Author: oxfordbrookesuni

The Cruel Mother

~ oxfordbrookesuni

after the ballad


Amongst the leaves I lie
teeth-bared,

raw as the sundown.
Scattered skins hang on the trees

like prayer flags – I am demon,
I am the bad-one.

I am the wild, edible bark.
You bit my tongue and made me roar.

I will barren you, bust up your eye,
scratch at damp dirt with these claws.

Where are you? Nest of twigs,
den in the woods,

hut with smoke at the door.
The home burns its riches.

My young slide onto the forest floor like eels.
They writhe –

branches hold them. Swaddle
small forms with dirt. They call

on into the blistering night.
Sky bubbles and caws.

Trees like dogs lick at the sun,
wide as horizon, large as moon.

The oak I lean on leans back,
bark like a spine.

Over the fence on the well-kept lawn
I hear them talk –

O there is nothing to be done,
Nothing, nothing to be done.

And hear him say
It is not his fault.

And they all agree
it was all up to me.

In the green wood
I sing to hope of rain.

I sing to blood
which falls and pours;

in the garden they sit, drink wine
and thunder, wonder

where I have travelled towards
but don’t stand and search

but talk, and worse they sigh,
O there is nothing, nothing to be done.

I will eat these babies,
cook them one by one.

The green wood says I should stay the night.
The green wood casts a curse

on those who say nothing can be done
and leave me, a wild cat, to run

into their sleep in hot damp beds,
into their eyes in the dark.

I am a clawed mother
and he will not have them back.

O the cruelty he weighed on me.


by Eleanor Rees

Over the next fortnight, we will be featuring two poems drawn from the new collections of Eleanor Rees and Sarah Corbett, and published by Pavilion Poetry. Both Sarah and Eleanor will be visiting Oxford on Friday 23 October – a super opportunity to hear two of the most exciting voices in contemporary poetry. The reading will take place at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Jericho from 7.30pm, and all are very welcome! More details can be found via Facebook.

The Poetry Centre has announced the winners of its Wellbeing Poetry Competition! Thank you to all who entered. You can see the shortlist and read the winning poems on the Poetry Centre website.

‘The Cruel Mother’ is copyright © Eleanor Rees, 2015. It is reprinted from Blood Child (Liverpool University Press, 2015) by permission of Liverpool University Press.

Notes from Liverpool University Press:

Eleanor Rees was born in Birkenhead, Merseyside in 1978. Her pamphlet collection Feeding Fire (Spout, 2001) received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and her first full-length collection Andraste’s Hair (Salt, 2007) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Glen Dimplex New Writers Awards. Her second collection
was Eliza and the Bear (Salt, 2009), and her most recent, Blood Child (Liverpool University Press, 2015). Rees has worked extensively as a local poet in the community and has a PhD from the University of Exeter in this practice. She often collaborates with other writers, musicians and artists and works to commission. She lives in Liverpool. You can read more about Eleanor’s book on the LUP website, on her own site, 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’s first three books are by three exciting voices: Sarah Corbett, Eleanor Rees, and Mona Arshi. Pavilion has already enjoyed considerable success, with Mona Arshi’s book, Small Hands, winning the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection at this year’s Forward Prizes. You can read more about the series on the Liverpool University Press 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.

Razorshell Wreck on Barleycove Beach on the Eve of All Saints’ Day

~ oxfordbrookesuni

A small wreck is a large wreck when a species is in retreat,
undertow and wave-sets soothe and stress between slate hills:
the rise & fall, the artwork re-inscribed in sand which will
gradually wash away, the full weight of the Atlantic.

So attuned, so sensitive, so determined to pull themselves down –
foot anchored hydraulic pull to start again down down down –
razorshell feedertube sucking low tide sweet and sour
into the glasses-case body, enrapture, huddling organs

snug against a cutthroat world’s predators, the larger shifts
making small changes massive, prescribe low-tide second-sight,
test hope as St Jude’s day swell ripped the world apart, a mass
of brethren exposed to make detritus of selves, the soup of origins and excrescence sharply in bands of shifting light,
dozens scattered on this earthquake beach, this harbour wave jewel
where corpses cut bare feet to bone or sinew, ghouls and gods
make sense of spring water bottles and plastic ropes binding
‘best kept secrets’. So many starved here, and razorshells make
discrete sub-fences that will briefly hold the residue of Lisbon’s collapse,
a history divined in shell, its dead reflections, separations along
vaguely perfect faultlines, what fate saw from below the sand.

by John Kinsella and Alan Jenkins

News! On Friday 23 October, poets Sarah Corbett and Eleanor Rees will be visiting Oxford to read from their exciting new books in an event organized by the Poetry Centre. It will take place at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Jericho, and all are very welcome! More details can be found via Facebook.

The Adam Phillips seminars at Keble College continue. Seminars focus primarily on American poetry of the twentieth century, and at the meeting Phillips will introduce the material and lead the discussion. For more details about the series, and forthe link to the reading material, please visit: https://tinyurl.com/nbgwdwb The next seminar will be on Robert Hass’s ‘On Teaching Poetry’, and will take place at 4.30pm on Wednesday 21 October in the Pusey Room, Keble College. All are welcome.

‘Razorshell Wreck…’ is copyright © John Kinsella and Alan Jenkins, 2015. It is reprinted from Marine (Enitharmon Press, 2015) by permission of Enitharmon Press. 

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

John Kinsella’srecent works of poetry include Armour (Picador, 2011) and Jam Tree Gully (W.W. 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.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 TimesLiterary Supplement. He is a Fellow of the RSL. You can read more about his collaboration with John Kinsella on the Enitharmon 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. 

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 Man From the Sea

~ oxfordbrookesuni

they find him in a dinner suit of salt
and sand, his passport seaweed, an ensemble
of herring gulls behind him in the drizzle.

he says nothing, but lets the surging felt-
surf caper through the piano case
to grand surprise. The heavy epaulettes
of hands weigh on his shoulders: this
is his hour of fame, a time of tablets,

Autumn nights with nurses floating
like icebergs through the wards. In the clinic
garden the last leaves flutter
beneath the walls. From an old cabin,
where ivy rises, drifts the muted tinkle
of a piano. Some believe it is Chopin.


by Jan Wagner
translated by Iain Galbraith

On Friday 23 October, poets Sarah Corbett and Eleanor Rees will be visiting Oxford to read from their exciting new books in an event organized by the Poetry Centre. It will take place at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Jericho, and all are very welcome! More details can be found via Facebook.

‘The Man From the Sea’ is copyright © Jan Wagner, 2015. It is reprinted from Self-Portrait with a Swam of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015) by permission of Arc Publications

Notes from Arc Publications:

Jan Wagner studied English in Hamburg, Dublin and Berlin, where he has lived since 1995. A poet, essayist and translator of British and American poetry by Charles Simic, Simon Armitage, Matthew Sweeney, and Robin Robertson, he was also, until 2003, co-publisher of The Outside of the Element, a boxed loose-leaf periodical based on an idea by Marcel Duchamp. He has published six volumes of poetry and has received numerous awards, including the Mondsee Poetry Award (2004), the Ernst Meister Prize for Poetry (2005), the Wilhelm Lehmann Prize (2009) and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize (2011).

In Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees, Wagner is a vigilant, yet playful, chronicler of the quotidian, his meticulous handling of image and sound forging a worldly, almost luminous palpability. Intensely curious, constantly attentive to novel or unanticipated possibilities afforded by traditional forms, Wagner’s poems celebrate what he has called ‘our steaming, glowing, odorous, noisy world’.

You can read a review of the collection by one of the Poetry Centre’s own interns, Inigo Purcell, on the Poetry Centre website.

Iain Galbraith is a prolific translator of German and Austrian poetry, while his own poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. A winner of the prestigious John Dryden Translation Prize, and editor of five anthologies of poetry, his recent translated books include a selection of W.G. Sebald’s poetry, Across the Land and the Water (2011). He is also a widely performed translator of British and Irish drama into German.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.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 Rolling Stones

~ oxfordbrookesuni


An unrestrainable storm’s energy,
a blues tornado building year by year,
smashing successive decades like stage-props
into a singular reality –

the music’s drive, and how Keith Richards loads
that power-line with such a laid-back style
he might be anywhere the drug dictates;
and now in high key the dervish explodes

frenetically, adopting a persona
for each volatile lyric expression,
a manically improvised Lucifer,
a lashingly exploitative ‘Gimme Shelter’,

a transsexual identity which dares
contain a crowd that’s like an exodus
come across country for the new ideal,
and with the red light on, it really scares.

Jagger’s psychopathic ‘Midnight Rambler’,
cued up to stick a knife right through the throat,
a pyrotechnical ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’,
no ostentation from the bass-player,

it’s all up front by a shared microphone,
and what was revolutionary is still
an ongoing assessment of our lives,
survival, altered consciousness, a tone

that challenges the way we live and think,
and devastates the old world, moves into
the centre of new chaos, while the pack
flail for the singer on the spotlit brink…

by Jeremy Reed

Some local poetry news: Mimi Khalvati, Giles Goodland, and the winners and commended poets in the 2015 Four Corners Poetry Competition will be reading in the Common Room, St Cross College, Oxford on Tuesday 13 October, 2015. The event will open at 5.30pm, with readings from 6-7pm. To attend, contact Ella Bedrock: ella.bedrock@stx.ox.ac.uk

‘The Rolling Stones’ is copyright © Jeremy Reed, 2015. It is reprinted from Voodoo Excess (Enitharmon Press, 2015) by permission of Enitharmon Press. Notes from Enitharmon Press:

In Voodoo Excess, Jeremy Reed charts in poetry and prose the astonishing career of the Rolling Stones from the band’s early days in 1962 to the 50th anniversary tour in 2012 and its extension in 2013. With great originality he examines why the Stones have been a musical and cultural phenomenon, and everything public and mythical, anecdotal and apocryphal about the larger-than-life individual band members. You can read more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

Called by the Independent ‘British poetry’s glam, spangly, shape-shifting answer to David Bowie’, Jeremy Reed’s poetry, fiction and performances are inimitable and utterly opposed to grey mainstream poetry. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. He has received numerous awards work has been translated abroad in numerous editions and more than a dozen languages. He is widely acknowledged as the most imaginatively gifted British poet of his generation. His Selected Poems were published by Penguin in 1987. You can watch Reed performing with The Ginger Light in his poem ‘Kit Marlowe’ here.

‘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.

Lemmeleht

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The moon was glowing
the forest darkening
the swing creaking
the pond shimmering

the lemmeleht
in the overgrown water
its blossom calls
a maiden

come from here
over the water
take me
and bear me

the lemmeleht
seemed to move
the pond did not
ripple

what will be given
in return
it knows how to make demands
the lemmeleht
the plant knows how to haggle
the dawn grass to reckon

the face of the maiden wilts
but the lemmeleht burns
side by side with a star
in the pond

the maiden pleads
the lemmeleht burns

promises to give
jewellery and silver beads
pendants and brooches
and from over the heart
a clasp
but the lemmeleht
stays silent
under its leaf
a frog
just croaks

she promises to give
her father’s plough
her brother’s horse
her sisters’s spinning wheel
her mother’s cows Maasik Lehik Lillik

and little Muu
and grandmother’s loom

the lemmeleht
doesn’t move
demands something else
it glows like day
it rings like a bell
the maiden pleads
and begs and

                     calls

no help to be found
                              anywhere

and quietly the lemmeleht says
                         promise me your home
                         your home promise me
                         nothing else
the lemmeleht stirred
the water rippled

and she promised her home

and the lemmeleht
was near her mouth
beneath her heart
and on her head
but her home was gone

the lake was left
the maiden
tore fescue from
her head
from beneath her heart
scraped the knowing plant
from her mouth
she struck the lemmeleht
the fescue didn’t argue any more
the lemmeleht lay still

her home was gone
the lake was left

a duck quacked
and a frog croaked


by Kauksi Ülle
translated by Ilmar Lehtpere and Mari Kalkun

News from the Centre: many thanks to everyone who entered our International Poetry Competition. The judging process has now begun, and our shortlist and winners will be announced in December!

On Monday 21 September from 4-5pm, Peter Hainsworth and David Robey will be discussing Dante in a free event at Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford. They will be giving a very short introduction to Dante and his work in the 750th anniversary year of his birth. Visit the website for more details.

‘Lemmeleht’ is copyright © Kauksi Ülle, 2015. It is reprinted from Six Estonian Poets (Arc Publications, 2015) by permission of Arc Publications.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Kauksi Ülle is a poet and cultural activist. She has become something of a symbolic figure, an icon of ethno-futurism, the focal point of an ebullient era with its own worldview, currents of literary life, identity issues, conflicts and impassioned debate. ‘Lemmeleht’ appears in the book Six Estonian Poets, in which the editor, Doris Kareva, presents us with the work of five highly individual poets of the younger generation together with that of the most influential figures of their parents’ generation. You can read more about the book on the Arc website.

IlmarLehtpere had a bilingual upbringing in Estonian and English. He is the translator of Kristiina Ehin’s The Drums of Silence (Oleander Press, Cambridge, 2007), which was awarded the Poetry Society Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation. His other translations of Kristiina Ehin’s work are Põletades pimedust -Burning the Darkness – An Dorchadas á Dhó (trilingual Estonian-English-Irish selected poems, Coiscéim, Dublin, 2009), A Priceless Nest(short stories, Oleander Press, Cambridge, 2009), Päevaseiskaja -South-Estonian Fairy Tales (Huma, Tallinn, 2009) and Noorkuuhommik- New Moon Morning (selected poems, Huma, Tallinn, 2007). He has also translated her play, A Life Without Feathers, and has already started working on her next collection of poems in English.

Read more about the work of the translators: Ilmar Lehtpere and Mari Kalkun.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.

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.

Barleyfield Wind

~ oxfordbrookesuni


Midsummer wind,
thought across the mind:

a running hare,
invisible, a hare-shape –
gone – leaving the field motionless, supple,
greeny yellow. Ripple,
current, eddies,
whirlpool, a pattern created
and in one movement unmade . . .
Quiet then quick,
a country undiscovered, mapped, unknown.
It is all imagination:
pooling – running – streaming – a long, slow surge.
Then, barely a touch,
the whiskered heads
brushed by a breath.
And all the time,
burnishing every grain,
the sun brings to fruition:
a dry, brittle gold.


by Jeremy Hooker

The deadline for submissions to the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Prize is 31 August. There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language, and First Prize in each category is £1000. The competition will be judged by Bernard O’Donoghue and Hannah Lowe, and you can enter by visiting this page. Please do pass on details to friends and colleagues.

Local poets may be interested to learn that Back Room Poets in Oxford are offering a masterclass with George Szirtes on the afternoon of August 15th at the Friends Meeting House. If you are interested in submitting a poem which George Szirtes might discuss, please contact aekocsis@googlemail.com for more details.

Please note that the Weekly Poem will be taking a month’s break. We’ll be back in early September.

‘Barleyfield Wind’ is copyright © Jeremy Hooker, 2015. It is reprinted from Scattered Light (Enitharmon Press, 2015) by permission of Enitharmon Press. Notes from Enitharmon Press:

Jeremy Hooker’s new collection, Scattered Light, shows him producing some of his finest work – a variety of short, ‘light’ poems, longer poems, and sequences such as ‘Saltgrass Lane’ and ‘Hurst Castle’ which revisit his childhood terrain on the Hampshire coastline. The poems show him extending his thinking about powerful crosscurrents that constitute the ‘sacred’, and deepening his exploration of history embodied in landscape. You can read more about the collection on the Enitharmon website.

Jeremy Hooker was born in 1941. Poet, critic, teacher and broadcaster, he is currently Professor of English at the University of Glamorgan. He has published ten collections of poetry. His other books include Imagining Wales: a View of Modern Welsh Writing in English, and studies of David Jones and John Cowper Powys. He has edited writings by Alun Lewis, Frances Bellerby, Richard Jefferies, and Wilfred Owen. Gillian Clarke has described his work as ‘a deceptively readable poetry that leaves phrases and images in the mind as the best poems should’, whilst Poetry Review called it ‘original and very ambitious’. Follow Jeremy’s work on his website, and hear him read from his poems on the Poetry Archive.

‘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.

Author’s Prayer

~ oxfordbrookesuni

If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over,
for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.

If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge
of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through rooms without
touching the furniture.

Yes, I love. I can cross the streets asking ‘What year is it?’
I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.

by Ilya Kaminsky

A reminder that the deadline for the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Prize is 31 August. There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language, and First Prize in each category is £1000. The competition will be judged by Bernard O’Donoghue and Hannah Lowe, and you can enter by visiting this page.

This Wednesday at The Albion Beatnik in Oxford, our Brookes colleague Jane Spiro launches her poetry collection Playing for Time, published by Oversteps Books. She’ll be reading with another colleague, George Roberts, and Zelda Chappel at 7pm.

‘Author’s Prayer’ is copyright © Ilya Kaminsky, 2004. It is reprinted from Dancing in Odessa (Arc Publications, 2014) by permission of Arc Publications.Notes from Arc Publications:

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived in the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. Kaminsky has worked as a law clerk for San Francisco Legal Aid and the National Immigration Law Center. Currently, he teaches English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University.

Dancing in Odessa was published in the US by Tupelo Press in 2004 and won the Whiting Writer’s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine. You can read more about the book on the Arc website, and follow his work via his own website.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.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.

Going Out

~ oxfordbrookesuni


Light bulbs, parties, jaunts, the final things –
The last most thought about at eighty-four,
Now as I gingerly change one of the first.
As for the second and third, not much these days,
Lacking an appetite for either. Drink –
A pale dilution, watered wine; no taste
For bad behaviour, mad hilarity,
Or staying up too late.
      Or fashions, either –
I never paid attention to such things,
Not noticing when skirts went up or down,
Or poets began each line with lower case.

Last orders, ending up, or final things –
All titles with a flavour of last words,
All leading up to this one: going out.

by Anthony Thwaite

The deadline for submissions to the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Prize is 31 August. There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language, and First Prize in each category is £1000. The competition will be judged by Bernard O’Donoghue and Hannah Lowe, and you can enter by visiting this page. Please do pass on details to friends and colleagues.

‘Going Out’ is copyright © Anthony Thwaite. It is reprinted from Going Out (Enitharmon Press, 2015) by permission of Enitharmon Press.

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

Now that he is eighty-four, Anthony Thwaite says that Going Out is likely to be the last book of poems he publishes in his lifetime, and that the title is apt. But the words are wistful, even playful, and that is true of some of the book’s contents. The poems range over times and places, commemorating friends (especially the poet Peter Porter), and draw on memories, hard-won faith, self-questioning. As Michael Frayn has put it, Thwaite ‘writes with simplicity and precision about difficult and ambiguous things, the complexity and unceasingness of the world, the vastness and richness of the past, the elusiveness of the present – and the heroic persistence of our efforts to fix some trace of all this.’

Anthony Thwaite has been a university teacher, a radio producer, and a literary editor. His first collection came out in 1953, and Enitharmon published his Collected Poems in 2007 and Late Poems in 2010. He is one of Philip Larkin’s literary executors and editors. He is married to the biographer Ann Thwaite and lives in Norfolk. You can find out more about the book on the Enitharmon website, and hear Anthony read from his poems on the Poetry Archive 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. 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.

Thirteen, in a Gulag, 1950

~ oxfordbrookesuni

We rode on, squashed together like harvested hay.
I lost my sister and my bearings the other side of the Urals,
tried to make soup in some mud hut,
rubbing frozen sorrel leaves
with mutton tallow, trying to
melt snow under my sheepskin,
seeing as no one had taught me the Kyrgyz songs
which magically light fires in wood and in stone.

Dance, spark, chase away the ice and putrid fever,
wake mother with your wormwood medicine.


by Wioletta Greg, translated by Marek Kazmierski

A reminder that the deadline for the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Prize is 31 August. There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language, and First Prize in each category is £1000. The competitionwill be judged by Bernard O’Donoghue and Hannah Lowe, and you can enter by visiting this page.

‘Thirteen, in a Gulag, 1950’ is copyright © Wioletta Greg, 2014 and translated by Marek Kazmierski. It is reprintedfrom Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance (Arc Publications, 2014) by permission of Arc Publications.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Wioletta Greg (b. 1974), poet, writer and translator from Southern Poland, has been active on the Polish literary scene since her first publication in the 1990s, and despite her move to the Isle of Wight at the beginning of the new millennium, has remained so. She has published several volumes of poetry, a collection of short prose poems and, most recently, a debut novel Guguły (2014), which has already been hailed as the ‘discovery of the year’ by critics and readers alike. Translated into English by Marek Kazmierski, her book Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance, from which this Weekly Poem comes, was shortlisted for the prestigious 2015 Griffin Prize. You can read more about the book on Arc’s website, and hear Wioletta read from her poems (in Polish) on the British Library website, with translations by Marek Kazmierski.

As part of the Poetry Centre’s Review Blog, student Brittany Krier reviewed the book, and you can read her thoughts on the Poetry Centre site.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.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.

St. Peter and the Storm Petrels

~ oxfordbrookesuni


Footsteps on water.

Dawn clear as prayer.
Bodies hanging over water

like small, dark beads.

How long have they been out there
treading slowly across the bay,
staring down into the salt-clear distances,
scrying for storms?

There was a time when a saint walked on water.
We saw him – a bright light crossing the bay
leaving a trail of taut, still water
marked with footprints.

He left long ago, turning west
on his weightless march,
leaning into the heft of the waves
like a restless ship.

We still wait for him to return,
but perhaps, lost or driven mad
by such winds, such distances,
this is what he has become –

a petrel hanging over water,
staring down as if in wonder
and pattering its ragged dance

to the distant, scudding footfall of storms.


by Ben Smith

A reminder that the deadline for submissions to the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Prize is 31 August. There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language, and First Prize in each category is £1000. The competition will be judged by Bernard O’Donoghue and Hannah Lowe, and you can enter by visiting this page.


The poet Clare Pollard is currently touring a staged version of Ovid’s Heroines, in which she reads, recites and performs her astonishing poems against a backdrop of Mediterranean light and sound. Produced by Jaybird Live Literature, the show visits the Burton Taylor Studio Theatre in Oxford this Thursday 9 July. For more details and for tickets, visit the Oxford Playhouse website.

‘St. Peter and the Storm Petrels’ is copyright © Ben Smith, 2014. It is reprinted from Sky Burials (Worple Press, 2014) by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Ben Smith’s poetry, criticism and short fiction has been published in a wide range of magazines, anthologies and journals. He completed a PhD on Environmental Poetry at Exeter University and currently lives in Devon. The poems in his debut pamphlet Sky Burials map shifting environments, strange ecological events and dubious auguries. Told through the voices of birds, unreliable seers and broken bones found in rivers and museums, these dark, playful poems explore prophecy and ritual, science and uncertainty in the era of climate change. Read more about the pamphlet on the Worple site, and another poem from the collection (as well as work from Worple poet Isabel Galleymore) on The Clearing website.

Worple Press was founded by Peter and Amanda Carpenter in 1997 and publishes 6-8 books a year by new and established poets: collections, pamphlets, works in translation, essays, interviews. Early authors included Iain Sinclair, Joseph Woods, Beverley Bie Brahic, Kevin Jackson and the acclaimed American nature poet Peter Kane Dufault. Recent collections (2014/2015) include Andy Brown’s Exurbia, Isabel Galleymore’s Dazzle Ship, Martyn Crucefix’s A Hatfield Mass, Julian Stannard’s The Street of Perfect Love, and Clive Wilmer’s Urban Pastorals. More information can be found at the publisher’s website, and on Facebook and 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.