Lastu

August 18, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Niitythän oli aivan ihania,
että niissä kukki päiväkukat sen minä muistan
että kerran tuolla kun oli sellainen peltoaukema
mutta mikäs kasvi se sellainen oli
minkä ympärillä ne perhoset
mikäs kasvi se siellä oli ja
sitten sitä metsää hakattiin ja sitten sitä ei enää ollu
mutta kun mä en muista sen nimee
ehkä mä muistan sen sitten
siitä mentiin sillan yli
ja silta vei joen yli ja siinä oli tuomi ja
tuomi sitten kaartui sen joen yli ja sananjalkoja
ja haiseva kurjenpolvi ja laakea kivi polulla
ja mä olen monta kertaa nähnyt unta siitä polusta
toisessa oli hirveesti muurahaisia
toinen oli sellainen ilman muurahaisia
toisessa oli paljon neulasia ja käpyjä mutta se toinen,
se oli hyvin lempee, siinä kasvo päivänkakkaraniitty
siinä vieressä ja siellä erämaassa oli sellainen torppa
isä lähti aina sunnuntaiaamuisin lintuja ampumaan
ja kastematoja oli meillä kotona ja
niitähän kerättiin kun oli pitkä siima, se on
semmoinen siima jossa oli paljon koukkuja
ja kerran tällainen siima
oli meidän vintillä kun oli paljon koiranpentuja
ja yks näistä pennuista sai sen siiman huuleensa.

The Shaving

The meadows used to be really wonderful,
with all daisies there, that I remember,
and there was this sort of clearing at one time
but what was that plant
the one the butterflies went for
what plant was that and
then the forest was chopped down and it was gone
but I just can’t dredge up the name
I might have it
we walked over a bridge from it
and the bridge crossed a river to a bird cherry and
the bird cherry bent over the river and ferns
and smelly cranesbill and a flat stone on the path
and I’ve had so many dreams about that path,
one had loads of ants
another had no ants
the first had lots of pine needles and cones but the other,
it was gentle, like, it had a daisy meadow
next to it and there was this cabin in the wilderness
Dad went out every Sunday morning to shoot birds
and we had earthworms at home and
we were always collecting them ‘cause we had a long fishing line,
the sort with lots of hooks
and once we had a line like that
in the attic when we had lots of puppies
and one of the puppies got its lip caught in the line.by Henriikka Tavi

Translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah

Two announcements: The Poetry Centre is inviting all members of the local community to join us in celebration of National Poetry Day on Thursday 2 October 2014 by performing poetry in our Pop-up Poetry event. If you would like to participate, please send us an e-mail at brookespopuppoetry@gmail.com including your name and a sample of the poetry you would like to read, by Friday 5 September 2014.

Details of the inaugural Winchester Poetry Festival have been released! Taking place between 12-14 September 2014, the festival is three days in length, features thirty poets, and hosts twenty-six events, including internationally-acclaimed and award-winning writers such as Patience Agbabi [Creative Writing Fellow here at Brookes], Ros Barber, David Constantine, Christopher Reid, Michael Longley, and Kate Firth. For more details, visit the Festival’s website, its Facebook page, or follow it on Twitter.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Hailing from Vehkalahti, now a part of Hamina, Henriikka Tavi’s (b.1978) first book, Esim. won the Helsingin Sanomat first book prize. She studied philosophy at the University of Helsinki and is a founding member of the co-op poetry publishing house Poesia. From 2006 until 2010 she also worked for the poetry magazine Tuli&Savu, serving as its chief editor from 2008 with Mikael Brygger.Published by Arc Publications in its New Voices from Europe and Beyond series, and edited by Teemu Manninen, Six Finnish Poets features the work of: Vesa Haapala, Janne Nummela, Matilda Södergran, Henriikka Tavi, Juhana Vähänen and Katariina Vuorinen. Their poems are translated by Lola Rogers, Emily and Fleur Jeremiah, and Helen R. Boultrum. These poets offer a refreshing mix of narrative, cinematic and experimental devices, ranging from science fiction to punk to whimsical subject matters. Several of the poets in this anthology collaborate with other artists and this engagement is evident as the poems speak to each other across the collection.

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

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Francisco Goya Self-Portrait [Oil on Canvas, c.1815, Prado, Madrid]

August 11, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Terrors are eyes’ dust
of my dogs and monsters,
giants and catholics and kings;
their internecine wars
growl into my dead ears’
cloven expectations,
climb up the very walls
to hive the time again
towards existence
and the almost possible.

Thus can I show the horror vision grants
behind the tremor of our sight and skin,
draw out the dark that age has patterned.
Knuckle lead white and carbon
sour on bones’ illusions
now beyond all courts and favours
can I step back into the shadows’ mysteries
and dear God’s hopes of favours;
fight back in dark oils and stark
against the blank and surface of the world
that etches past the brain’s protective bones
as dry and marrowed out of copper
into the aqua vita black and resurrections
pressed through the arc of devils and their dams
in silence just behind the hum of pain
throbbing again from out my mother’s
body of light gave life to the bright earlier beings
of pastel pales and greens under blue clouds
that scattered into sight and silence
just behind the scream.

It will be saved
as I
without the need of sound
that vision hides behind
and drags the horrors into
the beautiful
even without the mind’s
obedience to its call.

by David Pollard

A reminder that The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre is inviting all members of the local community to join us in celebration of National Poetry Day on Thursday 2 October 2014 by performing poetry in our Pop-up Poetry event.  The performance will be a part of a series of Pop-up Poetry events featured around Oxford exclusively for National Poetry Day. Should you wish to take part, we would need you to have around five minutes of material to perform. We encourage you to read your own work and/or the work of other poets. If you would like to participate, please send us an e-mail at brookespopuppoetry@gmail.com including your name and a sample of the poetry you would like to read, by Friday 5 September 2014.

Notes from Waterloo Press:

David Pollard has been furniture salesman, accountant, TEFL teacher and university lecturer. He has published The Poetry of Keats, A KWIC Concordance to the Harvard Keats’ Letters, a novel, Nietzsche’s Footfalls, and four volumes of poetry: patricides,Risk of Skin, Self-Portraits and bedbound. Find out more about David Pollard’s work from his website, follow him on Twitter, and read more about his latest collection from the Waterloo website.

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.

from Lives of the Poet

August 4, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

He remembers lunchtime readings at The Swan,
The Dove, The Mermaid; ‘the girls were all gazelles’
and among them sat that lovely, dutiful daughter . . .
He loved her. He began to write ghazals
to her eyes that reminded him of the sea . . .
He stepped out to sun that glittered on the water
beyond shop-girls and typists, suited types
and he felt, not that they were ‘free bloody birds’
but that happiness might still be caught, endlessly –
a salt-wet happiness in which there were few words,
in which she lay naked with that just-fucked look
and oleanders rustled in the breeze that shook
a leaf-shower down outside, while on
her shoulder shuttered moonlight fell in stripes . . .

Immoderation, intransigence, exorbitance,
a feeling of being out-of-this-world
or better-than-this-world, the prizes coming
at the wrong times to the proper people
and vice-versa, the protestations
of cheerfulness, the all-pervasive insecurity,
the chronic lack of commitment, the lifelong
dependence on others – for hospitality,
money, love – the simultaneous contradictory
impulses to be adored and alone, connected
and adrift; the brief passionate flare-ups, the long
epistolary retreats, the ecstatic arrivals,
panic departures; ‘agonizing reappraisal’,
disavowal; severe gloom, habitual dejection.

by Alan Jenkins

Poems ‘9’ and ‘20’ from Lives of the Poet are copyright © Alan Jenkins, 2013, and reprinted from The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann, edited by André Naffis-Sahely and Julian Stannard (CB editions, 2013).

Calling all poets! The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre invites all members of the Oxford community to join us in celebration of National Poetry Day on Thursday 2 October 2014 by performing poetry in our Pop-up Poetry event.

The performance will be a part of a series of Pop-up Poetry events featured around Oxford exclusively for National Poetry Day. Should you wish to take part, we would need you to have around five minutes of material to perform. We encourage you to read your own work and/or the work of other poets. If you would like to participate, please send us an e-mail at brookespopuppoetry@gmail.com including your name and a sample of the poetry you would like to read, by Friday 5 September 2014. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!
Notes from CB editions:

Alan Jenkins, deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement, has published a number of poetry collections, among them Harm (Forward Prize, 1994) and A Shorter Life (2005). The second poem here, in italics, is from the prose of the poet and translator Michael Hofmann – himself the subject of the book in which the poems are included, a collection of memoirs, poems and criticism published by CBe under the title The Palm Beach Effect.

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 and 2013, with over 50 publishers taking part, and has become an annual event. The next fair will take place on 6 September at Conway Hall in London.

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.

from American Sampler

July 28, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Last, my father combs out the long flax.
I think of my grandfather’s beard, white and silky,
and how as a young man he took with his own hands
stones and boulders from the earth, combing
the earth through with his fingers.

Mist hangs over the open, soft, serious farmland
like a sermon I breathe. My mother settles
to spin the flax, wetting her fingers
so the fibres twist and cling.

So this coarse linen still has their touch in it,
where I touch and bleed and belong.
by Jane Duran

Announcing the Poets’ Corner Open Mic Night at Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford. Blackwell’s writes: ‘Join us on the first Tuesday of every month for our ‘Poets’ Corner’ open mic poetry night. We invite you to stand up and read your work or to come along and enjoy being part of the audience listening. If you feel brave and would like to be a speaker on the night, please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Services Department on 01865 333623 to put your name on the list. Places are normally booked in advance so please get in touch to avoid disappointment. The next meeting is on Tuesday 5th August at 7pm, and is free to attend.’

Notes from Enitharmon:

Jane Duran was brought up in the USA and Chile, and now lives in England. Her poems have appeared in anthologies, and selections have been published in Poetry Introduction 8 (Faber and Faber, 1993), Making for Planet Alice (Bloodaxe, 1997), and in La Generacion del Cordero (Trilce Ediciones, Mexico, 2000). Her debut collection, Breathe Now, Breathe (Enitharmon, 1995) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Enitharmon published her second collection Silences from the Spanish Civil War in 2002. Jane’s last collection Graceline was published last year by Enitharmon and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. You can hear Jane Duran read from her work at the Poetry Archive.

Her latest book, American Sampler, will be published in early September, and you can find out more about the collection and pre-order it via the Enitharmon website. Jane Duran’s childhood memories of rural New England permeate American Sampler, bringing the reader in close to its landscapes, weather and light. The book is about vanishing worlds, and the struggle of memory and craft and imagination to understand and hold fragments of the past and turn them into fresh, breathing moments.

‘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.

from ‘Cybosaurus’

July 21, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The city chooses through whom it speaks. Hollow arteries, emotion suggestion, flaccid temper.

Once it’s chosen the atom-human-cyborg machine (call it Cybosaurus?) the city must drain-pipe,
throat-sliver him-her-it.

(what am I saying?

Speak without consequence.
Speak immediacy. Speak rhythm.
Speak in skulls. Speak dope. Speak easy.
Speak unruly. Speak in scales. Speak mutant disco.

Speak Chewbacca. Speak tornado. Speak conquistador.
Speak simulacra. Speak in fish dialect.
Speak Isadora, Q-lab, Dalston dirty condom-

(-inium)

Speak

rat-a-

tat-tat-tat…

Speak Angola. Speak fishnet stockings.
Speak zumba. Speak protons. Speak androids.
Speak cyber-graffiti.
Speak haemorrhoids.

Speak string theory. Speak antinomies. Speak Plato’s retreat.
Speak anglo-saxon, Michael Jackson, tooty-frooty.
fornication.

Speak cellular Andromeda.
Speak black-hole flash fiction.

Speak auto-autopsy psychobabble-fish.

Speak in
neutrinos, in marmalade, in hot-flavour sado-masoch-
ism,

speak grizzlybear.
by Siddhartha Bose

Reading-based publisher Two Rivers Press is launching its new book The Arts of Peace next Monday 28 July from 6.30-8.30 in the Museum of English Rural Life garden in Reading. There will be a terrific range of readers, including Vahni Capildeo, Peter Carpenter, John Greening, A F Harrold, Gill Learner, Allison McVety, Peter Robinson, and Susan Utting. Tickets are £3, and there are more details on the MERL website.

Two Rivers will also be hosting an event about poetry and the First World War at Acton Court in Reading, ‘Blast from the Past’, on Friday 1 August at 7.30pm. Tickets are £12, and readers include Adrian Blamires, Claire Dyer, Ian House, and Peter Robinson. Booking details are on the Acton Court site, and you can find out more about the book The Arts of Peace on the Two Rivers website.

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

‘Cybosaurus’ is an apocalyptic trawl through a future London in the form of a poetry sequence in thirteen parts. The whole poem can be found in Siddhartha Bose’s second collection Digital Monsoon , published by Penned in the Margins. In this follow-up to the acclaimed debut Kalagora, Bose proposes the poet as a twenty-first century beatnik, a ravenous language machine eating up the margins of the city. You can watch Siddhartha Bose read extracts from the book on his website, Kalagora.

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.

Their 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.

Frame for an abacus

July 14, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

An early April morning,
outside that door where dad
swooped down and scooped me up,Don’t go in. Mum is sleeping.

I started counting windows.

ii.

I have grown into a good mathematician.
Today I am studying Pi, prime numbers, angles,
how the light from those windows
formed a perfect Isosceles triangle.

iii.

Calculate the degree of diffracted light
If a door is:

one, open,
two, closed,
three, start again.by Maggie Sullivan

This Wednesday July 16^th from 7-8.30pm, Blackwell’s Oxford presents: Four Poets Reading. The evening features Susie Campbell, Amira Thoron, Claire Trévien, and Jennifer Wong (one of our PhD students in poetry at Brookes). A free evening of poetry, with drinks and books for sale.

Maggie Sullivan has been a trustee of the Poetry Society, a workshop tutor for CoolTan Arts and is a mentor for Survivors’ Poetry. Her first collection, near death {domestic}, was published by Tall Lighthouse Press. ‘Frame for an abacus’ comes from her second collection, the remote, published by Waterloo Press in 2013. You can read another selection from the remote on the Waterloo website.

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

F.G.

July 7, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

And on the plasma screen these words appear:
If I am asked to represent World’s End,
I want to make this absolutely clear,
my one priority will be to spend
more money on my home… No, no, that’s wrong.
It’s true, but not what politicians say
in my time or in yours. Mine was a long
brown nosing into power, but I made my way
from Clerk of the Signet (you may well ask)
to Treasurer of the Navy, until – a piece of luck –
the Stuarts gave me Warwick Castle. Then Chancellor,
some time to write, and finally Lord Brooke.
The words, of course, that matter in the end
are Greville was Sir Philip Sidney’s friend.

by John Greening

The most recent episode of the Poetry Centre podcast is now available via the website and on iTunes. This release features a critical-creative dialogue between Terri Mullholland and Siân Thomas about issues raised by Siân’s poem ‘The Abandoned House’, a work inspired by a derelict building in The Weald, East Sussex.

‘F.G.’ is copyright © John Greening, 2013. It is reprinted from Knot (Worple Press, 2013) by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Born in Chiswick in 1954, John Greening has lived in Upper Egypt, New Jersey, Mannheim, Arbroath but chiefly in Huntingdonshire, where he teaches. He has published more than a dozen collections (including Hunts, Poems 1979-2009) and several critical studies – of Yeats, Ted Hughes, Hardy, Edward Thomas, First World War Poets and the Elizabethans. His most recent book is a guide to the art: Poetry Masterclass. A regular reviewer with the TLS and a judge for the Eric Gregory Awards, Greening has received the Bridport Prize, the TLS Centenary Prize and a Cholmondeley Award for his poetry. Based on the design of a seventeenth-century knot garden, Knot makes consort music with the poets of Elizabethan England. Sonnets and verse letters are woven around a journal of life in a twenty-first century writers’ retreat (Hawthornden Castle) and a prose allegory of Ben Jonson’s famous walk from London to Scotland to visit William Drummond. The collection concludes with a witty modern masque.

Read more about Knot from Worple’s website, and more about John Greening’s poetry from his own site. You can also follow him on Twitter. John Greening will be reading at various events and festivals around the country in July and August, and you can see these listed on the Worple site.

Worple Press was founded by Peter and Amanda Carpenter in 1997. Since then they have published a wide range of authors, including Iain Sinclair, Joseph Woods, Elizabeth Cook, Beverley Bie Brahic, Clive Wilmer and Kevin Jackson. They published the selected poems of the acclaimed American nature poet Peter Kane Dufault for the first time in the UK (Looking in All Directions); this was followed in 2007 by Kane Dufault’s To be in the same world. Peter Robinson’s The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems was the Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for Spring 2002. This impressive backlist was augmented in 2012 by three significant titles: Passio: Fourteen Poems by János Pilinszky from Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri; Riddance by Anthony Wilson; and the republication of William Hayward’s cult novel from 1964, It Never Gets Dark All Night. Over 2013 and 2014 new titles have included work from John Greening, Michael McKimm, Peter Robinson, Mary Woodward and Sally Flint. More information can be found on Worple Press’s website, Facebook page, and Twitter feed, and you can sign up for Worple’s mailing list by e-mailing: theworpleco@aol.com.

The War Reporter Paul Watson and the Boys with the Bomblet

June 30, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A gang of shepherd boys minding their own
rib-caged cows. When a yellow can appears
in a dust cloud. Like soda or a sleeve
of tennis balls, clasped in a corona
of tabs known as The Spider. Casing scored
so as to better shatter in a blast
of stampeding shrapnel that will strip all
clothes and flay any naked skin, leaving
pulped, cauterized stumps. Tinkling like wind chimes
after the wetter thuds. The tiny chute
hangs limply from the lip. Designed to drift
silently, otherworldly, increasing
our scatter radius. Preset to detonate
at precise heights or times. Or with the thrum
of traffic, the plosives of speech. Tremors
of the lightest footfalls. Two boys running
off in search of a father. The one boy
holding the canister suggests, Maybe
we’ll find some food inside? The other one
slips his knife beneath the tab to find out
what’s inside The Spider.

by Dan O’Brien

A reminder that as part of the MCS Arts Festival Oxford, Azfa Awad, Youth Ambassador for Poetry (a position co-sponsored by Oxford Brookes and Oxford City Council), will be reading in Oxford alongside the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, this Thursday 3 July from 7.30-9.30pm. For more details, visit the festival website.

This year’s Free Verse, a one-day book fair for poetry publishers to show their work and sell direct to the public, organized by this week’s publisher, CB editions, is taking place on 6 September. See below for more details.

‘The War Reporter Paul Watson and the Boys with the Bomblet’ is copyright © Dan O’Brien, 2013, and is reprinted from War Reporter (CB editions, 2013) by permission of CB editions.

Notes from CB editions:

Dan O’Brien is an American playwright and poet living in Los Angeles. His play The Body of an American was the inaugural winner of the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama, and was produced in London in January 2014. War Reporter – which won the 2013 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize – derives from a collaboration between the poet and the war reporter Paul Watson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1993 photograph of a dead American being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu and has since reported from the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

Read more from Dan O’Brien’s book on the CBe website, and find out why CBe decided to publish the book on its blog. You can also follow O’Brien’s work on his own website and via Twitter.

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 and 2013, with over 50 publishers taking part, and has become an annual event. The next fair will take place on 6 September at Conway Hall in London. 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.

Why poetry?

June 23, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

To catch the cat’s
studied indifference,
her yawn and stretch in the sun.

To take what once was thought
and twice rejected
and refine it
until it is not what it was.

To recover the realm
between waking and sleep
where a dragon guards
the golden hoard

and a word marks the lizard’s dart
between is and
was.

Casual, effortless, elegant
to be the heron
climbing the air.

To give to the human order
a kinder face
a better shape.

To be and not
to be Hamlet beset
by slings and arrows.

To find a way back
to the bush stream
where small fish used to hang
in shafts of sunlight.

To get ahead of yourself
and accept the silence.

by CK Stead

As part of the MCS Arts Festival Oxford, Azfa Awad, Youth Ambassador for Poetry (a position co-sponsored by Oxford Brookes and Oxford City Council), will be reading in Oxford alongside the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, on Thursday 3 July from 7.30-9.30pm. For more details, visit the festival website.

Notes from Arc Publications:

CK Stead, poet, essayist and novelist, is only one of two writers to hold the Order of New Zealand. In The Yellow Buoy, Stead’s fifteenth collection of poetry, the writer journeys in time and space from Croatia and Colombia to Karekare and the Côte d’Azur; Catullus returns to receive plaudits, write to friends and read the world; and various other literary fellows appear in person, dream or conversation – Allen Curnow and Hugh Kawharu, Frank Sargeson and Barry Humphries, Robert Creeley and Katherine Mansfield.

You can read more about CK Stead on Arc’s page, where you can also read further samples of his work. Eight poems from Stead’s work, read by the poet himself, can also be heard on the Poetry Archive site.

Speeches at an Eightieth Birthday

June 16, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

If the dead could be summoned
to say what they thought of you,
they would be as reluctant
and evasive as in life.
No eloquence from a friend,
no measured words from a foe,
would counter your sense of faint
virtue, lacking solid proof.

But why expect of the dead
more than of the loud voices
in present praise and debate
of your accomplished manhood?
Fading under fine phrases,
you disappear in plain sight.

by Tony Connor

This Wednesday 18 June from 6-7pm at The Poetry Society, Betterton Street, London, Jenny Wong, PhD student at the Department of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes, presents a reading by Chinese poets Jiang Tao and Ming Di. The event is free to attend. Visit the Poetry Society website for more details.

‘Speeches at an Eightieth Birthday’ is copyright © Tony Connor, 2013. It is reprinted by permission of Anvil Press from The Empty Air, New Poems 2006-2012 (Anvil Press, 2013).

Notes from Anvil Press:

Tony Connor’s tenth collection is framed by military encounters. In the first poem a young man grapples with a malfunctioning machine-gun, while the author grapples with the poem he is making from this event, memory or fantasy. In the surrealistic sequence that ends the book, a strange army invades a country collapsing into societal and semantic dissolution. Connor’s abiding preoccupations continue into his eighties:his own life and the lives around him, passing time and its traps, poetry and its transfiguration of the commonplace. Yet all is not solemn as Connor extends his range into comic verse and dramatic dialogue. His new poems mix fantasy and reality in unexpected ways, always with the unobtrusive hand of a skilled craftsman. You can read further selections from the new book on the Anvil website, and more about Tony Connor from the Academy of American Poets site.

Since 1971 Tony Connor has lived partly in Middletown, Connecticut where he was a professor of English at Wesleyan University. He spends the summers in London. He left school at fourteen and worked in Manchester as a textile designer for many years.

Anvil Press, founded in 1968, is based in Greenwich, south-east London, in a building off Royal Hill that has been used at various points in its 150-year history as a dance-hall and a printing works. Anvil grew out of a poetry magazine which Peter Jay ran as a student in Oxford and retains its small company ethos. Visit Anvil’s website here, where you can sign up to their mailing list to find out about new publications and events.

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