Penelope to Ulysses

June 29, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Dear Ulysses,

you’re late.

Don’t worry about answering, just come home.
The enemy of Grecian wives has fallen,
but, honestly, Troy wasn’t worth it.

If only Paris had drowned
in some storm when he was heading for Sparta,
I wouldn’t lie frigid in my bed
or have to moan of tedious days
or pass my nights like some poor widow
at the loom’s dull web.

I mean, I know love makes me anxious
and my nightmares were excessive –
lurid scenarios; Trojans singling you out etc.
Hector’s name made me ashen.
When I heard he’d killed Antilochus,
I was a nervous mess.
Then Patroclus died, in borrowed armour,
so even cunning couldn’t guarantee success…
Each time Greek blood warmed spears
I was flooded with fear.

But someone must look out for couples:
Troy burnt and you survived.
Now soldiers slur victory songs;
smoke coils from altars laid with souvenirs;
admiration makes old men babble
as girls hang on tales from lovers’ lips.

The other night, one man mapped battles
in spilt wine, lightly tracing Troy:
‘The river was here; Priam’s palace,
Achilles’ tent, then Hector’s corpse…’

I sent our son to find you – he got the story:
how you, full of your daring – not caring about us –
stole into the Trojan camp at night
and just two of you slaughtered hundreds.
Sounds typically cautious and thoughtful.
Until I heard you’d ridden back, my heart
reared with fear at every word.

Anyway, you’ve razed Troy, but what does it matter
to me it’s been levelled?
I remain as I was while it remained –
alone.

by Clare Pollard

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 on 9 July. For more details and for tickets, visit the Oxford Playhouse website.

As part of the MCS Arts Festival Oxford (20 June-5 July), the highly-acclaimed poet Roger McGough will be reading tomorrow evening (30 June). You can find more details on the festival site. Also tomorrow, Penny Boxhall will be leading an Illumination Poetry Workshop in the Old Library, University Church of St Mary the Virgin from 4.15pm.

An extract of Penelope’s letter to Ulysses, one of Ovid’s Heroides, translated by Clare Pollard as Ovid’s Heroines. With this letter, Ovid puts a different perspective on Homer’s The Odyssey. The Trojan War has long been over, but the Greek war hero Ulysses has not returned to his wife Penelope in Ithaca. Whilst those who have read Homer will know this is because he has been waylaid by obstacles that include Gods, monsters, weather and the sorceress Circe, Penelope has heard nothing. Their son Telemachus has just returned from a fruitless trip to Pylos, where he was trying to find out what has happened to his father and was almost killed.

You can read more about Clare’s book here, and follow her work via her website and on Twitter.

Founded in Newcastle in 1978, Bloodaxe Books is one of Britain’s leading independent poetry publishers. Internationally renowned for quality in literature and excellence in book design, its authors and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry. Details of all Bloodaxe’s publications, plus sample video and audio clips of poets reading their work, can be found here.

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.

A Calvinist in Love

June 22, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I will not kiss you, country fashion,
By hedgesides where
Weasel and hare
Claim kinship with our passion.

I care no more for fickle moonlight:
Would rather see
Your face touch me
Under a claywork dune-light.

I want no scent or softness round us
When we embrace:
We could not trace
Therein what beauties bound us.

This bare clay-pit is truest setting
For love like ours:
No bed of flowers
But sand-ledge for our petting.

The Spring is not our mating season:
The lift of sap
Would but entrap
Our souls and lead to treason.

This truculent gale, this pang of winter
Awake our joy,
For they employ
Moods that made Calvary splinter.

We need no vague and dreamy fancies:
Care not to sight
The Infinite
In transient necromancies.

No poetry on earth can fasten
Its vampire mouth
Upon our youth:
We know the sly assassin.

We cannot fuse with fallen Nature’s
Our rhythmic tide:
It is allied
With laws beyond the creatures.

by Jack Clemo

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.

As part of the MCS Arts Festival Oxford (20 June-5 July), the highly-acclaimed poet Roger McGough will be reading on 30 June. You can find more details on the festival site. On 27 June, the festival will also host a youth poetry slam, featuring a wide range of students from across Oxfordshire, and an Illumination Poetry Workshop with Penny Boxhall, Tuesday 30th June, Old Library, University Church of St Mary the Virgin.

Jack Clemo (1916-1994), English poet and author whose physical sufferings – he became deaf about 1936 and blind in 1955 – influenced his work. Clemo’s formal education ended when he was 13. His early poems reflect the stark landscape of the clay-pits in their austere intensity. Important in his writings are the themes of Christianity and conversion, erotic mysticism and marriage, and the role of suffering in attaining happiness. He married Ruth Peaty in 1968, and she inspired his later poetry, which shows a softened acceptance of sex and love. During his lifetime Jack Clemo was considered one of the most important poets Cornwall has produced but as with many major poets his work fell into obscurity after his death in 1994. This Selected Poems represents his return to prominence. You can read more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

Writing about his work in The Independent, John Mole commented that Clemo was ‘a remarkable and original writer… [whose] charged, evangelical language has a strenuous urgency, a mixture of austere beauty and an often remorseless emphasis on the “striving flesh”, the “storm-flash of grace”.’

‘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.

Wood

June 15, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

When you reach the trees
the apple’s rotted
on the golden bough,
– canker grown, fly-blown –

depths are still depths
but the way swirls in shallows,
the rough hint of path runs
up only to bramble.

But this last look, wake-up
pinch, hollow laugh, sorrow –
might be a fork’s touch,
a fresh furrow.

by Olivia Byard

As part of the MCS Arts Festival Oxford (20 June-5 July), the highly-acclaimed poet Roger McGough will be reading on 30 June. You can find more details on the festival site. On 27 June, the festival will also host a youth poetry slam, featuring a wide range of students from across Oxfordshire, and an Illumination Poetry Workshop with Penny Boxhall, Tuesday 30th June, Old Library, University Church of St Mary the Virgin.

Notes from Worple Press:

Olivia Byard was born in South Wales and grew up on the Cotswolds and in Montreal, Canada. Her debut collection From a Benediction (1998) was short-listed for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and was followed by Strange Horses (2011). Her various roles have included factory worker, academic researcher, community organiser, children’s book writer, book controller, phone advisor for Mind, and, for the last twenty-one years, creative writing tutor. She is politically engaged, especially on Green issues. She comments online and her letters regularly appear in the Guardian. You can read more about her latest book on the Worple website, and follow her work on her own site.

Schoolchildren on Vía Augusta

June 8, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Like leaves of wind surprised in a sudden gust
they peel away from the dense huddle,
one child, two, then several, more,
they take flight and ruffle up the street,
blown towards each other, impelled into merging,
unravelling the group they were in,
seeking it out again, finding their place.
A magnet drives them apart and tugs them back,
it scatters them first toward the street,
then brings them together once more. It’s very strange
the way they fill out, make themselves be.
As though they don’t know who are they are unless pursued.
They chase each other, touching, colliding.
There’s no giving way, except in a challenge
that blocks them one by one.
There are two or three who have already crossed over,
two or three more who are starting to break away,
until, as if the motive were spreading,
the curl escapes, flies free, tucks itself in,
and they cross the street en masse. A breath
of air lingers, a gentleness that rocks,
that wraps itself round the stragglers, making them
see that they’re not there, they’re not there yet, that the group
is on the other side. All
as natural as a kindly wind,
without violence, like a pattern,
a compact group once more
finally, after movement, calm and still.

by Pedro Serrano, translated by Anna Crowe

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.

Pedro Serrano has published five collections of poems. Among these are titles such as; El Miedo (Fear) (1986), Ignorancia (Ignorance) (1994), Turba (Peatlands) (2005) and Nueces (Walnuts) (2009). Many of his poems have been translated into English and have been published widely in the UK and abroad. His work has recently appeared on The Verb on BBC Radio Three, presented by Ian McMillan.

The poems in the first full-length collection to be published in the UK by the acclaimed Mexican poet Pedro Serrano, Peatlands, are taken from Desplazamientos, a volume which draws on all his collections since 1986. Chosen by both the poet and his accomplished translator, Anna Crowe, these poems are wide-ranging, passionate and linguistically thrilling.

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.

The Talking Tree

May 18, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My Father once told me about a talking tree,
a tree that spoke only to children, a tree
I never heard speak, but still it must have spoken
to my father, because he was always talking
to someone, but there was never anyone there.

I’d often see Father arguing with that tree;
he’d pace the whole length of the living room,
twitching and sweating through his undershirt,
muttering things I didn’t understand
about mother, or perhaps Rachmaninoff.

The tree must have also told my father what to wear,
because he’d often perform in mismatched socks,
his ears still white with bits of shaving cream,
People said look at this man— look at this man!
People said my father was a genius:

he’d lean back in the piano bench
and hum something that must have made its way
from another world, then close his eyes and dream.
Soon his head was swaying, his long arms sprouting
magical hands, moving across the keys.

by Jodie Hollander

Weekly Poem for 18 May 2015

The Talking TreeMy Father once told me about a talking tree,
a tree that spoke only to children, a tree
I never heard speak, but still it must have spoken
to my father, because he was always talking
to someone, but there was never anyone there.I’d often see Father arguing with that tree;
he’d pace the whole length of the living room,
twitching and sweating through his undershirt,
muttering things I didn’t understand
about mother, or perhaps Rachmaninoff.The tree must have also told my father what to wear,
because he’d often perform in mismatched socks,
his ears still white with bits of shaving cream,
People said look at this man— look at this man!
People said my father was a genius:he’d lean back in the piano bench
and hum something that must have made its way
from another world, then close his eyes and dream.
Soon his head was swaying, his long arms sprouting
magical hands, moving across the keys.by Jodie HollanderThe Poetry Centre recently launched its International Poetry Competition! There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language. The winner of each category receives £1000, and second prize is £200. Our judges are Bernard O’Donoghue and Hannah Lowe. Find out more information about the competition, read the terms and conditions, and enter on the Poetry Centre website. Please spread the word!‘The Talking Tree’ is copyright © Jodie Hollander, 2015. It is reprinted from The Humane Society (Tall-Lighthouse, 2012) by permission of the author and Tall-Lighthouse.

Jodie Hollander, originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was raised in a family of classical musicians. She studied poetry in England and has published her work in journals such as The Poetry Review, Stand, Poet Lore, The Dark Horse, The Manchester Review, Verse Daily, Ambit, The Warwick Review, Agenda, and Australia’s Best Poems, 2011, edited by John Tranter. You can follow Jodie’s work via her website. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in South Africa, a Hawthornden Fellowship in Scotland, and was awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship in February of 2015. Her debut publication, The Humane Society, was released with Tall-Lighthouse in 2012. Tall-Lighthouse is an independent publishing house in the UK, established in 1999 by Les Robinson. It publishes full collections of poetry, pamphlets, and the anthology City Lighthouse, a collection of poems by established and emerging poets alike, having featured work by Maurice Riordan, Hugo Williams, Daljit Nagra and Roddy Lumsden, among others. The press has established itself as a leading light on the small press poetry scene, four of its pamphlet publications having received the Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice Award in Spring 2006, Summer and Winter 2008, and Spring 2009. The current Director and Editor of the press is Gareth Lewis, who took over after Les Robinson stepped down from those roles on 1 October 2011. Poets published by Tall Lighthouse include Helen Mort, Aoife Mannix, Baden Prince, Pierre Ringwald, Heather Taylor, Alan Buckley, Ben Parker and Jodie Hollander. Find out more about the press from its 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 Event

May 11, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

On the fifth day we sailed our frozen island out
into the shipping lanes. We counted all the evil things
and cast them in an ice-hole. They were only numbers.

On the fourth day we opened high-yield savings accounts.
The refugee camps were fast becoming commuter towns
encircling the crater. Jets of steam were seen from the tor.

On the third day we left our cars in short stay.
The air was pine-fresh. Pebbles nuzzled at our shoes.
We began to doubt the alignment of the trackway.

On the second day we shopped. You carried your foot
like a dead weight. Some youths got on TV
pretending to be trainee customer service assistants.

On the first day the fridge defrosted itself.
Wearing Halloween masks we made love and
you said something really evil about a mutual friend.

On the day before the first day we fell into geometry
like children. The sky was a chemical peel.
We slept alone and restlessly through the shipping news.

by Tom Chivers

The Poetry Centre recently launched its International Poetry Competition! There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language. The winner of each category receives £1000, and second prize is £200. Our judges are Bernard O’Donoghue and Hannah Lowe. Find out more information about the competition, read the terms and conditions, and enter on the Poetry Centre website. Please spread the word!

‘The Event’ is copyright © Tom Chivers, 2015. It is reprinted from Dark Islands (Test Centre, 2015) by permission of Test Centre.

Notes from Test Centre:

Tom Chivers was born in 1983 in south London. His poetry publications include How to Build a City (Salt, 2009), The Terrors (Nine Arches, 2009), Flood Drain (Annexe, 2014) and, as editor, the best-selling anthology Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins, 2012). He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and has been shortlisted for the Michael Marks and Edwin Morgan prizes.

Tom makes perambulatory, site-specific and audio work for organisations such as LIFT Festival, Cape Farewell, Humber Mouth, Bishopsgate Institute and Southbank Centre. In 2009 BBC Radio 4 broadcast his documentary on the poet Barry MacSweeney. In 2011 this poem, ‘The Event’ was turned into an animated film by Julia Pott and broadcast by Channel 4. It has subsequently been screened at film festivals worldwide and viewed over 100,000 times online. You can watch it on Vimeo. There will be a special launch event on Thursday 14 May for Tom’s new book. Visit Test Centre’s site here for more details about how you might attend.

Test Centre’s first project was a series of spoken word vinyl LPs, starting with Iain Sinclair’s Stone Tape Shuffle. This was followed by Chris Petit’s Museum of Loneliness and Stewart Home’s Proletarian Post-Modernism. In 2012 Test Centre hosted a 12-week series of radio shows on Resonance FM, presenting a subjective history of spoken word recordings. Test Centre has published 5 issues of its fiction and poetry magazine, with future issues continually in the process of compilation. Other publications include a number of books and pamphlets by Iain Sinclair, including Austerlitz & After: Tracking Sebald and RED EYE; GOOGLEmeGOD and House of Memory by Chris Petit; a facsimile edition of Derek Jarman’s rare and only collection of poetry, A Finger in the Fishes Mouth; the poetry anthology I Love Roses When They’re Past Their Best; Within Habit by Oli Hazzard and The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones by Stewart Home.

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.

Allegory of the Navigation Canal

April 27, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Something like Blake’s daughters of Albion:
flame and shadow, the moment and the thought
set into each other, rack and pinion
against this slope of time. And time is caught
lightly between the teeth. Here on the Weald
where gypsum inculcates the groundwater
with elemental hardness, water’s held;
time is channelled through it into colour:
seams that run obliquely to the surface
mapping time in arcs through matter’s prism,
each plumbed depth explored, resplendent, poly-
chromatic like spilt oil. Time, that folly,
hollows out its cave of solipsism,
leaving earth infected with its darkness.

by James Brookes

‘Allegory of the Navigation Canal’ is copyright © James Brookes, 2015. It is reprinted from MAP: Poems After William Smith’s Geological Map, edited by Michael McKimm (Worple Press, 2015) by permission of Worple Press. Notes from Worple Press:

James Brookes grew up in rural Sussex before reading English & Creative Writing at the University of Warwick and a postgraduate degree at the College of Law. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2009 and published a pamphlet, The English Sweats, with Pighog Press in the same year. His first collection Sins of the Leopard (Salt, 2012) was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. You can find out more about James Brookes’s work on Michelle McGrane’s poetry blog, Peony Moon, and follow him on Twitter.

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.

The only proper way to go on a fossil hunt is in a minibus

April 20, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

She was always glad to be taken along, liked
the dirt, the students’ laughter.
Once, in the pale grey slope of a road cutting,
she found an ammonite, big as a skull.

Having learned that the earth is made of layers
she began to put her feet down differently
so as not to disturb the pattern, dreamed
of shapes vibrating in the seams,

found she was torn between the wish to preserve
and a digging desire to excavate,
cover the landscape in mountains of rubble,
unearth old life or an ancient ore.

She longed for a map that could pinpoint
a likely place to look, spare her
the lung-blighting spade work. Better to lie still
with her ear in the cool grass, listen

to the coal,
to the trilobites singing.

by Ailsa Holland

‘The only proper way to go on a fossil hunt is in a minibus’ is copyright © Ailsa Holland, 2015. It is reprinted from MAP: Poems After William Smith’s Geological Map, edited by Michael McKimm (Worple Press, 2015) by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Ailsa Holland’s poems have been published in print and online in such places as Nutshell, Angle, Ink Sweat & Tears and And Other Poems. She won second prize in the Open Category of the 2014 Hippocrates Award. Under Silk Wood, a Maxonian homage to Under Milk Wood, was written and performed by Ailsa with Jo Bell for Macclesfield’s Barnaby Festival 2014.

MAP is a new anthology from WorplePress which celebrates the first geological map of Britain, created single-handedly 200 years ago by the engineer and geologist William Smith. Edited by Michael McKimm, this groundbreaking anthology collects new work by over thirty poets inspired by William Smith, his revolutionary map, and the foundation of a science. There are poems in this anthology that tell the story of Smith’s genius and his misfortune; poems about fossil hunting and map making; poems about the drive of the Industrial Revolution and our continuing reliance on fossil fuels. They illustrate not only the vibrancy and variety of contemporary poetry but also poetry’s unique ability to take on uncharted territory with vision: the poems here make Smith’s map anew in moving and surprising ways. You can read more about the anthology on the Worple 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.

A Birthmother’s Catechism

March 30, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

How did you let him go?

With black ink and legalese

How did you let him go?

It’d be another year before I could vote

How did you let him go?

With altruism, tears, and self-loathing

How did you let him go?

A nurse brought pills for drying up breast milk

How did you let him go?

Who hangs a birdhouse from a sapling?

by Carrie Etter

Notes from Seren:

American poet Carrie Etter has lived in England since 2001 and taught creative writing at Bath Spa University since 2004. She has published three collections of poetry: The Tethers (Seren, 2009), winner of the London New Poetry Prize, Divining for Starters (Shearsman, 2011) and Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014); she also edited the anthology Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010). Individual poems have appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals worldwide. She also reviews contemporary poetry, most recently for The Guardian and Warwick Review.

You can read more about the book on Seren’s site, and find out more about Carrie’s work from her blog. You can also follow her on Twitter.

Writing of this collection, Carol Rumens has commented: ‘The narrator is a mother whose son was adopted soon after his birth. In the main sequence she describes a series of encounters with the now-adult child. This is not the report of a literal search, nor an effort to construct an identity, but a mosaic of the numerous possibilities of relationship. Funny at times, fast-moving and psychologically astute, these tiny monologues are held together by a narrative voice as seemingly self-possessed as it is candid.’

Seren is based in Bridgend, South Wales and was originally conceived in the early 80’s by then Head of English at Brynteg Comp, Cary Archard, on his kitchen table as an offshoot of Poetry Wales magazine. After moving briefly to poet Dannie Abse’s garage in Ogmore by Sea, the advent of Managing Editor Mick Felton has seen the press has go from strength to strength. We’ve published a wide range of titles including fiction (which under Editor Penny Thomas has seen the Booker-nominated novel by Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days, and an acclaimed novella series based on the medieval Welsh tales from the Mabinogion) and non-fiction (including literary criticism such as John Redmond’s Poetry and Privacy, as well as sumptuous art books like the collaboration between the painter Shani Rhys James and a number of poets and writers: Florilingua). Seren’s poetry list, edited by Amy Wack since the early 90s, has produced T.S. Eliot-nominated titles by Deryn Rees-Jones and Pascale Petit, Costa winner John Haynes, and a large list of Forward prize winners and nominees. Cary Archard remains on our Board of Directors and is a lively and influential presence. We mourn the loss, last year, of the wonderful Dannie Abse, also a guiding spirit. Find out more about the publisher from its website.

The Necropolis

March 23, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

When I walked into the necropolis
at Genoa I saw that every grave

had been allocated a panettone
and because the Council was in

broad terms a coalition of the left
every panettone was in a red box

and because every panettone
was in a red box I had a hunch

the old Maoist-Leninist-Stalinist
front were calling a meeting

with the dead and because the
dead were bored of being dead

they clapped and shouted
like nuns who have discovered

the libido and because nuns
have discovered the libido

I am going to bring the poem
to a sudden end. Sleep well!

by Julian Stannard

Notes from Worple Press:

Julian Stannard spent many years teaching American and English Literature at the University of Genoa. He has a PhD from UEA and is now a Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Winchester. Previous publications include Rina’s War (Peterloo, 2001), The Red Zone (Peterloo, 2007) and The Parrots of Villa Gruber Discover Lapis Lazuli (Salmon, 2011). He co-edited The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann (CB Editions, 2013). He was awarded the Troubadour Prize in 2010 and reviews for the TLS, the Guardian and Poetry Review.

To read more about Julian’s new chapbook, visit the Worple website. You can also follow Julian on Twitter, and read more of his work on the Poetry Foundation website.