Bleach

March 16, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You’ve burnt me, bleach. Swollen my skin
until it squeaks. I trusted you and took off
my gloves. You left your red stubble touch.

I know you’re bad, bleach. I’ve read your label
and turned from the checkout before now.
I’ve sworn to give you up for good but

you’re so strong, bleach, when it comes
to the mould blooming across my bathroom
and my dreams. I needed you, called out

and you were there, bleach. Still, you must go.
Quick, no one will know. You’ve chewed my fingers
and swallowed my prints with your stink

so I’m blameless and raw as I tuck you in,
hide your face amongst the softer yet so much
weaker ecological bottles under the sink.

by Katherine Stansfield

This Thursday, join us at Brookes for a symposium about Witchcraft, Spiritualism, and the Occult. Featuring papers about Walter Scott, psychic detectives, and the use of the web to map stories of witchcraft and magic, this will be a lively and eye-opening event. It takes place from 5-6.30pm in room 207 of the JHB Building at Gipsy Lane. More details can be found here.

‘Bleach’ is copyright © Katherine Stansfield, 2014. It was published in Playing House, and is reprinted here by permission of Seren Books.

Notes from Seren:

Katherine Stansfield grew up on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. She moved to Wales in 2002 to study at Aberystwyth University where she worked as a lecturer in Creative Writing for several years before deciding to concentrate on writing full time. She is a poet and fiction writer. Her novel The Visitor was published by Parthian in 2013. It went on to win the fiction prize at the 2014 Holyer an Gof awards. Playing House, her debut poetry collection, was published by Seren in October 2014. Read more about her new book on the Seren website, and more about Katherine’s work on her own site. You can also follow her on Twitter and hear her read from her work here.

Writing about Katherine’s work, the Lampeter Review observed that: ‘Wit is a powerful tool that can be at once unsettling and disarming. It certainly imbues the virtuoso handling of tone in Katherine Stansfield’s poems, and her almost celebratory relish of the physicality of language.’

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.

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 Last Thatch

March 9, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

for Thomas Lynch

The sun had dried the haggard to a crust,
whilst up on Riley’s roof they hammered slates.
The donkey’s hooves were puffing up the dust

as we listened to the roofers’ repartee – they cussed
each time their new apprentice made mistakes.
The sun had dried the haggard to a crust.

‘You need to watch your bloody work. A hefty gust
might see you boost the unemployment rates…’
The donkey’s hooves were puffing up the dust

below, tired of the heat and apparently nonplussed
that soon he’d face the derby’s starting gates.
The sun had dried the haggard to a crust.

Racing themselves, the roofers said they must
‘Get the whole shebang finished before eight’,
when donkey hooves would puff the racetrack dust.

The thatch was gone; the new slates ‘more robust’;
the starter’s gun discharged on real estate.
The sun had dried the racetrack to a crust
where donkey hooves were puffing up the dust.

by Andy Brown

This Friday from 6pm at IES in London, three fantastic poets will be giving a free reading: Ian Duhig, Patience Agbabi, and Hannah Lowe. Sign up to attend via Eventbrite.

The public reading is part of the New-Next Generation contemporary poetry conference on Friday and Saturday, organized by the Poetry Centre and the IES, which features more readings (from Helen Mort and Nick Drake), and discussions about the publishing and reviewing of contemporary poetry. Register separately for the conference on the IES site. All are welcome.

‘The Last Thatch’ is copyright © Andy Brown, 2014. It is reprinted from Exurbia (Worple Press, 2014) by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Andy Brown’s most recent book of poems is Exurbia (Worple Press 2014). He also collaborated with David Morley on the Worple Press collection Of Science. Previous books include The Fool and the Physician, Goose Music (with John Burnside), and Fall of the Rebel Angels (all Salt). A selection of his poems appears in the Bloodaxe anthology Identity Parade. He recently edited The Writing Occurs As Song: A Kelvin Corcoran Reader (Shearsman, 2014) and is co-editing, A Body of Work: Poetry and Medical Writing, with Corinna Wagner, for Bloomsbury (2015). He is Director of the Exeter University Creative Writing Programme and was formerly an Arvon Foundation Centre Director. Read more about Andy Brown’s new book on the Worple website, and you can find out more about his academic work on the University of Exeter site.

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 UrbanPastorals. 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.

Child Development

March 2, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I am concerned we are making this mother
not like her son
by bringing to the surface in a rush
all his faults
to find out why he won’t sit still
and does what he does.

He looks fatter recently,
and turns his toes inwards
in a way that I’ve always liked but know
is aberrant, or will lead to aberrations.

And he looks over his shoulder often.
We have talked of how
he will escape
to the safe middle-distance
where ground-down words become music,

and how he will look for your eyes.
We have been told
we should not hold his gaze
in case he gets in and draws from us
what he thinks he needs,
what we are advised isn’t helping.

I saw the thinnest slice of a moon this morning.
Tomorrow, it will be melted and gone.

by Graham Clifford

Registration is still open for our contemporary poetry conference in London from 13-14 March, to which all are welcome. ‘New Generation to Next Generation 2014’ features academic panels, a poetry reading from Nick Drake and Helen Mort, and discussions about the publishing and reviewing of contemporary poetry. It will be an exciting two days. Full details of the programme are available on the IES website.The conference also includes a free public reading on the evening of 13 March by an illustrious ‘cross-generation’ panel of poets: Ian Duhig, Patience Agbabi, and Hannah Lowe, and you can register for that via the IES.

Notes from Seren:

Graham Clifford was born in 1973 in Portsmouth and grew up in Wiltshire. He studied Fine Art and then Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He has been published in numerous literary magazines such as: Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Magma, and London Magazine. Graham has been commended in many competitions including The Arvon International and the Bridport Prize. Two short collections won first prize in the 2006 New Writer Poetry competition and the Biscuit Publishing Prize in 2008. He has also performed at venues and events including Hay on Wye, The Troubadour Café and the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. His work is featured in the Forward Prize Anthology for 2014. He has recently had two poems chiselled into the pavement near Walthamstow train station as part of a sundial project for refurbishment of the area. He works as an Assistant Head Teacher in East London. The Hitting Game is his first collection. You can read more about the book on the Seren website, and find out more about Graham’s work on his own website.

Commenting on Graham Clifford’s first book in Mad Hatter Reviews, Charlotte Barnes noted that: ‘A poetry fan to my very core, I was eager to delve into Graham Clifford’s recent collection, The Hitting Game. It was clear from the opening poem, “On the Dispersal of Water”, a nugget of intricate description and thought-provoking imagery, that this was going to be an interesting collection, and the rest of the publication certainly lived up to that initial judgement.’

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.

Stones

February 23, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

for Dave Billings

I nearly went arse over tip on the footpath to Lundy Bay
where violets, primrose and spring squill were jostling
in the last of the sun with scurvygrass and speedwell.

I clambered over the boulders, with half an eye on the tide
that sucked and slopped in the hollows, as I looked for pretties
and paperweights – for stones are a comfort in sorrow.

And I turned up granite and quartz, flat skimmers of shale,
limestone smoothed by the ebb and flow, and a slew
of coppery pebbles tumbling down to the foam;

then heaved myself back up the cliff, pockets bulging with rocks,
as a stonechat sang in the tangled gorse and alder swayed
in the wind, while the boats out at sea held their course.

So I bring you nothing but stones and I let these stones
speak for me, that hold their own in the storm, keep faith
with the tide and the land; for we measure in millions
the years they have been here, and the years till they turn to sand.

by Stephen Boyce

This Friday, The Archway Foundation, UK, in partnership with Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre, presents Rhyme to Change, a free poetry and music event in support of Time to Change, the national campaign to end mental health discrimination. The event takes place at the Barracks Lane Community Garden from 7.30pm, and features Dan Holloway, Matt Sewell (Charms Against the Evil Eye), Hugh McManners and George Edward Chopping. For more details, visit Archway’s Facebook page.

‘Stones’ is copyright © Stephen Boyce, 2014. It is reprinted from The Sisyphus Dog (Worple Press, 2014) by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Stephen Boyce lives in Hampshire and works as an advisor to arts and heritage bodies. His poems have appeared in Magma, Staple, The Interpreter’s House, Frogmore Papers, Smiths Knoll, Tears in the Fence, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Acumen and other journals, as well as in various anthologies. He has been a prizewinner in the Kent & Sussex, Leicester, Ledbury, Ware Poets and Plough Prize competitions. His collection Desire Lines (Arrowhead Press 2010) was described by Katherine Gallagher as ‘intelligent, sophisticated, formally assured… a truly exciting new voice’. He is a trustee of Winchester Poetry Festival. You can read more about his work on his website and on Twitter. You can find out more about his book 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 TheStreet 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.

San F.

February 16, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Bridged city under fog-white hills
The weeks were love and ended our eyes turning
Away past silence, endurable, the way damp soil tills.
In front of October, already, love was slower burning.
Wakeless suspension, her absence the agent of fever,
You gave the meaning of newspapers, and cleared the mist,
Silently plaguing like a dress I can’t remember
As i held back love with gripped fist.
Sirocco, and even the week-ends spent
The mental move must precede suitcases packed
Standing eternally within this dolmen we bent
Two memories and me gazing into plaster cracked.
Give time the time to rewind cells
Another meeting will arrange new hells.

by Ed Dorn

Our contemporary poetry conference, New to Next Generation 2014, takes place between 13-14 March 2015 in London, and features a wide range of discussion panels, poets (such as Helen Mort and Nick Drake), publishers and editors (like Peter Target from this week’s publisher, Enitharmon, Tom Chivers, and Karen McCarthy Woolf), and critics (such as David Wheatley, Suzi Feay, and Jeremy Noel-Tod). You can register for the conference on the IES website. All are welcome. On 13 March, there is also a free evening reading featuring Ian Duhig, Patience Agbabi, and Hannah Lowe. Please register for that here.

‘San F.’ is copyright © Edward Dorn, 2015. It is published in Derelict Air, and is reprinted here by permission of Enitharmon Press.

Derelict Air gathers over 400 pages of Edward Dorn’s previously uncollected poetry. Whereas Dorn’s Collected Poems exhibits the poet that he became, Derelict Air reflects a career of becoming, full of unacknowledged successes: impassioned outbursts written during the Cuban missile crisis, illustrated bucolics for an unfinished children’s book, “confetti poems” meant to shower the 1968 DNC, translations of native texts from the Mayans and Aztecs, outtakes from his sci-fi epic Gunslinger, and a relentless extension of his nineties ‘stock ticker’. Complete with scholarly endnotes, manuscript facsimiles, and a cover by the painter Raymond Obermayr, this substantial offering of Dorn’s poetry makes fully visible the transatlantic roots of his anti-capitalism, and is a must-have for anyone interested in post-War American modernism. The book contains a large number of illustrations, including reproductions of manuscripts which reveal Dorn’s unique style of composition. You can find out more about the book on the Enitharmon website, and listen to Ed Dorn read from his work on the PennSound website.

Edward Dorn (1929-1999) was born in Eastern Illinois in 1929 and grew up in rural poverty during the Great Depression. He studied at Black Mountain College with Charles Olson. For several years he travelled through the far West of America, following the winds of writing and employment. He taught at various universities in America and the UK (Essex) where he wrote the first book of his epic Gunslinger), before accepting a professorship in 1978 at the University of Colorado, Boulder where he continued teaching until his death in December 1999. He is the author of over forty books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and translation. Writing about Dorn’s work in The Guardian , Patrick McGuinness observed that ‘what you get from Dorn is not available anywhere else in poetry.’

‘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.

Boom!

February 9, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

There was this baby who thought she was a hand grenade.
She appeared one day in the centre of our marriage
– or at least in the spot where all the elements of our union
       appeared to orbit –
and kept threatening to explode, emitting endless alarm-sounds
       that were difficult to decode.
On the ridge of threat, we had two options.
One was attempt to make it to the bottom
of the crevice slowly, purposively, holding hands. The other
       was see how long we could stand there philosophizing
     that when she finally went off we’d be able to take it.
But then the baby who believed she was a hand grenade
       was joined in number: several more such devices entered our lives.
We held on, expecting each day to be our last. We did not let go.
As you might expect, she blew us to smithereens.
We survived, but in a different state: you became
       organized, I discovered patience, shrapnel soldered the parts of us
       that hadn’t quite fit together before. Sometimes when I speak
it’s your words that come out of my mouth.

by Carolyn Jess-Cooke

Two notes from the Poetry Centre: registration is now open for our contemporary poetry conference in London from 13-14 March, to which all are welcome. ‘New Generation to Next Generation 2014’ features academic panels, a poetry reading from Nick Drake and Helen Mort, and discussions about the publishing and reviewing of contemporary poetry. It will be an exciting two days. Full details of the programme are available on the IES website. The conference also includes a free public reading on the evening of 13 March by an illustrious ‘cross-generation’ panel of poets: Ian Duhig, Patience Agbabi, and Hannah Lowe, and you can register for that via the IES.The deadline for submissions to our well-being poetry competition isthis Friday 13 February. It is open to all members of the Brookes community. Find more details on the Poetry Centre website.

‘Boom!’ is copyright © Carolyn Jess-Cooke, 2014. It was published in Boom!, and is reprinted here by permission of Seren Books.

Notes from Seren:

Carolyn Jess-Cooke is a poet and novelist from Belfast. She has received numerous awards for her poetry, including an Eric Gregory Award, the Tyrone Guthrie Prize for Poetry, an Arts Council Writer’s Award, prizes in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition and the National Poetry Competition, and she has twice received a Northern Promise Award. Her work has been translated into over twenty languages. She is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. You can read more about Boom! on Seren’s pages, and more about Carolyn Jess-Cooke from her website. You can also follow Carolyn on Facebook and Twitter.

Writing about Jess-Cooke’s work in New Welsh Review, Georgia Carys Williams has commented that: ‘For any readers who sigh at the very idea of pregnancy writing, these poems are somehow unique, laying motherhood bare, written at the raw moment of pain and ecstasy at each strange and miraculous stage. We can only gain further insight from such vivid descriptions of how this experience affects time, identity and relationships.’

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.

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.

Enda’s Letter

February 2, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Your second letter arrived this week,
green edged air mail. The only place in the world
to have these envelopes, I’ll bet,
and in case that’s not enough, a small printed
shamrock and Bronze Age jewellery on the stamp,
Tobair an Choir on the post mark: my address
in royal blue. You don’t seem too bothered
about countries, England’s an afterthought
in the corner. With your own you get as far
as Gurteen but no further. What are
states and nations your writing seems to say?
Four Easter eggs and holldays from school,
two kisses and a heart.

Aren’t there laws against letters as young
as this travelling on their own by air?
You’ve only been around five years. Hardly time
to learn to clean your teeth, and here you are
sending a whole page of proper sentences
thousands of miles, getting foreign post codes
right, being taken seriously by postmen,
addressing me as Ms. and, no doubt, by now
learning like a grown up to wait for a reply.

by Mary Woodward

‘Enda’s Letter’ is copyright © Mary Woodward, 2014. It is reprinted from The White Valentine (Worple Press, 2014) by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Mary Woodward was born in Hammersmith to Irish and Welsh parents. As a child she lived in bomb-damaged Shepherd’s Bush, grew up on a council estate in Hertfordshire, and then studied in Liverpool. She has an English degree and a Master’s degree for research on William Morris’s early poetry from the University of Liverpool. She has worked in the Department of Education, and from 1979 to 2002 as a teacher in a comprehensive school; in 1993 she won the TES Teaching Poetry prize. After teaching HND Fashion students she went on to win the Guardian Jackie Moore Award for Fashion Writing in 2003. In 1993 she won the Poetry Business poetry competition and published Almost Like Talking (Smith Doorstep). In 2008 she was awarded a place on a Poetry Trust First Collection seminar at Bruisyard Hall. Her poems have been in many magazines and frequently placed in competitions. Her poem ‘White Valentine’ was Highly Commended in the Forward Prize for Poetry 2014. She also has published short fiction. Read more about the book from Worple’s website.

Into This Suspended Vacuum

January 26, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

for John Wieners

Whatever militates against our dreamier pleasures I have
Become the same meaning utopia’s crude petroleum jolts
Coded rubber heat singing things that turn blind eyes to waste
Erasing worlds being serial resolves my fate in theory I think

I want to love and loving kiss yr many addled hallucinations
Hunger fulfillment’s no longer a glamour hangs dependence
On feeding the thing eternally expressing selves in public
Johns voices saying before you decide to leave me leave

Me a rag some hair a duct or mass producing anything external
Can’t arouse thus corrodes the tongue with news I can’t be
Warm or think my own repression cause it’s too hot inside this
War to dream communications a soiled body nobody wants

To express can’t be itself in goods another total embracing
Wants to believe belief enough to become the world we can’t

~~— cause the cops can’t fucking fathom.~~
by Rob Halpern

Welcome back to the Weekly Poem series! Look out for the next instalment of the Next Generation Poets 2014 tour. There are 11 more stops coming up across the country, including readings by Brookes’ own Hannah Lowe and Patience Agbabi (Next Generation Poet in 2004). For the full schedule, visit the Next Generation Poets 2014 website.

Rob Halpern is the author of the Common Place tetralogy, published in the USA over the last eight years, and co-author (with Taylor Brady) of Snow Sensitive Skin. Recent essays and translations by Halpern have appeared in Chicago Review, Journal of Narrative Theory, and The Claudius App, and an essay by Sam Ladkin on the Common Place series can be found online in World Picture Journal 8. You can read more about [––––––––]: Placeholder on the Enitharmon website, hear Halpern read on PennSound, and find out more about his work from his page on the Eastern Michigan University website.

The Boston Globe, selecting Halpern’s book Music for Porn as one its Poetry Books of 2012, commented that: ‘Halpern was as fearless as they came in 2012. His stunning third collection was both statement and experiment – a gruesome, erotic, studied, unflinching dissection of the ways that violence, sex, and social order tear at each other. Halpern uses the body as a battleground, and the soldier as a stand-in for a range of repressed (and fulfilled) desires. Light reading, it is not; enlightening, challenging, and upsetting, it will be for years to come.’

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.

Black Jaguar at Twilight

December 15, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

He seems to have sucked
the whole Amazon
into his being, the storm-

clouds of rosettes
through a bronze dusk.
I’ve been there, sheltered

under the buttress
of a giant, felt
the air around me –

its muscles tense,
stalking me
as I stumbled

through dense fur,
my father’s tongue
wet on my neck

as I fell into a gulch,
the blackout of his mouth.
And when I woke

I thought I heard
the jungle cough – this jungle,
the jaguar safe

behind bars. I lean over
and touch his cage – his glance
grazes me like an arrow.

by Pascale Petit

This is the last Weekly Poem until after the Christmas and New Year period. We hope you have enjoyed this year’s selection, and we are very grateful to our publishers who have so generously provided poems. You can find a full list of those publishers on the Poetry Centre site. Their books make excellent Christmas presents!

This Friday is the closing date for receipt of abstracts for the Poetry Centre/IES conference about contemporary poetry, due to take place in March 2015. Inspired by the New, Next, and Next Generation 2014 lists, the conference will explore the state of contemporary British and Irish poetry now, and will feature a host of contemporary poets and critics. For more details,visit the cfp on the IES site.

Notes from Seren:

Pascale Petit has published six collections, four of which were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and three featured as Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement, The Observer, and The Independent. Her latest is T.S. Eliot-shortlisted Fauverie (Seren, 2014). A portfolio of poems from this book won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize and the manuscript in progress was awarded an Arts Council England grant. Her fifth book, What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo, was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and Wales Book of the Year. You can read more about Fauverie on the Seren website, and follow Pascale’s work on her website or via Twitter.

Writing about Fauverie on The Tuesday Poem site, Kathleen Jones commented that ‘[t]he Fauverie is the big cat house in the Jardin des Plantes zoo in Paris – a city portrayed in these poems as “savage as the Amazon”. At the centre of the collection is the big Jaguar, Aramis, beautiful, wild and dangerous in every cell of his powerful body. And there is also the poet’s father, now weak and dying, but still able to arouse turbulent emotions and painful memories. There is ambivalence and ambiguity in everything – ‘ferocity and grace’ exist side by side – the wild can be both savage and seductive. Humans are also animals.’

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, this year, of the wonderful Dannie Abse, also a guiding spirit. Find out more about the publisher 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.

3. Reclining Figure, Angles

December 8, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

credo

If there must be a word
and believe me there must
then it is the word alert

and drawn to what moves
beyond her—where she lies
draped about the knees

with fabric pulled taut again
a way of explaining time
to the eternal moment

as her left leg declines
though no longer passive—
the turn of her left shoulder

towards a strong focal point
leaves the body twisted
on the thrust of her flatplanted

right foot—image
of awareness repeatedly
alertness of an interest in

though there’s nothing
here of the egotistical—
in these graceful airs

in what passes through
as it has through these others
the flex and curve

of self-confident pride
yet hollowed and smoothed
and though the head

is shaped to a feature
still the magisterial gaze
is blankly all-seeing

staring beyond shock
or surprise or pleasure
or anger or envy forever

beyond grief—this curious
taking notice and if it ever
comes to be diminished

I mean the head on its stump
it’s the body that senses
and nothing’s let slip
by Martyn Crucefix

This Friday 12 December, join The Archway Foundation, local poets George Chopping, Kate Byard, and Dan Holloway, and musician Matt Sewell for ‘Rhyme to Change’, a free poetry and music event in support of the Time to Change mental health campaign. The event takes place at 7.30pm at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop on Walton Street in Oxford. All are welcome!

Notes from Worple Press:

Martyn Crucefix has won numerous prizes including a major Eric Gregory award and a Hawthornden Fellowship. He has published 5 collections of poetry; the latest, Hurt, was published by Enitharmon in 2010. His translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies in 2006, shortlisted for the Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation, was hailed as “unlikely to be bettered for very many years” (Magma). His new translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus appeared in 2012. You can read more about A Hatfield Mass on the Worple website, and follow Martyn’s work on his website or on Twitter.