Blacksmith

December 9, 2013April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I made a pillow out of iron, a pair of shoes,
I made a tutu, my mother’s hat,
iron lashes for my eyes, iron fingernails,
I made myself a bridle and a belt.

I made a baby out of iron, I hammered out
a tree in bud, a nest of yellow beaks.
I smelted, riveted, cast my hands
into bellows. I blew a cumulus of sparks –

they found the corners of a room,
a hidden silhouette, they settled
on a dusty charcoal bed
and from the shadows made a forge.

by Jackie Wills

Notes from Arc Publications:

Jackie Wills has published three collections of poetry with Arc Publications, and one with Leviathan. Powder Tower was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and Wills was shortlisted for the 1995 T.S. Eliot prize. In 2004, Mslexia magazine named her one of the 10 new woman poets of the decade. Born in Wiltshire, Wills now lives in Brighton. She was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the universities of Surrey and Sussex between 2009 and 2012.

Woman’s Head as Jug is about women’s experiences of work, the city, menopause and ancestry. The poems have a touch as deft as the seamstresses and other craftspeople who populate the book. They are funny, political and lyrical. Read more about the collection at Arc’s site or from Jackie Wills’ own blog.

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

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

The Madwoman’s Roof

December 2, 2013April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It’s midnight, and a worker returning
from the second shift at the cannery
tests what strength he has left

by throwing stones against the tiles
of the madwoman’s roof.

‘Damn you all, you sons of bitches!’
she curses from inside.

She is history, unable to cast blame on anyone.
She is the skeleton key, the collective curse
on a night that reeks of sardines and enzymes.

by Luljeta Lleshanaku, translated by Henry Israeli and Shpresa Qatipi

This is the final poem taken from the shortlist for The Corneliu M Popescu Prize that we are featuring. The Prize, run by the Poetry Society, was formerly called the European PoetryTranslation Prize. The first winner of the Prize, in 1983, was Tony Harrison for The Oresteia. The prize was relaunched in 2003, and renamed in honour of the Romanian translator Corneliu M Popescu, who died in an earthquake in 1977 at the age of 19. The Popescu Prize 2013 has a shortlist of seven books, and the winner this year was Alice Oswald for Memorial, her ‘excavation’ of Homer’s Iliad. You can watch a video of Oswald reading from her book on thePoetry Society site.

This week’s poem comes from Haywire: New & Selected Poems, and is copyright © Luljeta Lleshanaku, 2011. The translation is © Henry Israeli and Shpresa Qatipi, 2011. It is reprinted by permission of Bloodaxe Books from Haywire: New & Selected Poems by Luljeta Lleshanaku, translated by Henry Israeli, Luljeta Lleshanaku and Shpresa Qatipi.

The judges of the Popescu Prize, Karen Leeder and David Wheatley, comment: ‘I could have been born in another place /within another idiom’, writes Lujeta Lleshanaku, in lines that acquire a prophetic edge in these fine translations, like some latter-day Double Vie de Véronique, holding Eastern and Western Europe in delicate balance.

Luljeta Lleshanaku was born in Elbasan, Albania in 1968. Under Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist dictatorship, she grew up under house arrest. Lleshanaku was not permitted to attend college or publish her poetry until the weakening and eventual collapse of the regime in the early 1990s. She later studied Albanian philology at the University of Tirana, and has worked as a schoolteacher, literary magazine editor and journalist. She won the prestigious International Kristal Vilenica Prize in 2009, and has had a teaching post at the University of Iowa and a fellowship from the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has given readings in America, Europe and in Ireland at the Poetry Now Festival in Dún Laoghaire in 2010, and you can watch a film of her reading in Ireland on the Bloodaxe site.

Haywire: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) is her first British publication, and draws on two editions published in the US by New Directions, Fresco: Selected Poems (2002) and Child of Nature (2010), as well as a selection of newer work. As well as being shortlisted for the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for poetry translated from a European language into English, it is also a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

Henry Israeli is a poet, translator, and founder and editor of the poetry press Saturnalia Books. He studied at McGill University and the University of Iowa, and is now assistant teaching professor, and associate director, certificate in writing and publishing, at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He is the lead translator of Luljeta Lleshanaku’s Haywire: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation shortlisted for the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for Poetry Translated from a European Language into English. He was also the lead translator as well as the editor of her two US editions, Fresco: Selected Poetry of Luljeta Lleshanaku (New Directions, 2002) and Child of Nature (New Directions, 2010). His own books include New Messiahs(Four Ways Books, 2002) and Praying to the Black Cat (De Sol Press, 2010). He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Canada Council on the Arts, amongst others.

Bloodaxe Books was founded in Newcastle by Neil Astley in 1978. Internationally renowned for quality in literature and excellence in book design, its authors and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry, from the T.S. Eliot Prize and Popescu to the Nobel Prize (the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, Tomas Tranströmer, was the sixth Nobel Laureate to be published in the UK by Bloodaxe). Alongside a substantial list of books in translation, Bloodaxe publishes both new and established poets from Britain and Ireland, as well as manypoets from the US and other countries. Since 2000, Bloodaxe has been based in Northumberland, with its finance and sales office in Bala, North Wales. You can learn more about the press from its website.

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

from 1001 Winters

November 25, 2013April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

In a dream
I saw a ticket booth
at a bus stop where
birds’ feathers were sold instead of tickets
and the seller was…
an old man
with the early spring sun in his eyes

and for you young lady…
he said slowly
and took from somewhere next to the door
where there might have been
a bin and a broom
one more feather
a white plume
light and as tall
as himself

I paid and went
in dream’s muddy buses
no notion of waking
no fear of inspection

by Kristiina Ehin, translated by Ilmar Lehtpere

This is the third in our series of four poems taken from the shortlist for The Corneliu M Popescu Prize. The Prize, run by the Poetry Society, was formerly called the European Poetry Translation Prize. The first winner of the Prize, in 1983, was Tony Harrison for The Oresteia. The prize was relaunched in 2003, and renamed in honour of the Romanian translator Corneliu M Popescu, who died in an earthquake in 1977 at the age of 19 The Popescu Prize 2013 has a shortlist of seven books, and the winner will be announced this Friday 29 November.

In addition, this Sunday 1 December sees the launch of a new poetry pamphlet. Inspired by exhibits in the Ancient Near East Gallery of the Ashmolean Museum, the pamphlet will be launched there from 3.30-4.30 with readings from the contributors, Adnan al-Sayegh, and Jenny Lewis. This free event will be introduced by Dr. Paul Collins, Curator of the Ancient Near East Gallery. More readings, led by Adnan al-Sayegh and Jenny Lewis, will take place at the Albion Beatnik Bookstore, 34 Walton Street, from 5.30-7.30: there will be a £2 cover charge and tea and wine will available.

This week’s poem comes from 1001 Winters and is copyright © Kristiina Ehin, 2013. The translation is © Ilmar Lehtpere, 2013. It is reprinted by permission of The B itter Oleander Press from 1001 Winters by Kristiina Ehin, translated by Ilmar Lehtpere.

The judges of the Popescu Prize, Karen Leeder and David Wheatley, write: ‘Kristiina Ehin’s poem’How to explain my language to you’ ends with a moment of epiphany “in a language neither yours nor mine”, and these fine translations explore the meeting points in which the strange and the familiar find common ground.’

Kristiina Ehin is one of Estonia’s leading poets and is known throughout Europe for her poetry and short stories. She has an MA in Comparative and Estonian Folklore from the University of Tartu, and folklore plays a significant role in her work. In her native Estonian she has to date published six volumes of poetry, three books of short stories and a retelling of South-Estonian fairy tales. She has also written two theatrical productions as well as poetic, imaginative radio broadcasts, one of which has also been released as a CD. She has won Estonia’s most prestigious poetry prize for Kaitseala(Huma, 2005), a book of poems and journal entries written during a year spent as a nature reserve warden on an otherwise uninhabited island off Estonia’s north coast.

Kristiina has published seven books of poetry and three of prose in English translation. The Drums of Silence (Oleander Press, 2007) was awarded the Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation, and The Scent of Your Shadow (Arc, 2010) is a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Her plays and broadcasts have also been translated into English and her work, poetryand prose, appears regularly in leading English language literary magazines and anthologies in the US, UK and Ireland. She is the featured writer in The Bitter Oleander, 18.1, with thirty-two pages devoted to her poetry, short stories and an in-depth interview. In addition to English, her work as been translated into nineteen languages. Kristiina lives in Estonia with her husband, the musician Silver Sepp, and her son. Learn more about her from Ilmar Lehtpere’s website devoted to her work, and hear her read from her work in a film from Poetry Parnassus.

Ilmar Lehtpere is Kristiina Ehin’s English language translator. He has translated nearly all of her work – poetry, prose and drama – most of which has appeared in Kristiina’s nine books in his translation, as well as in numerous literary magazines. Kristiina and he have won two prestigious prizes together for poetry in translation. Their collaboration is ongoing. Ilmar lives in Estonia with his wife, the poet Sadie Murphy.

The Bitter Oleander Press, begun in 1974, has devoted itself entirely to contemporary poetry of the imaginative and the concrete particular from both within the United States as well as the rest of the world. We not only publish books in translation, but feature international poets in every issue of our biannual journal, The Bitter Oleander, whose work in translation would not otherwise be available to our astute readership. We publish four to five books of bilingual poetry by individualpoets per year along with two issues (Spring & Autumn) of our journal. Of more recent note are Jacques Dupin’s Of Flies and Monkeys / de singes et de mouches (France) in 2012, Kristiina Ehin’s1001 Winters / 1001 talve (Estonia) in 2013, Ana Minga’s Tobacco Dogs / Perros de tabaco(Ecuador) in 2013, and José-Flore Tappy’s Sheds / Hangars (Switzerland) in 2014 along with Philippe Rahmy’s Movement for the End, A Portrait of Pain / Mouvement par la fin, un portrait de la douleur (Switzerland) also in 2014 and Karl Krolow’s Puppets in the Wind / Eine Puppe im Wind(Germany) also scheduled for publication in early 2015. You can find out more about the press fromits website.

The Homecoming

November 18, 2013April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

For Lois Pereiro

In Ithaca everyone was dead.
They say it was me, Argos the dog, who woke first:
– Dead, dead, dead!
A smell stronger than dung,
the smell of a living man,
made me vomit celestial remains,
cloud-bones,
rainbow-hides.
That man who reeked of legend,
a twitching skeleton,
a bad-tempered ghost,
ripped open the scar with his nails
and smeared the mired shadows with words.
There were our names. All of them.
And the infallible memory of the trees
in Laertes’ orchard.
Half a hundred rows of vines,
thirteen pear trees,
ten apple trees,
forty fig trees.
The blind old man saw, in the end, his son, thanks to the earth’s algebra.
After, Odysseus
came and woke us one by one
and our tears, since then,
are the rope that binds the light
with a violent joy.

by Manuel Rivas, translated by Lorna Shaughnessy

This is the second in our series of four poems taken from the shortlist for The Corneliu M Popescu Prize. The Prize, run by the Poetry Society, was formerly called the European Poetry Translation Prize. The first winner of the Prize, in 1983, was Tony Harrison for The Oresteia. The prize was relaunched in 2003, and renamed in honour of the Romanian translator Corneliu M Popescu, who died in an earthquake in 1977 at the age of 19. The Popescu Prize 2013 has a shortlist of seven books, and the winner will be announced on 29 November.

The original poem ‘The Homecoming’ is copyright © Manuel Rivas, 2009, and the translation is © Lorna Shaughnessy, 2012. It is reprinted by permission of Shearsman Books from The Disappearance of Snow by Manuel Rivas, translated by Lorna Shaughnessy.

The judges of the Popescu Prize, Karen Leeder and David Wheatley, comment: ‘What is your message?’ asks Manuel Rivas in ‘Missed Call’, but these translations show that, as well as being what gets lost, poetry in translation can be about what gets through, the connections we make, and the voices we hear loud and clear.

Poet, novelist, short-story writer and journalist, Manuel Rivas was born in A Coruña, Galicia (north-western Spain) in 1957, and writes in Galician, which is one of Spain’s co-official languages. His work has a deep connection with the landscape, folklore and history of Galicia, but has a universal impact that has led to him being recognised as one of Europe’s leading contemporary writers. A desaparición da neve is his most recent collection of poems and had the unusual distinction of being issued with a single volume in Spain together with translations of the poems into Catalan, Basque and Castilian. Further selections from The Disappearance of Snow can be found in this pdf file from the Shearsman website.

Lorna Shaughnessy was born in Belfast and lives in County Galway. She lectures in the Department of Spanish, NUI Galway. She has published two collections of her own poems, Torching the Brown River and Witness Trees (Salmon Poetry) as well as two translations of contemporary Mexican poets: Mother Tongue: Selected Poems by Pura López Colomé and If We Have Lost Our Oldest Tales by María Baranda, both with Arden House.

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with a very active translation list. Founded in 1981 as a magazine, with some occasional chapbooks, the press – now based in Bristol – has grown rapidly in recent years, and is now one of the most active poetry publishers in the U.K. You can find out more about Shearsman’s work from the publisher’s 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 Tomb of Edgar Poe

November 11, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

uch as into Himself at last eternity changes him,
the Poet with a naked sword provokes
his century appalled to not have known
death triumphed in that strange voice!

They, like an upstart hydra hearing the angel once
purify the meaning of tribal words
proclaimed out loud the prophecy drunk
without honour in the tide of some black mixture.

From soil and hostile cloud, what strife!
if our idea fails to sculpt a bas-relief
to ornament the dazzling tomb of Poe,

calm block fallen down here from an unseen disaster,
let this granite at least set for all time a limit
to the black flights of Blasphemy scattered in the future.

by Stéphane Mallarmé, translated by Peter Manson

This week we begin a series of four poems taken from the shortlist for The Corneliu M Popescu Prize. The Prize, run by the Poetry Society, was formerly called the European PoetryTranslation Prize. The first winner of the Prize, in 1983, was Tony Harrison for The Oresteia. The prize was relaunched in 2003, and renamed in honour of the Romanian translator Corneliu M Popescu, who died in an earthquake in 1977 at the age of 19. The Popescu Prize 2013 has a shortlist of seven books, and the winner will be announced on 29 November.

This translation of ‘The Tomb of Edgar Poe’ is copyright © Peter Manson, 2012. It is reprinted fromStéphane Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse, translated by Peter Manson and published by Miami University Press in 2012. You can read more about the book on the press’s website.

From the judges of the Popescu Prize, Karen Leeder and David Wheatley: ‘Mallarmé is the strong enchanter of French symbolism, and in these versions Peter Manson has carried an entire body of work across into English with authority, conviction and compulsive readability.’

Stéphane Mallarmé was born in Paris on 18 March 1842, the son of Numa Mallarmé and Élisabeth Desmolins. He had one sister, Maria. After a short spell in the Registry Office at Sens, he trained as a teacher of English, working at schools in Tournon, Besançon and Avignon before settling in Paris in 1871. He married Maria Gerhard in 1863, and they had two children, Geneviève and Anatole. He retired from teaching in 1893, and died, at Valvins (now Vulaines-sur-Seine), on 9 September 1898. His books include Poésies (limited ‘photolithographic’ edition 1887, trade edition 1899), the prose book Divagations (1897), school textbooks on the English language (Les Mots anglais, 1878) and on mythology (Les Dieux antiques, 1879), and a French translation of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe (1888). He wrote widely on contemporary literature, visual art and theatre, and briefly became the editor (and main contributor to) a fashion magazine, La Dernière mode (1874). His groundbreaking visual poem, ‘Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard’ (‘A throw of the Dice never will abolish Chance’), was published in the journal Cosmopolis in 1897, and in book form in 1914. Works published posthumously include the prose tale Igitur (1925) and the surviving notes towards three unfinished projects: ‘Le Livre’ (‘The Book’, 1957), ‘Les Noces d’Hérodiade’ (‘The Marrying of Hérodiade’, 1959) and ‘Pour un Tombeau d’Anatole’ (‘For Anatole’s Tomb’, 1961).

Peter Manson lives in Glasgow. His books include Between Cup and Lip (also from Miami University Press), For the Good of Liars and Adjunct: an Undigest (both from Barque Press). Another book,Poems of Frank Rupture, is due soon. More information about his work can be found on Peter Manson’s website.

Miami University Press publishes poetry, poetry in translation, novellas and short fiction, and books about Miami University history or conferences held at the university. For more details, visit the press’s website.

The George

November 4, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

While most have for their smell the deep
entanglement of beer in nylon underlay,
this joint is scrubbed and temperance-sweet,
at least as far as the far corner where Gran
bequeaths her eternal stash of lossin dants.

There’s grandpa strangling the swan who dared
to take a nip at baby Alf, and right behind him
Uncle Alf, lean and in his prime, crooning Haydn
to a brace of pinnied sisters and the highwayman
who someone traced to someone’s distaff side.

There’s our Huguenot great-grandsire, slopping
in off the Pembrokeshire coast. He pontificates
on the elect, sticks out a hand to feel for rain,
moans his way east to Rhymney, and don’t
even get him started on the Treaty of Nantes.

They’re all in there, jammed like junked receipts
in a filofax. Beyond them there’s the Davies Suite,
and further back the Eveleigh, the Jones: dimly lit,
proliferating function rooms, packed with thatchers
and lay-preaching stiffs, each of them marrying in,

each of them thwacking upon the table their own
lame dowry of myth. Sunday visits. Suicides.
The gypsy someone had a tumble with, and hence
that auntie’s Persian eyes. They’re all there gossiping
as far as the dark back garden, ignorant of my love.

by Dai George

Notes from Seren:

Dai George is originally from Cardiff and now lives and teaches in London. He studied at the universities of Bristol and Columbia, NYC, where he completed his Master of Fine Arts in Writing in 2010. As well as poetry, his criticism has been published in a range of magazines including Poetry Wales, Poetry Review and New Welsh Review. He writes fiction and is working towards a historical novel on the Gunpowder Plot, with Ben Jonson as the central character. According to Roddy Lumsden, ‘Dai George seems to me to offer something new to Welsh, and to British poetry. In fact, perhaps the poet he most reminds me of is the leading Northern Irish poet of the newer generation, Alan Gillis, not in terms of direct stylistic commonalities, but in that both these poets can and do switch successfully between a higher, lyrical style and something closer to demotic narrative’. You can read more from The Claims Office on Seren’s site, watch Dai George read from his work on YouTube, and attend the launch of the book on Thursday 14 November at The Tea House Theatre, 139 Vauxhall Walk, London .

Seren Books (‘Seren’ means ‘star’ in Welsh) is based in Bridgend, South Wales. Originally conceived by Cary Archard and Dannie Abse as an offshoot of Poetry Wales magazine in the latter’s garage in Ogmore-by-Sea in the early 80s, under Managing Editor Mick Felton the press has gone from strength to strength and has 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 the new John Redmond title Poetry and Privacy, as well as sumptuous art books like the collaboration between photographer David Hurn and poet John Fuller, Writing the Picture). Seren’s poetry list, edited by Amy Wack since the early 90s, has produced T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated titles by Deryn Rees-Jones and Pascale Petit, Costa winner John Haynes, and a large list of Forward Prize winners and nominees, as well as continuing to publishing classic Welsh writers. Most recently, Seren has also added Irish and American writers to its list.

For more details about Seren, visit the publisher’s website, where there is a blog about Seren’s news and events. You can also find Seren on Facebook, on Twitter, and on YouTube, where there are videos of a number of poets reading from their work.

Sweets

October 28, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

After dark she handed round the confectionery
and the rustle of the papers excited me.
As well as the comforting chocolate colours
there were staring greens, lumps of grainy yellow
and white fondant homunculi, whose feet
were the first items to be bitten off.
I would nibble my way up through the body,
thinking about the organs I’d consumed
and which had yet to come. The head when reached
was crunched between my remorseless milk teeth.

Now there’s unwelcome knocking at the door
and parents’ voices in the social mode.
No, I will not come home! This is my home –
from now on and forever. I have left you
and shall be colonising this chaise longue,
where Phyllis sits, warm thigh pressed against mine,
biting into dusted Turkish delight
with regular little ivory teeth
and squeezing the pieces against her palate
with a pink, unspeakably catlike tongue.

by Fergus Allen

If you are in Oxford or visiting the city soon, and haven’t yet seen the exhibition Where We Begin to Look. Landscape and Poetry, there is still time! Where We Begin to Look is a collaborative exhibition by the artist Zoe Benbow and the poet, Deryn Rees-Jones, and is presented by the Poetry Society and Small World Theatre, Ceredigion. It will be at the Glass Tank at Oxford Brookes until 5 November, and you can find out more about it on the Brookes web site.

Fergus Allen is 92 years old. Educated in Ireland, he moved to England during the Second World War and ended his professional career as First Civil Service Commissioner. Following retirement he has published collections with Faber and Dedalus Press as well as CBe. Writing from a lifetime of rich experience, Fergus Allen offers poems of precision and fine observation, stripped of illusion yet deeply human in their affections and glancing wit. The confusions of abroad, of childhood and memory, of love and sex and identity, are rendered in Before Troy with a bracing clarity. You can hear Fergus Allen reading from his poems at the Poetry Archive.

CB editions publishes no more than six books a year, mainly poetry and short fiction and including work in translation. Since 2008 its poetry titles have twice won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and have been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize three times. In 2011 CBe put on 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 September 2012 and this year, with over 50 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.

Holes

October 21, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I pressed the button. No-one came. The police could not find me in
the dark. They were also afraid of death… it might come for them
instead. They waited behind a screen of trees, for the moon to
uncover itself, silver the edges of their sirens, their dark cars. The
pale pebbles in the driveway, left to imagine the river that used to
wet them-they must tire of always staring up, sightless and at the
mercy of everything. The police step on them. They creep only so
close, but no closer. My son is dead on the ground. Someone close
his eyes. But I am ignored in this as I have been with so many other
things. His blood is cold now, blackening, drying up, stiffening the
fabric of his jacket, soaking into the soil. There are holes in him I
know nothing about, nothing to do with the boy I delivered to the
world, my gift, small and pure. The dark is blue and cold. The trees
conceal susurrations in their high skirts, branches uplifted like arms,
wailing whispers… Black cars, old scars, my son’s open mouth,
empty shotgun shells whistling smoke white dancing up and out

by Ivy Alvarez

There is an exciting multi-poet reading taking place at the Jericho Tavern on Walton Street in Oxford tomorrow (Tuesday 22nd October). The evening will feature Fiona Sampson (former associate of the Poetry Centre), Patrick McGuinness, Jenny Lewis, and Claire Trévien, who featured in a recentPoetry Centre podcast. Tickets cost £5/£4 on the door, doors and bar open 6pm, and you are advised to arrive early! You can find more details about the event from thewebsite of Gareth Prior, who is the organizer of the reading.

Notes from Seren:

Ivy Alvarez is the author of Mortal (Red Morning Press, USA, 2006), her first poetry collection. Her poems appear in anthologies, journals and new media in many countries, including Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, Roundyhouse and Red Poets, as well as Best Australian Poems (2009), A Face to Meet the Faces (University of Akron Press, 2012), The Guardian (online, 2012), Prairie Schooner (US, 2012) and Junctures (NZ, 2010), with individual poems translated into Russian, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. A MacDowell and Hawthornden Fellow thrice-shortlisted for Best Poem by fourW (Australia), both Literature Wales and the Australia Council for the Arts awarded grants towards the writing of her second collection, Disturbance, which was published this month. Born in the Philippines and raised in Australia, she became a British citizen in 2010 after living in Cardiff, Wales since 2004. Disturbance is a book-length long poem, in multiple voices, that relates the devastating consequences of a true-life case of domestic violence that leads to murder. Writing about her first collection, Denise Duhamel commented that ‘Alvarez is an ambitious poet who challenges herself and her readers, while exploring the complexities of families through persona.’ You can read further extracts from Disturbance on the Seren website, and follow her work via her website or on Twitter: @IvyAlvarez.

Seren Books (‘Seren’ means ‘star’ in Welsh) is based in Bridgend, South Wales. Originally conceived by Cary Archard and Dannie Abse as an offshoot of Poetry Walesmagazine in the latter’s garage in Ogmore-by-Sea in the early 80s, under Managing Editor Mick Felton the press has gone from strength to strength and has 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 the new John Redmond title Poetry and Privacy, as well as sumptuous art books like the collaboration between photographer David Hurn and poet John Fuller, Writing the Picture). Seren’s poetry list, edited by Amy Wack since the early 90s, has produced T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated titles by Deryn Rees-Jones and Pascale Petit, Costa winner John Haynes, and a large list of Forward Prize winners and nominees, as well as continuing to publishing classic Welsh writers. Most recently, Seren has also added Irish and American writers to its list.

John Betjeman at Trebetherick

October 14, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A mile of sunny, empty sand away
A boy sits by the surf and clasps his knees.
‘Don’t care. Don’t care. Don’t care,’ the breakers say;
A mile of sunny, empty sand away;
Joan, Tom, Ralph, Alistair and Phoebe play,
But Biddy whispers to the foam-flecked breeze,
‘We’re sorry, sorry, sorry. Come back please.’
A mile of sunny, empty sand away
A boy sits by the surf and clasps his knees.

Red Admirals basking with their wings apart;
Up on the links it’s been like this all week.
Plus fours and baggy caps look very smart:
(Red Admirals basking with their wings apart)
As serious golfers make an early start;
The niblick and the mashie and the cleek
Where light and dappled shade play hide-and-seek.
Red admirals basking with their wings apart
Up on the links. It’s been like this all week.

Then the cool silence of St Enodoc,
Her spire bent like a crooked witch’s hat,
A grave, a stile, a dandelion clock
Then the cool silence of St Enodoc
A clergyman attends his little flock:
The Psalms, the Lesson, the Magnificat,
The Creed, the Prayers, the Anthem, all of that
In the cool silence of St Enodoc,
Her spire bent like a crooked witch’s hat.

by John Whitworth

The Wantage (not just) Betjeman Festival gets underway this week, and the programme for Sunday 20 October features a number of poetry events, including readings from former Poetry Centre Fellow Fiona Sampson (some of whose poems you can read on the Poetry Centre site); an event entitled Now as Then: Mesopotamia-Iraq, which includes work by British poet Jenny Lewis and Iraqi poet Adnan al Sayegh to mark the 10th anniversary of the 2003 UK/US invasion of Iraq; and a collaboration between Peter Wyton, former Poet Laureate of Gloucestershire, and Cheltenham Poetry Festival Co-Director Robin Gilbert, celebrating history in verse. In the evening, there will be a poetry slam. You can find out more about the Festival and book tickets for it via the Festival website.

If you are a poet yourself, you may be interested in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize, the winner of which receives £2500. The judges this year are Deryn Rees-Jones and George Szirtes, and the deadline for entries is Monday 21 October. More details and the rules are to be found on the Coffee-House Poetry site.

Notes from Enitharmon:

The first line of each verse of ‘John Betjeman at Trebetherick’ is from Betjeman’s poem ‘Sunday Afternoon Service in St Enodoc’s Church, Cornwall’. Cornwall was, unsurprisingly, the first of the Guides to English Counties he edited and in some cases, including this one, wrote for the Shell Oil Company. Names in the first stanza are of children he knew from holidays at Trebetherick, Biddy [Walsham] not quite the first of his freckled, boyish blondes.

John Whitworth has published nine books of poems, edited two Faber anthologies and written a book on writing verse. His work has appeared in Poetry Review, the TLS, London Magazine and the Spectator among many others. He has been awarded the Cholmondeley Prize and The Silver Wyvern, Poetry on the Lake. You can read more by John Whitworth at the poetry pf site.

Enitharmon Press takes its name from a William Blake character who represents spiritual beauty and poetic inspiration. Founded in 1967 with an emphasis on independence and quality, Enitharmon has been associated with such figures as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Kathleen Raine. Enitharmon also commissions internationally renowned collaborations between artists, including Gilbert & George, and poets, including Seamus Heaney, under the Enitharmon Editions imprint. You can sign up to the publisher’s 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.

Wingprint

October 7, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

the colour of power hanging in the air
is a word for sun on warm stone
made transparent

as sky and trees
repeat leaves in flame
on the other side a flight path

where finches throw their outlines
wings etch themselves on windows

in the stun of what stops them
an identified span
of feather grease and dust

                                            a curve of passageways
glazed over a bird
                      flies in
                                 lost in exits
           and entrances                      a tongue silent
                      behind a mouth that moves through glass

when the door is locked it is alarmed
somewhere between G4 and E7
or what I know and and how it’s different from X

a restless wish for    what can’t be googled
           and if so is it knowledge
                                            or the lost keys
that apple F won’t retrieve

by Zoë Skoulding

The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre warmly invites you to attend the opening of the exhibition Where We Begin to Look: Landscape and Poetry on Friday 11 October at 6.30pm in the Glass Tank, Abercrombie Building, Oxford Brookes University. Where We Begin to Look is a collaborative exhibition by the artist Zoe Benbow and the poet, Deryn Rees-Jones, and is presented by the Poetry Society and Small World Theatre, Ceredigion. The opening event will feature a discussion about the exhibition by Benbow and Rees-Jones, and readings by Rees-Jones and Sarah Corbett, whose work appears in the show. You can find out more on the Brookes website. If you would like to attend the opening, please reply to this message with your details. The exhibition runs until 5 November and is open to all.

Notes from Seren:

Zoë Skoulding‘s previous collections of poems include Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008), and The Mirror Trade (Seren, 2004). Her work as a poet also encompasses criticism, translation and cross-media performance; she has been involved in several projects combining poetry with music or experimental soundscape, particularly as a member of Parking Non-Stop. She lives in north Wales, where she is Senior Lecturer in the School of English at Bangor University and Editor of the international quarterly Poetry Wales. You can follow Zoë’s work via her website or on Twitter.

Seren Books (‘Seren’ means ‘star’ in Welsh) is based in Bridgend, South Wales. Originally conceived by Cary Archard and Dannie Abse as an offshoot of Poetry Wales magazine in the latter’s garage in Ogmore-by-Sea in the early 80s, under Managing Editor Mick Felton the press has gone from strength to strength and has 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 the new John Redmond title Poetry and Privacy, as well as sumptuous art books like the collaboration between photographer David Hurn and poet John Fuller, Writing the Picture). Seren’s poetry list, edited by Amy Wack since the early 90s, has produced T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated titles by Deryn Rees-Jones and Pascale Petit, Costa winner John Haynes, and a large list of Forward Prize winners and nominees, as well as continuing to publishing classic Welsh writers. Most recently, Seren has also added Irish and American writers to its list.