Author: oxfordbrookesuni

Girl

~ oxfordbrookesuni

That girl’s the girl I mean. That one now, wearing
no-animals-were-harmed-in-making-these-
leopardskin leggings, ears posing the question

of what are ears for, really,
but bearing the weight of the biggest silver-
coloured hoops on earth? In diamanté

scarlet heels, six inch,
when she walks, everything sparkles, everything
limps. Her hair is piled up on her head,

like the kind of coastal clifftop rampart
cameras swoop in at from the sea,
in historical action movies, featuring

Mel Gibson. Up her sleeve
is a tattoo, a Chinese symbol, and what it means
is clear. Look, that’s her now, outside The Mermaid,

going a little cross-eyed as she draws
on a cigarette and shouts across the street,
asks an acquaintance if she’d like

some, would she? So how else
can I put it? How much clearer can I be?
That girl’s the girl. That girl’s the girl for me.
by Jonathan Edwards

Two news items. First, the deadline of the call for papers for the conference ‘New Generation to Next Generation 2014: Three Decades of British and Irish Poetry’ has been extended to 19 December. We welcome all abstracts that address one or more of the broad range of themes listed in the cfp, which can be found on the IES website.

And on Wednesday, Professor Maximilian de Gaynesford (University of Reading) will speak on ‘Why Poetry Matters’: 6pm (drinks and nibbles from 5.30) at the Ashmolean Museum’s Education Centre (nearest entrance from St. Giles). The event is free, but turn up early to secure a seat! More details can be found on the Ashmolean website.

‘Girl’ is copyright © Jonathan Edwards, 2014. It was published in My Family and Other Superheroes, and is reprinted here by permission of Seren Books.

Notes from Seren:

Jonathan Edwards was born and brought up in Crosskeys, south Wales. He has an MA in Writing from the University of Warwick, has written speeches for the Welsh Assembly Government and journalism for The Big Issue Cymru, and currently works as an English teacher. He won the Terry Hetherington Award in 2010, was awarded a Literature Wales new writer’s bursary in 2011, and in 2012 won prizes in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition and the Basil Bunting Award. His work has appeared in a wide range of magazines, including Poetry Review, The North, Poetry Wales andNew Welsh Review. My Family and Other Superheroes is his first collection, and has been shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Prize 2014 and the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2014. You can hear Jonathan discuss his book and read from it on the BBC website, and find out more about the book on the Seren website.

Dave Morgan in Write Out Loud has commented that ‘[t]his collection, in parts nostalgic and emotional, reveals a poet preoccupied with heart and hearth. However, Jonathan Edwards’ characters and places stop short of being caricature, and his appeal to emotion does not trivialise the poignancy and pathos of his observations. Edwards is the poet as sociologist, as well as observer/participant; he makes the customs and culture of the hill tribes of south Wales as exotic as that of the Trobriand islanders.’

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, TheLast 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 90’s, 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 on 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.

You, Me and the Bookcase

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The back seat of a car wasn’t ever
big enough. The boot had to be left open
to bring home our book case.


Fitting corners through doorways
allowed us to feel the grain, the scent
of polish rushing to our heads. Out of the rings

left by two glasses and what we surmised
a bottle of burgundy, we invented a story
about a couple like us, who at weekends scoured

shops for texts about the world. Atlases,
dictionaries, photo albums, and the collected works
of philosophers share the shelves.

We’ve devised an order of sorts,
and positioned spines so sometimes
we lie horizontal with the titles.

Although we haven’t filled all the gaps,
we’re learning it’s not just touch
and visual pleasure, but finding the words.

by Sally Flint

This Saturday 29 November at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, Hannah Lowe (Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing at Brookes) will be running a poetry workshop and taking part in a discussion with Mike Phillips in an event related to her fascinating recent publication, Ormonde. There are a few tickets left! Visit the Hercules Press website for more details.

Next Wednesday 3 December, Professor Maximilian de Gaynesford (University of Reading) will speak on ‘Why Poetry Matters’: 6pm (drinks and nibbles from 5.30) at the Ashmolean Museum’s Education Centre (nearest entrance from St. Giles). The event is free, but turn up early to secure a seat! More details can be found on the Ashmolean website.

‘You, Me and the Bookcase’ is copyright © Sally Flint, 2014. It is reprinted from Pieces of Us (Worple Press, 2014) by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Sally Flint grew up in the West Midlands and now lives in Exeter. Her poetry and prose have been widely published, anthologised and won awards. She teaches creative writing, facilitates community workshops and is co-founder/editor of Riptideshort story journal and Canto Poetry at the University of Exeter. She also works with Devon Drugs Service and Devon Community Foundation on a project called ‘Stories Connect’, based on the University of Massachusetts’ programme, ‘Changing Lives through Literature.’ Her research interests include healthcare in the arts, and the evolution of ekphrasis, especially the relationship between poetry, visual art and technology.

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.

Midnight, Dhaka, 25 March 1971

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I am a hardened camera clicking at midnight.
I have caught it all: the screeching tanks
pounding the city under the pressing heat,
searchlights dicing the streets like bayonets,
Kalishnikovs mowing down rickshaw pullers,
vendor sellers, beggars on the pavements.
I click on, despite the dry and bitter dust
scratched on the lake-black water of my Nikon eye,
at a Bedford truck waiting by the roadside,
at two soldiers holding the dead by their hands and legs,
throwing them into the back, hurling
them one upon another until the floor
is loaded to the sky’s armpits. The corpses stare
at our stars’ succulent whiteness
with their arms flung out as if to bridge a nation.
Their bodies shake when the lorry chugs.
I click as the soldiers laugh at the billboard on the bulkhead:
GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU
SIX MILLION DRUNK EVERY DAY.
by Mir Mahfuz Ali

Tomorrow (Wednesday), there will be a joint poetry reading at Oxford Brookes by Peter Robinson and Hannah Lowe. It will take place from 12-1pm in T.300 (Tonge Building, Gipsy Lane Campus), and all are welcome. Peter Robinson is Professor of English Literature at the University of Reading, and a prolific and highly influential writer and editor. He has recently published Foreigners, Drunks and Babies, a collection of short stories, and Like the Living End, a chapbook of new poetry. Hannah Lowe is Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing at Brookes. Her collection Chick was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2013, and shortlisted for, amongst other prizes, the Forward Best First Collection Prize. Hannah’s pamphlet Ormonde appeared earlier this month from Hercules Editions. In September, she was named as one of the twenty Next Generation Poets 2014. For more details, contact niall.munro@brookes.ac.uk

‘Midnight, Dhaka, 25 March 1971’ is copyright © Mir Mahfuz Ali, 2014. It was published by Seren Books, and is reprinted here by permission from Midnight, Dhaka.

Mir Mahfuz Ali is an exceptional new voice in British Poetry. A native of what is now Bangladesh, Mahfuz grew up during the difficult period of the early 1970’s when the region was struck, first by a devastating cyclone, then by a particularly vicious civil war. As a boy, Mahfuz witnessed atrocities and writes about them with a searing directness, in poems like ‘My Salma’ and the title poem, but much more than this, his trauma becomes transformative, and his poetry the key to unlocking memories of a childhood that are rich in nuance, gorgeous in detail, and evocative of a beautiful country. They celebrate the human capacity for love and survival in otherwise tragic circumstances. Read more about the book on the Seren website.

Mahfuz was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1958, moved to the UK in the 1970s. He has worked as a male model, a tandoori chef and as a dancer and actor. He is renowned for his extraordinary voice: a rich, throaty whisper brought about by a Bangladeshi policeman trying to silence the singing of anthems during a public anti-war demonstration. He has given readings and performances at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and in other theatres in Britain and elsewhere; on BBC Newsnight Review, Radio 4, and the World Service as well as speaking at a number of conferences and festivals, including addressing the Home Office on integration policy. His poetry has appeared in London Magazine, Poetry London, Poetry Review and PN Review. His influences include Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and Jibanananda Das (1899-1954). Mahfuz is an active member of Exiled Writer’s Ink, which is working to promote the creative expression of refugees and of exiled writers and encourage cross-cultural dialogue. Midnight, Dhaka, is his first full collection of poetry. Several poems from this collection won the Geoffrey Dearmer prize in 2014. You can find out more about his work from his website.

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 90’s, 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 on 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.

Cracked Walnut and Cup

~ oxfordbrookesuni


The cracked walnut
beside the porcelain cup

is not a porcelain walnut
and a cracked cup


but as she who finds
her lover’s words in her mouth

and their friends who discover
their faces alike

the walnut shell seems
another drinking vessel

and the cup appears
ever more breakable.

by Isabel Galleymore

Tomorrow (Tuesday 11 November), the Emergency Poet visits Brookes! Between 11-3pm, the EP’s ambulance will be parked between the Media Centre and the John Henry Brookes Building on Headington Road. Come along for your free poetry prescription! This event is part of the Poetry Centre’s ongoing collaboration with the local mental health charity The Archway Foundation. Whether you’re from Brookes or not, all are welcome!

And tomorrow evening, the Next Generation Poets are in town. The Next Generation list, released every decade and organized by the Poetry Book Society, marks out the poets to watch from Britain and Ireland. At 7pm, Blackwell’s on Broad Street will host a reading featuring two of the twenty Next Generation 2014 poets, Jane Yeh and Luke Kennard, who will be reading alongside New Generation (1994) poet Susan Wicks, and local poet Rachel Piercey. More details about the event can be found on the Blackwell’s website, and more information about the Next Generation Poets 2014 from the promotion’s site.

‘Cracked Walnut and Cup’ is copyright © Isabel Galleymore, 2014. It is reprinted from Dazzle Ship (Worple Press, 2014) by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Isabel Galleymore was born in 1988. She held a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2012 and her poems have appeared in magazines such as Poetry Review, Poetry London and The Rialto. She is currently writing her critical PhD thesis on metaphor and ecopoetics at the University of Exeter and co-edits The Clearing, an online magazine of nature and place-based writing. Find out more about her book from 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.

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.

Days of November 2009

~ oxfordbrookesuni


Short days, long shadows:
sun rising low skims the hill.

Mending, making good, days full
of outdoor jobs, folk

racing to finish before dark,
before winter. Angled light, always

on the edge of leaving. These days
when every little thing feels urgent,

unmissable, when all you want
is to hold on to a lit rack

of cirrus, the taste of woodsmoke
catching your throat, a sleek seal

slipping back under, the farewell
of geese, scribbled in black arrows.

by Sheenagh Pugh

Hannah Lowe, Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing, and Jennifer Wong, PhD student in English and Creative Writing, will be taking part in the Reading Poetry Festival on Saturday 8 November in a special Poetry Centre reading. You can find out more about the festival, and book tickets, on the dedicated website.

‘Days of November 2009’ is copyright © Sheenagh Pugh, 2014. It was published by Seren Books, and is reprinted here by permission.

Sheenagh Pugh lived for many years in Wales but now lives in Shetland. She has published many collections with Seren, including a Selected and a Later Selected Poems. Her latest is Short Days, Long Shadows (Seren 2014). She has also published two novels, a book of translations and a critical study of fan fiction. Write Out Loud has commented that ‘this consummate collection has the certainty of touch one has come to expect from Sheenagh Pugh, one of our finest contemporary poets.’ Sheenagh taught creative writing at the University of Glamorgan, but has now escaped and returned to the wild. You can find out more about her work from her website, and her blog. She writes a lively blog and is a provocative and entertaining presence on social media platforms. 

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 90’s, 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 like Hilary Menos, Sheenagh Pugh, Kathryn Simmonds, Kate Bingham, Judy Brown, Meirion Jordan, Rhian Edwards and Marianne Burton as well as continuing to publishing classic Welsh writers like Duncan Bush, Christopher Meredith, Paul Henry, Ruth Bidgood, Peter Finch and new names like Jonathan Edwards and Dai George. Recently, we’ve also added some fine Irish poets: Anne-Marie Fyfe, Eoghan Walls, Siobhan Campbell, Carolyn Jess-Cooke; several Americans: Carrie Etter and Katha Pollitt; and the London-based: Kathryn Maris. Our staff also includes Simon Hicks, Publicity, who doubles as cover designer, Sarah Davies, Marketing and Digital Media, and Rebecca Parfitt, administrator for Poetry Wales magazine. 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 on 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.

from Gilles de Rais

~ oxfordbrookesuni


the magician television show which isn’t true to life.

This is the best of all says prelati
mixing tobacco
too many fish in the sea apparently
to keep
the quench clenched
oh well no use in crying
now 30 years or 300 years later unless there’s
some hard money involved
but I am not able
to forget, Gilles in drowing
in his dreaming
of the happy society kissed as a king

shot in the ribs in revenge.

my organs like this, two ribs, rhymes
and emily’s
racist baby workout
is a future collected book
like this a postcard sized box that is completely
empty as a hospital bed
can be empty soon
enough if you don’t watch you mouth & if so
I’ll be on quick as a flash
evidence for it in my past

by SJ Fowler

Two news items: Hannah Lowe, Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing, andJennifer Wong, PhD student in English and Creative Writing,will be taking part in the Reading Poetry Festival on Saturday 8 November 2014 in a special Poetry Centre reading. You can find out more about the festival, and book tickets, on the dedicated website.


From St Aldates Church in Oxford: This winter sees the publication of an Advent Poetry Anthology and we are currently accepting submissions towards this project. This is open to all ages, and although poems don’t have to be overtly Christian, they should reflect the themes of the advent season. The closing date for poetry submissions is Sunday 9 November. For more information or to submit a poem please email poetry@staldates.org.uk

This excerpt from ‘Gilles de Rais’ is copyright © SJ Fowler, 2013. It is reprinted by permission of Penned in the Margins from Enemies (Penned in the Margins, 2013).

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

‘Gilles de Rais’ is a collaborative work with poems by SJ Fowler and artwork from David Kelly, and comes from the anthology, Enemies . This ground-breaking, multi-disciplinary collection is the result of collaborations between SJ Fowler and over thirty artists, photographers and writers. Diary entries mingle with a partially-redacted email exchange; texts slip and fragment, finding new contexts alongside prints, paintings, diagrams, Rorschach blots, YouTube clips and behind-the-scenes photographs at the museum. Find out more from the Penned in the Margins website, watch SJ Fowler read from the poem, and follow his work on his website and on Twitter.

SJ Fowler is a poet and artist living in London. He has published four collections of poetry, most recently the limited-edition Recipes (Red Ceilings, 2012). He has produced poetry, sonic art, installation and performance artworks for Tate, the Voiceworks project and the London Sinfonietta. He is the poetry editor of 3:AM Magazine and also works as a martial arts instructor, and as an employee of the British Museum.

Penned in the Margins is an independent publisher and live literature producer specialising in poetry and based in East London. Founded in 2004, the company has produced numerous literature and performance events, toured several successful live literature shows, published over twenty-five books, and continues to run innovative poetry, arts and performance projects in the capital and beyond. The company is currently touring two productions: Shlock!, a powerful feminist satire for the cut and paste generation, and The Shipwrecked House, a one-woman performance that blends poetry with theatre, in which Anglo-Breton poet Claire Trévien navigates a shifting maritime landscape. You can find out more about these productions on the Penned in the Margins website.

Penned in the Margins’s recent anthology, Adventures in Form, was awarded a Special Commendation by the Poetry Book Society and was chosen as one of 50 Best Summer Reads by The Independent. You can visit the Penned in the Margins website here to sign up to the mailing list, and follow the publisher 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.

Milia

~ oxfordbrookesuni


I

An olive-wood fire and the local
pre-phylloxera survival red against
the cold wind outside, which is enough
of being, as if it were so grand.

Night folds its corners down
the terraced hillsides and
walks upright on the
wandering streams, but

No sound, of stream or wind, reaches here
or almost, and the fire darkens. Breathe words
across my ear, breathe a fear, second by
second, jar by jar, fear of war and world, be explicit.

Let a resistance grow here, far
from world but close to mind, how
close it lies, to hear its breath
against the inner ear,

A breath to banish fear.
Then the streams flow on
and the air follow,
down the valley towards the world.

II

Thought that distils
against my ear a tear
for the time and
a silent belief in peace. Our cargoes

Were sunk in the seas and now
lie calm under tumult. Our dead
recede behind the night clouds.
Remind me of what I once knew,

Breathe the truth back faintly across
my ear in this walled shelter and hear
the plants shake, the earth tumble.
There is only one peace, a lot further out.

by Peter Riley

‘Milia’ is copyright © Peter Riley, 2014. It was published by Two Rivers Press in the anthology The Arts of Peace in 2014, and is reprinted here by permission.

This is the second of two poems from The Arts of Peace: An Anthology of Poems, edited by Adrian Blamires and Peter Robinson. There will be a special event at the upcoming Reading Poetry Festival on Sunday 9 November featuring a number of poets whose work is included in the anthology. You can find out more about it and the rest of the events on the festival’s website.

If you are a student or member of staff at Oxford Brookes, enter our poetry competition on the themes of mental health and well-being. The deadline is Friday 13 February 2015, and poems should be submitted via email to: brookespoetrycompetition@gmail.com Find out more on the Poetry Centre website.

Peter Riley was born into an environment of working people in the Manchester area in 1940 and now lives in retirement in Hebden Bridge, having previously lived in Cambridge for many years. He has been a teacher, bookseller, and a few other things and is the author of some fifteen books of poetry, and two of prose concerning travel and music. His most recent book is The Glacial Stairway (Carcanet 2011). He contributes reviews of new poetry to the website The Fortnightly Review regularly. Peter Riley’s own website is April Eye, where you can find out more about his work, and you can also read an interview with him by Keith Tuma in an issue of Jacket magazine from April 2000.

This poem is taken from The Arts of Peace: An Anthology of Poems, edited by Adrian Blamires and Peter Robinson, and published by Two Rivers Press. The first of August 1914 saw the beginning of the war that was to end all wars and which, instead, ushered in a century of armed conflicts, two of them described as global. This anthology’s title is borrowed from Andrew Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, in which he deprecates ‘the inglorious arts of peace’. With this gathering of newly composed poems, and against that grain, this anthology looks to celebrate all that is left behind in times of conflict and which conflict is so often evoked to defend. The more than fifty contributors include Fleur Adcock, Fred D’Aguiar, Gerald Dawe, Jane Draycott, Elaine Feinstein, Roy Fisher, Philip Gross, Allison McVety, Bill Manhire, John Matthias, and Carol Rumens.

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.

Coral Island

~ oxfordbrookesuni

To our surprise the island was well watered.
The fishes were strangely easy to catch
And the little pigs that gambolled around
In the interior provided nourishment,
As well as fun for my fellow castaways.

The weather was persistently benign,
Stroking our hair and murmuring white noise.
Though my spyglass had suffered from the sea
I could still use it for scanning the waves,
Hoping for a sail or even a monster.

Meantime I memorised our days in paradise
And the little that happened, looking forward
To the book I should write when we were rescued –
A more or less truthful tally of events,
Spiced up or embroidered as need might be.

At night the land crabs rattled round the palms
And the waves were bored by the same old beach.
Peterkin snored guilelessly in our hut
While Jack dreamed in silence about his pig-sticking
And I stared out to sea with an empty mind.

That was before the coming of the cannibals
And our unforeseen arrival at manhood,
When things that should not be seen were seen
And could not be unseen, and our green Eden
Receded into a book for small boys.

by Fergus Allen

Together with the Institute of English Studies in London, the Poetry Centre is organizing a conference from 13-14 March 2015 at the IES to address the three initiatives: New Generation Poets (1994), Next Generation Poets (2004), and Next Generation Poets 2014. It aims to examine important concerns of contemporary poetry arising from these projects, such as the relationship between poetry and the public, the promotion of poetry through initiatives such as these, and what the selection of the particular poets on these lists can tell us about the state and direction of British poetry at various stages over the past twenty years. For more information and the call for papers, please visit the IES website.

‘Coral Island’ is copyright © Fergus Allen, 2013, and is reprinted from New & Selected Poems, introduced by Christopher Reid (CBeditions, 2013).

Fergus Allen was born in 1921; his father was Irish, his mother English. After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, he moved to England during the Second World War. He was Director of the Hydraulics Research Station and ended his professional career as First Civil Service Commissioner. In 2000 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He published his first book (with Faber) at the age of seventy-two; the poem here is one of several recent poems that comprise the first section of his New& Selected Poems, which also includes work from five previous collections. You can read more poems from the book on the CBe website, read more about Allen’s work from the CBe blog, and hear him read at the Poetry Archive.

CB editions, founded in 2007, publishes poetry alongside short fiction and other writing, including work in translation. Its poetry titles have won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize three times (in 2009, 2011 and 2013), and have been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize.

In 2011 CBe inaugurated Free Verse , a one-day book fair for poetry publishers to show their work and sell direct to the public; the event was repeated in 2012, 2013, and this year too, with over 60 publishers taking part.

Find out more about the publisher from the website, where you can also sign up to the CB editions mailing list, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook to keep up-to-date with its activities.

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.

Quick March

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Geraniums stood in ranked red rows
inside Victoria’s railed parks
where servants took their Sunday walks
without an aphid on the rose.

My grandfather in brisk young life,
hunched in dugouts, ironed Majors’ clothes,
spotted ‘dead Jerries’, when dawn froze,
then edged his lawns sharp as a knife.

My father kicked down Hamburg’s doors
when they pursued the last SS.
He grew, in ground raked fine as dust,
long beans, parsnips, small potatoes.

The white musk roses bend your border,
bees bumble, where dusk’s crickets trilled.
They marched; from rigid files, fell killed,
so you may garden, in disorder.

by Alison Brackenbury

This Thursday 2 October is National Poetry Day (the theme of which is ‘Remember’), and the Poetry Centre will be marking the occasion with the launch of three projects: a wellbeing poetry competition open to all at Brookes, a Memorable Poem video project in which members of the Brookes community talk and write about the poems which mean the most to them, and a series of pop-up poetry events around the Brookes campuses and across Oxford. You can find out more about all of these on the Poetry Centre website, and will be able to follow our activities on the day via Twitter and Facebook.

‘Quick March’ is copyright © Alison Brackenbury, 2014. It was published by Two Rivers Press in the anthology The Arts of Peace in 2014, and is reprinted here by permission.

Alison Brackenbury’s eighth collection is Then (Carcanet, 2013). New poems can be read at her website, and a new collection will appear in early 2016. You can hear Alison read from her work at the Poetry Archive, and read her reflections on The Great War on her blog entry for April 9 2014. You can also find Alison on Facebook and Twitter.

This poem is taken from The Arts of Peace: An Anthology of Poems, edited by Adrian Blamires and Peter Robinson, and published by Two Rivers Press. The first of August 1914 saw the beginning of the war that was to end all wars and which, instead, ushered in a century of armed conflicts, two of them described as global. This anthology’s title is borrowed from Andrew Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, in which he deprecates ‘the inglorious arts of peace’. With this gathering of newly composed poems, and against that grain, this anthology looks to celebrate all that is left behind in times of conflict and which conflict is so often evoked to defend. The more than fifty contributors include Fleur Adcock, Fred D’Aguiar, Gerald Dawe, Jane Draycott, Elaine Feinstein, Roy Fisher, Philip Gross, Allison McVety, Bill Manhire, John Matthias, and Carol Rumens.

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.

Looking At Late Rembrandts After Leaving Dad At The Nursing Home

~ oxfordbrookesuni


Bodies strained upright
in upright
straight-backed chairs;
struggle to stay
still, 
              clawing hands
grappling arm rests to brace;
their skin-shrunk 
                                rounded
skulls 
                concentrated
by some inexpressive
thought,

the life that has lived them,

the eyes stunned
by seeing the what
is not there,
the foreseeable
that has happened
                            to them;
the eyes in the
struck faces
of the painter’s sitters

alone
alive
with a titanium

glint of light.
by Steven Matthews

‘Looking At Late Rembrandts After Leaving Dad At The Nursing Home’ is copyright © Steven Matthews, 2012. It was published by Waterloo Press in Skying  in 2012, and is reprinted here by permission.

Notes from Waterloo Press:

Steven Matthews’s first book of poetry, Skying, emerges from an engagement with the landscape and seascape of North Essex and the Suffolk border, where Steven Matthews was brought up, and which he has always been drawn back to. It combines moments of illumination with voices remaking family and local stories, and so tunes into oral histories of place. The book’s often local voices associate themselves with, but also diverge amazingly from, national versions of trauma and threat. There are also poems here about childhood, being a father, and about grief and loss. 

But the collection also sets those particular voices within and against the history of poetry and art which has been similarly engaged. A sequence, ‘Places of Writing’, and related work, explore the relation of a gallery of writers to their locale. As the title of the collection, which uses a word coined by the artist indicates, the painter John Constable stands as presiding spirit behind Skying’s related concerns.

Steven Matthews was born and brought up in Colchester, Essex. Various of his poems have been published in magazines and journals including Stand, Versus, Kunapipi, Oxford Magazine, Poetry and Audience, and Moving Worlds. He has been a regular reviewer for Poetry Review, and Poetry Editor for Dublin Quarterly Magazine. The former Director of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre, Steven Matthews is now Professor in English Literature (Modernism) at the University of Reading.

Waterloo Press offers readers an eclectic list of the most stimulating poetry from the UK and abroad. We promote what’s good of its kind, finding a commonality amongst the poets we publish. Our beautifully designed books range from lost modernist classics, translations and vibrant collections by the best British poets around. Our translation list is growing to 25% of our output. Waterloo Press brings radical and marginalised voices to the fore, mirroring their aesthetics in outstanding book design, including dust jackets; large font; and original artwork. With its growing list, Waterloo Press promotes at last a permeable membrane between contemporary schools, quite apart from archiving a few sacred vessels for good. WP fosters a poetics based on innovation with respect for craft, bloody-mindedness and as founder Sonja Ctvrtecka put it: ‘An elegant unstuffiness – a seagull perched on a Porsche.’ Now the major poetry publisher of the south-east, we also believe strongly in a community of like-minded independent presses. We’ve become a land.

Find out more about Waterloo Press via its website, or ‘like’ the publisher 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.