are also poems of extravagance, hope and desire, that stake new ground for the Romantic lyric in an age of social media and internet porn. In this new book of poems, Melissa Lee-Houghton shines a light on human ecstasy and sadness with blinding precision. This book, which was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards, was also selected as one of the best poetry books of 2016 by both the Guardianand the Poetry School, and includes ‘i am very precious’, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2016.

You can find out more about the book on the Penned in the Margins website, where you can also read further poems from the collection.

MelissaLee-Houghton was announced as a Next Generation Poet in 2014. Her first and second collections are published by Penned in the Margins. BeautifulGirls was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her poem ‘i am very precious’ was shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She has received a Northern Writers’ Award for her fiction. She lives in Blackburn, Lancashire.

You can hear Melissa read from her work on the Poetry Archive, read more about her work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me

December 19, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I swooned at the large god of him, sunning.
A tooth for every day of my life.
He performed his run along the bank,
as males do. I brought my boat closer.
He took to following, at a distance.

I wasn’t taken in, knew his four-chambered heart
pumped love out and in, in and out,
knew his tongue had few good uses,
knew all about his grin. Yet whoever said he was cold-
blooded has never truly known this beast.

He brought out the prehistoric in me. I dived.
We swam, belly to belly, to where the Niles meet,
tussled as we thrashed among the weeds. After, I lay
the length of him, a limestone lilo, studs patterning
my skin. He smiled at me, often. Taught me all he knew.

Years later, when a man tried to drag me under,
I practised the force my lover had held back –
levered my small jaws open to their furthest extent,
splashed them down on the human’s arm.
My attacker still carries the mark of my smile.

by Katrina Naomi

This is the last Weekly Poem of 2016. The Poetry Centre wishes you a very Merry Christmas! We look forward to sharing more poems with you in 2017, as well as details of our upcoming readings, workshops, and events for 2017. For more initial details on those, do visit the Poetry Centre website.

Notes from Seren:

With warmth, flair and a certain ferocious wit, Katrina Naomi tears into her subject matter in The Way the Crocodile Taught Me: a childhood fraught with dislocation and violence but also redeemed by more tender memories of a sister and a kindly, although at times comically obtuse, grandmother. The tone of the work is as much tender as turbulent, reflecting the protagonist’s travails. Vicki Feaver has praised Katrina Naomi’s ‘cool voice and fierce eye’, and this pointed, lively and always entertaining book is sure to delight all those who know Katrina’s work, and undoubtedly win new fans for her courageous and unabashedly entertaining poems. You can read more about the book on Seren’s website.

Katrina Naomi has a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College. She was the first writer-in-residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, West Yorkshire and was recently writer-in-residence at Gladstone’s Library in North Wales where she wrote a sequence on the Suffragettes, published by Rack Press as Hooligans. Her debut collection The Girl with the Cactus Handshake received an Arts Council Award and was shortlisted for the London New Poetry Award. Her pamphlet Lunch at the Elephant & Castle won the 2008 Templar Poetry Pamphlet Competition and her pamphlet Charlotte Brontë’s Corset was published to acclaim by the Brontë Society. She is a Hawthornden Fellow, a tutor at Falmouth University and runs Poetry Surgeries for the Poetry Society. Katrina’s recent work has been broadcast on Radio 4 and published by the TLS, The Spectator, The Poetry Review and Poetry Wales. She received an award from the Royal Literary Fund in 2014 for her writing. She enjoys performing her poetry and collaborating with visual artists, musicians and film-makers. She recently had an exhibition at London’s Poetry Café entitled ‘The Argument: Art V Poetry’, following a collaboration with the visual artist, Tim Ridley. She is originally from Margate and lives in Cornwall.

You can find out more about Katrina’s work on her website, in this recent interview from Literature Works, and by following 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.

Cannibal

December 5, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Once I was so hungry, I tore the skin in strips from my feet
and ate it – a masseuse asked if I was burned?
There was protein there. I ate stories too,
tales of survival in the shell of planes.

People are said to taste like pork,
the Polynesians called white folk long pigs –
Did you know we’d all taste ourselves
all day long, if we could; that’s what poems are for.

I’d never eat a child.
I’d sooner die than eat a sibling.
Pork meat is white, fatty, fibroud
with the same strings that animate human days.

I’d like to think I could stay alive
on rain and my own dermis, beads of breast milk,
crusts of wax. My heart quietly consuming itself,
cardiac walls breaking down.

by Sarah Westcott

Today (Monday 5 December), the Poetry Centre presents a double dose of poetry from Steven Matthews, Kelley Swain & John Barnie. The three current poets in residence at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History will read from 12-1pm in JHB 208 at Oxford Brookes University, and then in the evening at The Albion Beatnik Bookshop from 7.30pm. All are welcome to either – or both! – events. You can find more details on the Poetry Centre website.

Notes from Pavilion Poetry:

In her first full-length collection, Slant Light, Sarah Westcott immerses the human self in the natural world, giving voice to a remarkable range of flora and fauna so often silenced or unheard. Here, the voiceless speaks, laments and sings – from the fresh voice of a spring wood to a colony of bats or a grove of ancient sequioa trees. Unafraid of using scientific language and teamed with a clear eye, Westcott’s poems are drawn directly from the natural world, questioning ideas of the porosity of boundaries between the human and non-human and teeming with detail.

Sarah Westcott’s debut pamphlet Inklings was the Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice for Winter 2013. Her poems have been published in journals including Poetry Review, Magma and Poetry Wales and in anthologies including Best British Poetry 2014 (Salt). Sarah grew up in north Devon, on the edge of Exmoor, and has a keen interest in the natural world. She holds a science degree and an MA in poetry from Royal Holloway, University of London. Sarah lives on the London/Kent borders with her family and, after a spell teaching English abroad, works as a news journalist. You can find out more about Sarah and her work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

Pavilion Poetry is a new contemporary poetry series from Liverpool University Press, edited by Deryn Rees-Jones, which seeks to publish the very best in contemporary poetry. Always international in its reach, Pavilion Poetry is poetry that takes a risk. Whether by new or established and award-winning writers, this is poetry sure to challenge and delight. Launched in 2015, Pavilion has already enjoyed considerable success, with Mona Arshi’s book, Small Hands, winning the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection at the 2015 Forward Prizes, and Ruby Robinson’s Every Little Sound being shortlisted for the same prize in 2016. You can read more about the series on the Liverpool University Press website.

Gavia stellata

November 21, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Who calls to the dark?

Who, when the shadows
are converted to morning,
when light pours out, when
day is turned to darkness
once more, when dark
is on the face of the sea,
who dives down, who
brings back a speck
to build on? I do. I did.

Who is the smallest
and brightest
and speckled
with stars? I am.

All things that gather
to shine I bear on my back
I raise on my wings
in the black of the waters,
in the deep vault of space.

Who dips and dives?
Dense bones take me down.

Who rose with a twin,
with another, who breasted
the face of the night, who
stitched the belt of stars
in Orion? Who speeds
without drag: bill like an awl
and flattened tarsus, neatest
and fleetest in streamlined
propulsion? Who took
Arcturus like a morsel of light,
a pinch of snuff, returned
to the surface?

Who calls to the dark;
who calls to the wind on
the surface of the water?
Who prompts the others
to dip and rise? Eyes like
seeds of garnet. Lightest
and brightest: gavia stellata,
the red-throated diver.

by Alexander Hutchison

This Thursday, Isy Mead, Head of Learning at The Story Museum here in Oxford, will launch a new monthly poetry workshop, held on the last Thursday of each month (except December). The workshop is open to anyone interested in writing poetry, from beginners to advanced. You can find more details on the Story Museum website.

And this Friday the Poetry Centre holds its International Poetry Competition awards event at Oxford Brookes, featuring readings from a number of the winning and shortlisted poets, from local young poets mentored by Kate Clanchy, and from the judge, Daljit Nagra. You can find more details of the winning and shortlisted poems on the Poetry Centre website

Notes from Sidekick Books:

With this poem we begin a 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.

Alexander Hutchison (1943-2015) was born in Buckie, lived in Glasgow, and was RLF Writing Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He published Scales Dog: Poems New and Selected (Salt Publishing) in 2007, and his first book, Deep-Tap Tree (University of Massachusetts Press, 1978) is still in print, He wrote in English and Scots – and his poem ‘Deil Tak the Hinmaist’ was more than a token dialect piece in The Best British Poetry2011. His poem ‘Gavia stellata’ comes from Birdbook II: Freshwater Habitats.

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.

Happy Seventieth Birthday Blues, Mr Zimmerman

November 8, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I’m staring into seventy, staring at that old bad news,
Yeah, staring into seventy, staring at the rank bad news.
I’m getting slowly smashed, but it’s not the getting smashed you’d choose.

It’s a wall that’s got no garden shining on the other side,
A wall that’s got no pardon, smiling on the other side –
Just ask any angel who ever crossed that divide.

I heard the devil singing, he was singing to me long ago,
He sang me through the sixties, he sang me years and years ago –
Sang Man, if you’re a woman you just have to grow and grow.
I’m a long-born woman, and it’s the shortest straw.
I’m a long-born woman, smoking my cheroot of straw.
But I’m no damned angel, I was born to be a whole lot more.

I’m looking at the wall. Are you telling me it’s a gate?
I’m looking at a wall, yeah, he’s telling me it’s the gate.
You can find it if you’re blind, baby blue, it’s not too late.

We’re only ever twenty, we’re only ever at the start.
We’re only ever peddling that iconic parabolic start.
And there’s no wall, baby, it’s the shadow of an empty heart.

Go cruising into seventy: seventy’s a broad highway;
Cruise along at seventy, along that broad highway –
You’ll soon be doing eighty, if the angels get out the way.

by Carol Rumens

The latest Poetry Review blog review is now available! Written by Alex Wortley, who recently completed his MA by Research about Seamus Heaney at Brookes, it examines a new collection of poetry by Michelle Cahill. You can read Alex’s review here.

The awards event for the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition takes place on Friday 25 November from 6-8pm. It will feature a reading by the judge, Daljit Nagra, as well as a number of the winning and shortlisted poets. If you would like to attend, please let us know by the end of this week. Simply reply to this e-mail.

Notes from Seren:

Animal People is the new collection by distinguished poet Carol Rumens. Often inspired by and infused with the weathers of various seasons of the year, many poems also feature a strong sense of place, whether it be the dramatic mountain rock-scapes of Snowdonia or the gritty streets of London and Hull. This particular poem has also appeared in the Seren anthology The Captain’s Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob Dylan at 70 edited by Phil Bowen, Damian Furniss and David Wooley. There is a strong sense of commemoration in this collection, of time passing and of the challenges of mortality, and also a number of brilliant pieces that are influenced by translations or re-readings of classic works of literature. The title poem refers to a sequence devoted to themes inspired by autism and what it means to be ‘on the spectrum’. Read more about Animal People on the Seren website.

Carol Rumens was born in South London. She has taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury, Queen’s University Belfast, University College Cork, University of Stockholm, and the University of Hull; she is currently Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Bangor. The author of sixteen collections of poems, as well as occasional fiction, drama and translation, Rumens has received the Cholmondeley Award and the Prudence Farmer Prize for her poetry, and has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her work has appeared regularly in publications such as The Guardian, The Observer and Poetry Review, and she currently writes the hugely popular ‘Poem of the Week’ feature for The Guardian. Writing about Rumens’s work in the Times Literary Supplement, Isobel Armstrong described her as ‘a European poet whose imagination goes beyond the confines of Europe, a poet of borders and transit, and of movement across frontiers which makes both the experience of alienation and that of “home” a relative matter.’ Read more about Rumens’ work on her website.

Self-Portrait at Primary School

October 24, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I was so obliging I let the weirdest, smelliest kid pick on me
because I thought it might make him feel better.
He smelled like an opened can. They called him the weirdo.

Instead of the red sweatshirt with the school logo on the right breast,
he had a generic red jumper which wasn’t even the right shade of red.

I remember the grain of the wood on the prefab classroom’s base
against my scalp as he gently, then firmly, rolled my head against it.
I remember the rolling turned to knocking, a tuft of my hair in his fist.

I didn’t say: Don’t do that because that hurts me. I didn’t
want to hurt his feelings. I remember smiling quizzically at him
and he beamed back, delighted with this human doll.

The relationship continued for a week until a dinner lady
marched us both to my teacher. The Weirdo was sent for counselling
and never allowed to go near me again.

And even at the time it struck me: maybe I was the dangerous one.
by Luke Kennard

News from the Centre! This week join us at Oxford Brookes for two terrific readings. First, acclaimed conceptual poet and public artist Ira Lightman will be with us on Wednesday at lunchtime (12-1pm, Special Collections, basement of the Main Library, Headington Campus). Then Forward Prize-shortlisted poet Sarah Corbett will read from her verse novel And She Was on Friday between 2.30-3.30pm (JHB 201, John Henry Brookes Building, Headington Campus). The readings are free, and everyone is very welcome to attend! Please share the news with colleagues and friends.

Luke Kennard has published five collections of poetry. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2005 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2007. He lectures at the University of Birmingham. In 2014 he was selected by the Poetry Book Society as one of the Next Generation Poets. His debut novel, The Transition, is published in 2017 by Fourth Estate. Read more about Cain on the Penned in the Margins website, and hear Luke read from his work on the Poetry Archive website.

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.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.

Belle Étoile

October 19, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

(after Paul Louis Rossi)

One more time
I’ve let myself drift
Through the network of darkened streets
Once more the boat has left harbour
And I’ve forgotten oars and compassMysterious
Women, or statues,
Stone façades or plaster faces
You steal my nights from me
You mix your blood with mine, in spite of me

Nothing welcomes me nothing
In the solitude where I wander
Not a single opening door
And the fluttering of handkerchiefs can’t hold me
The current is too strong, the rudder’s broken

Let it go give up
Don’t stretch out a hand to the drowned man
I’ll roll like a pebble to the sea
And don’t go grieving over him he has
His eternity of recollection innocence and forgetfulness

In the bitter strictness of the night
The stars are extinguished after so many glances
It’s between two waves that the voyage ends
The lighthouses winking to each other on the coast
I’m lit up suddenly like phosphorescence, glowing algae

by John Kinsella and Alan Jenkins

Booking for our exciting poetry writing/visual art workshop with Tamar Yoseloff closes tomorrow (Thursday) at 5pm! Just a couple of places remain, so move fast if you would like to join us! Visit the Poetry Centre page for more details.

We invite all our Weekly Poem subscribers to join us at the awards evening for our International Poetry Competition on Friday 25 November at Oxford Brookes from 6-8pm. The event will feature readings from our judge, Daljit Nagra, and the winning and shortlisted poets. To attend, please e-mail poetrycomp@brookes.ac.uk by 11 November with details of how many places you require. We hope to see you there!

This remarkable collaboration had its origins when John Kinsella and Alan Jenkins, two very different poets who had long admired and enjoyed each other’s work, discovered by chance that the new poems they were working on shared a preoccupation with the sea. Marine brings together those poems and others written since, all dealing with the sea in its many moods and weathers, with people’s relationship to and exploitation of their marine environment, from the Indian Ocean to the shores of the Atlantic; the two poets’ highly distinctive voices, while drawing on a dazzling variety of forms and sources, complementing each other in a powerful counterpoint. Read more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

Alan Jenkins’s volumes of poetry include Harm, which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 1994, A Shorter Life (2005), Drunken Boats (2008), and Revenants (2013). He is Deputy Editor and Poetry Editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He is a Fellow of the RSL. Learn more about Alan Jenkins’s work from his page on the British Council website

John Kinsella’s recent works of poetry include Armour (Picador, 2011) and Jam Tree Gully (WW Norton, 2012). Picador published Sack in November, 2014. He is editor and the author of anthologies, works of criticism, fiction and poetry. He is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. You can find out more about John Kinsella’s work from his website.

‘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.

The Things She Burned That Year

October 12, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Whole nights claimed her on sooty knees,
worshipping the heat of a first open fire.
She tended it with the caution of a mistress,

offered her past and part of her future.
She kindled her half-filled diary; each curling
page exposed the inky, unburned next.

All afternoon it read itself to the blaze,
settled down at dusk to a soft grey bed.
She was watching someone she knew grow old.

Then she’d fed the fire a banquet of porn
that she no longer had an attic to store.
The printed bodies, the breasts and cocks

were nibbled off by a bright green flame
before the paper charred in the usual way.
And the final text that lanterned out

in the beige-tiled fireplace flared so fast
that the thing she wanted to erase
was lost: even its capsicum name is dust.

by Judy Brown

News from the Centre! This Friday sees the first of our lunchtime readings at Brookes for the semester, featuring Seán Street and Jennifer Wong. All are welcome! Please feel free to bring your lunch!

There are just a couple of places left on the workshop led by Tamar Yoseloff entitled ‘The Space of the Poem’ on Saturday 22 October. Inspired by the exhibition by Pan Gongkai running at Brookes’ Glass Tank, we will look at examples of Chinese painting, concrete poetry and text-based sculpture as a way of generating new poems. You can read more about the workshop on the Brookes website, where you can also book your place. There is a reduced price for Brookes students and staff.

Threads Across Water is an exhibition of painting, print and sculpture by Carola Colley inspired by the poetry of Usha Kishore, which is currently running at The Mill Arts Centre in Banbury, Oxfordshire. To tie in with the show, there will be a workshop and reading by Usha Kishore on Saturday 15 October. The workshop, entitled ‘Poetising Myth’, will take place at the Mill Arts Centre from 2.30-4 p.m on Saturday, and the reading will take place at 5.30pm. Email carola.colley@gmail.com for details and to book your place, or visit the Facebook page for more details.

Notes from Seren:

Driven as much by thoughtful speculation and metaphysics as by personal experience and relationships, Judy Brown‘s poems surprise and delight at every turn. Crowds and isolation, and city and the country collide in Judy’s second collection. Spells living in London and Hong Kong and the author’s recent residencies in Grasmere and North Wales provide key moments of inspiration. Crowd Sensations is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Judy’s debut, Loudness, was shortlisted for the Forward and Fenton Aldeburgh first collection prizes. Judy writes and teaches in Derbyshire and London and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She was the Wordsworth Trust’s poet-in-residence for 2013 and was a 2014 Gladstone’s Library writer-in-residence. Judy won the Manchester Poetry Prize in 2010. Carol Rumens has described her as ‘a poet who instinctively sees the possibilities of defamiliarisation wherever she casts her penetrating, colour-loving eye.’

Reader, listener,

October 6, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

come in. I’m opening my door to you – the trap
door of a modern barn conversion with lots of little rooms,
vast paintings on the bare brick walls, a daring colour scheme,
sofas and awkward plastic chairs for interrogating guests

in that looking way. There’s soup. Bread in the oven to warm.
Take off your shoes. Take some spare socks – I know your own feet
offend you. I know your deepest thread, like a baked-in hair.
You wish someone would think of you, spontaneously

in the middle of the night; call you out of the dark like a comet
landing on your duvet. Come in, make yourself at home.
The walls here don’t have eyes. They’re dumb surfaces
onto which shadows of stags are cast like stalking giants.

by Ruby Robinson

Happy National Poetry Day! We hope that wherever you are you’ll have time to enjoy some poetry today, starting with this poem! The Poetry Centre will be handing out free poetry postcards in the John Henry Brookes Building at Oxford Brookes today for you to mail to friends and family who need poetry. You might also be interested to know that we have just announced the winners of our International Poetry Competition, and you can find more details on our website. There will be a special awards ceremony on 25 November, and all are welcome to attend.

And next Friday sees the first of our lunchtime readings at Brookes for the semester, featuring Seán Street and Jennifer Wong. All are welcome!

Finally, there are just a few places left on the workshop led by Tamar Yoseloff entitled ‘The Space of the Poem’ on Saturday 22 October. Inspired by the exhibition by Pan Gongkai running at Brookes’ Glass Tank, we will look at examples of Chinese painting, concrete poetry and text-based sculpture as a way of generating new poems – participants will be encouraged to share their first drafts during the session. You can read more about the workshop on the Brookes website, where you can also book your place. There is a reduced price for Brookes students and staff.‘Reader, listener,’ is copyright © Ruby Robinson, 2016. It is reprinted from Every Little Sound (Liverpool University Press, 2016) by permission of Liverpool University Press.

Notes from Pavilion Poetry:

Drawing from neuroscience on the idea of ‘internal gain’, an internal volume control which helps us amplify and focus on quiet sounds in times of threat, danger or intense concentration, Ruby Robinson’s brilliant debut, Every Little Sound, introduces a poet whose work is governed by a scrupulous attention to the detail of the contemporary world. Moving and original, her poems invite us to listen carefully and use ideas of hearing and listening to explore the legacies of trauma. The book celebrates the separateness and connectedness of human experience in relationships and our capacity to harm and love. You can read more about the collection on the Pavilion Poetry webpages.

Ruby Robinson was born in Manchester in 1985 and lives in Sheffield. She studied English Literature at the University of East Anglia and has an MA from Sheffield Hallam University where she also won the Ictus Prize for poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry (Chicago) and elsewhere. You can follow Ruby on Twitter.