Author: oxfordbrookesuni

A British Summer

~ oxfordbrookesuni

My boredom chock-a-block
with furniture – the desk
in bits, the sofa cushions
cluttering the bed, drawers
shoved beneath the dresser
– I stare at Wimbledon
while listening to the man
restretch then clean
the carpets in two rooms.
Suds rumbling in their drum,
the smell of pine detergent
creeping up to me.

Two hours of plucky Brits,
mauve clouds, the covers on,
or grim-faced teenagers
washed up before their spots
have cleared, then I descend
like Norma Desmond,
out of touch, magnanimous;
and all the little dents
where chairs and tables stood
have disappeared, as though
the years of being here
had never happened.

by Stephen Knight

From 1-7 July, this week’s Weekly Poem publisher, CB editions, will be running a pop-up poetry shop at 201 Portobello Road in London. The Shop will be filled with books (from CBe, Eyewear, Arc, Five Leaves, Flipped Eye, and more), photographs by Ken Garland, and other things, and an excellent selection of writers will be calling in to do brief pop-up readings through the week. You can find out more from Charles Boyle’s Sonofabook blog here.

‘A British Summer’ is copyright © Stephen Knight, 2012. It is reprinted from The Prince of Wails by permission of CB editions.

Notes from CB editions:

The Prince of Wails is Stephen Knight‘s first collection of poems since Dream City Cinema (1996), which – like its predecessor, Flowering Limbs (1993) – was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and was selected by Robert Potts in the Guardian as a Book of the Decade: ‘A masterpiece in miniature, packed with surprisingly enthusiastic and musical treatments of entropy, whether universal or personal, by a top craftsman with a quirky and disconcertingly loveable voice.’ Stephen Knight’s novel Mr Schnitzel (2000) won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award. Born in Swansea, Stephen Knight now lives in London. Read more selections from the collection on the CB editions website.

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 twice been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize. 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 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.

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.

Slow Rock

~ oxfordbrookesuni

slow rock
being limestone
pines
for rain
pockets springy needles
is not the sea
forgotten
but sounding its breath
in an airy maze
where woodpeckers
up the tempo
& who’s that
red-capped, furtive
(other hand gripped
to his mobile)

perspective
shrinks him

shoals of bedrock
leaping mid-city
console our short-lived
urgencies
          nothing
you can’t ride out
on these smooth backs
for a while
(the skyline livid)

by Jennie Feldman

Two announcements! This Friday 28 June 2013, Oxford is host to an exciting poetry event: ‘Irregular Folk Does Poetry’, which features the talents of a number of visiting and local poets, including Jack Underwood, Amy Blakemore, William Davies, and Charlotte Geater. The event will take place at the Perch on Binsey Lane in Oxford, and begins at 7.30pm.

And Oxford Brookes is currently displaying The Booker Prize, 1969-2008: an exhibition. Visit Oxford Brookes University’s Glass Tank exhibition space in the Abercrombie Building on Gipsy Lane between 17 June and 14 July to see this new exhibition, which is both an introduction to the fantastic material housed in the archive and a reflection upon Brookes’ role as custodian of the archive for a decade.

‘Slow Rock’ is copyright © Jennie Feldman, 2012. It is reprinted by permission of Anvil Press from Swift (Anvil Press, 2012).

Notes from Anvil Press:

In Jennie Feldman’s second collection, Swift, the earth-shy bird of the title flies high above the territorial rivalries of its region. From the Middle East, Swift ranges across Europe to Scotland, always on the lookout for what coheres in the world and its telling encounters – with a Greek beekeeper, a cello maestro, lone figures on society’s margins, the Latin poet Lucretius in an East Jerusalem café. Buoyed by music as well as water, notably the Aegean Sea and the rare rains of the eastern Mediterranean, these poems combine delicacy and vigour in their pursuit of an elusive equilibrium.

Jennie Feldman was born in South Africa, grew up in London and graduated from Oxford, where she studied French. A Hawthornden Fellow, she lives in Jerusalem and Oxford. Her first collection, The Lost Notebook, was also published by Anvil, as were her translations from Jacques Réda, Treading Lightly: Selected Poems 1961-1975, and the bilingual anthology Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets 1938-2008, co-edited and translated with Stephen Romer and shortlisted for the Popescu Prize 2011. You can read another selection from Swift on Anvil’s website.

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.

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.

Theme and Invariants

~ oxfordbrookesuni

So you see I’ve begun looking after you

looking for you

looking for you, who would not see
as relentlessly as I did
what we both meant
to end

So that you see just as long as you’re made
to listen
to this lyre’s
sedulous strain

Whose head severed in the river-current,
unlooked-at & still singing
all its way downstream to Lesbos

Not stopped looking after
you’d already begun to look twice
in every direction but ours

So I turned back too, back to
what we’d both been looking
away from, looking
for

looking after, in this
aftermath of whatever
we end up calling
what we ended

So you see
I’ve begun
relooking
so that you see

(pluck and pluck of the lyre)

So you see I’ve begun
again
(silt
under the eyelids,
silt on the singing tongue)

looking after you

by Bruce Beasley

The Poetry Centre hosted a special performance poetry event last year, and the video of the show is now available on YouTube! Watch it here, and enjoy sampling the talents of some of the finest Oxford poets.

‘Theme and Invariants’ is copyright © Bruce Beasley and BOA Editions, 2012, and reprinted from Theophobia (BOA, 2012).

Notes from BOA Editions:

Bruce Beasley’s Theophobia is the latest volume in his ongoing spiritual meditation, which forms a kind of postmodern devotional poetry in a reinvention of the tradition of John Donne, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T.S. Eliot. The book is structured around a series of poems called ‘Pilgrim’s Deviations’ and it forms a deviating pilgrimage through science, history, politics, and popular culture. Beasley interrogates the theological, metaphysical, scientific, and political worlds of our time in a continually disrupted catechism, a ‘catechismus interruptus.’

Bruce Beasley grew up in Macon, Georgia, and studied at Oberlin College (B.A., 1980), Columbia University (M.F.A., 1982), and the University of Virginia (Ph.D., 1993). He is the author of six previous collections of poems, including The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems (University of Washington Press, 2007), Lord Brain (winner of the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Award, 2005), and Summer Mystagogia, selected by Charles Wright for the 1996 Colorado Prize for Poetry. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust and three Pushcart prizes, and his work appears in The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from the First Thirty Years of the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Bellingham, Washington, with his wife the poet and nonfiction writer Suzanne Paola and their son Jin, and is a professor of English at Western Washington University. His latest collection Theophobia (BOA, 2012) is now available at BOA’s site here, where you can also read another poem from the collection, ‘From “Having Read the Holy Spirit’s Wikipedia”‘. You can also find out more about Bruce Beasley’s work from his website.

BOA Editions, Ltd., a not-for-profit publisher of poetry and other literary works, fosters readership and appreciation of contemporary literature. By identifying, cultivating, and publishing both new and established poets and selecting authors of unique literary talent, BOA brings high quality literature to the public. Support for this effort comes from the sale of its publications, grant funding, and private donations. In 2011, BOA celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary. To find out more about BOA Editions, click here. You can also sign up for the publisher’s newsletter here, find and like BOA on Facebook, and follow the publisher on Twitter by searching for @boaeditions.

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.

Orpheus, Just Checking

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I shouldn’t look back. I seem to come
perpetually out of the underworld,
and by feeling my way in the near
total darkness I have won back my
easily frightened away frequently dead
Muse, who follows me silently.
I’m never sure she’s there. The pupils
of my eyes dilated to catch
every glimmer of light, I inch my way
up the winding path, if it’s a path at all,
but upwards anyway to the world of life.
It’s as if I’m always at the same point
though always moving. How far have I come?
I look back. Where I had walked
alone, uncertainly, I see her,
silent still and other and dignified,
filling my eyes with light. But she stops.
I face forwards again, blinded, nonplussed.
Behind me she melts back to the dark halls.

by John Freeman

A reminder that the inaugural Reading Poetry Festival runs this week from 5-9 June. The impressive line-up of speakers includes Iain Sinclair, Bernard O’Donoghue, Leontia Flynn, Kei Miller, Zoe Skoulding, Peter Robinson, and Steven Matthews. There are also two exhibitions curated by Peter Robinson and Natalie Pollard. Many events are free but require you to book. Click here for the full programme and details about how you can book tickets.

‘Orpheus, Just Checking’ is copyright © John Freeman, 2007. It is reprinted from A Suite for Summer by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

John Freeman was born in Essex, grew up in South London and studied English at Cambridge. He lived in Yorkshire before moving to Wales where he teaches at Cardiff University. A Suite For Summer is John Freeman’s ninth collection of poems. Other collections include The Light Is Of Love, I Think: New and Selected Poems (Stride), and Landscape With Portraits (Redbeck). Stride also published a book of essays, The Less Received: Neglected Modern Poets. The essay ‘We Must Talk Now’ appeared in Cusp: recollections of poetry in transition, edited by Geraldine Monk (Shearsman, 2012). In 2013 John Freeman won third prize in the National Poetry Competition. Of his work, Jim Burns has written: ‘The movement of John Freeman’s poems is always easy to follow. The ease and the warmth make for an attractiveness that is central to the poems. And because they never lapse into the merely anecdotal they retain their quality and stand repeated reading. There is a consistency in the writing that is impressive. The voice in the poems is constant and true.’ You can read more about the collection at Worple’s site here.

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 Janos Pilinszky from Clive Wilmer and George Gomori; 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 include work from John Greening, Michael McKimm, Peter Robinson, Mary Woodward and Sally Flint.  More information can be found on Worple Press’s new website and Facebook page.

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.

It Won’t Be Anytime Soon

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I need a man with enough sagacity
To wear a coonskin cap
And escort me and my party
Through the Cumberland Gap
A man sufficiently rough hewn
Not to see shooting a racoon
As serious crime
You need a man with enough powder and ball
To see that what lies behind a waterfall’s
The American sublime
Though you may one day track down your Daniel Boone
It won’t be anytime soon

I need a man with just enough gravity
To see how a dripping tap
Will bend the back of a levee
Until you hear it snap
A man sufficiently immune
To the broad strokes of the Times-Picayune
As might turn on a dime
You need a man with enough native wit to call
It like it is from the flood wall
Even as the waters climb
Though he may rise one day with the harvest moon
It won’t be anytime soon

I need a man with enough lucidity
To read a contour map
Of Zion or Monument Valley
Without the appropriate app
A man sufficiently attuned
To looking beyond buttes and dunes
Of sandstone and shale and lime
You need a man with enough old-fashioned gall
To tell you you look small
In geological time
Though that may one day strike you as opportune
It won’t be anytime soon

by Paul Muldoon

Poetry news! The inaugural Reading Poetry Festival runs from 5-9 June and promises to be a fantastic event. Speakers include Iain Sinclair, Bernard O’Donoghue, Leontia Flynn, Kei Miller, Zoe Skoulding, Peter Robinson, and Steven Matthews. There are also two exhibitions curated by Peter Robinson and Natalie Pollard. Many events are free but require you to book. Click here for the full programme and details about how you can book tickets.

‘It Won’t Be Anytime Soon’ is copyright © Paul Muldoon, 2012, and reprinted from his book Songs and Sonnets, published by Enitharmon Books in 2012.

Notes from Enitharmon:

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the BBC. Since 1987 he has lived in the USA, where he is now Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. Apart from Songs and Sonnets, Muldoon’s most recent collections of poetry are Plan B (also published by Enitharmon in 2009), Maggot (2010), and The Word on the Street (2013). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Muldoon was elected a Member of the American Academy in Arts and Letters in 2008. Among his awards are the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the International Griffin Prize, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, and the Shakespeare Prize.

Writing in The Guardian about Songs and Sonnets, Maria Johnston commented that ‘perhaps th[e] hyphenated category “poem-songs” best describes these songs and sonnets. They are complex, charged performances that vibrate in the interim between one thing and the other. They’ll rock your world.’ You can read more about Songs and Sonnets on Enitharmon’s site here, and more about Muldoon from his own website here.

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 here to receive a newsletter with special offers, details of readings & events and new titles and Enitharmon’s Poem of the Month.

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 Glorious Fellowship of Migraineurs

~ oxfordbrookesuni

When we gather we greet each other
by lifting tentatively one hand to one eye.
We meet in darkened rooms, quietly;
share no wine. Nobody speaks
but often our voices join to moan
the migraineurs psalm, low and holy.

The hours before fizz brilliantly, scented
with burnt toast and oranges, petrol, sparking
fireworks, fireflies, stars. Everyone
dons a halo, everyone’s soul
shines out through their pores, whether unnaturally
small or wrapped in a skin of water.

We sleep the night together, slip off
one by one on waking from
a dream we pass between us, in which
the structure of the sky is revealed. We make
no dates, but palm to temple, salute
in a migraineur’s kiss, our transcendence.

by Polly Atkin

There are two events to draw your attention to this week. This week’s poet, Polly Atkin, is one of a number of scholars contributing to Shifting Territories, a conference on modern and contemporary poetics of place, which is taking place on Wednesday and Thursday this week at theInstitute of English Studies in London. As well as panels of papers responding to poetry and place, the conference features readings by Jo Shapcott and David Morley, a keynote paper by Eóin Flannery, a workshop by Steven Matthews, and an evening event in association with the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature with Alice Oswald and Hugh Haughton. Find out more about the conference here.

Tomorrow at 7pm in Headington Hill Hall, Oxford Brookes, the Poetry Centre presents ‘”The Cheerful Companion”: Poetry, Music & Performance in Eighteenth-Century Poetic Miscellanies.’ The event will consist of a series of short talks, readings, and music, followed by an interactive session in which participants will be able to experience an authentic eighteenth-century sewing session hosted by Nicole Pohl from Oxford Brookes. All are welcome and you can find more information about the event here.

‘The Glorious Fellowship of Migraineurs’ is copyright © Polly Atkin, 2013. It is reprinted from Shadow Dispatches , published by Seren Books in 2013.

Notes from Seren:

Polly Atkin was born in Nottingham in 1980, lived in London for a number of years before moving to Cumbria in 2006 to research poems about place. Widely published in journals, various of her poems have been placed first in the Troubadour, and Kent and Sussex Competitions, been commended in the National Sonnet, McLellan, Basil Bunting, Wigtown, and Troubadour Competitions, and shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. Her pamphlet bone song (Clitheroe: Aussteiger, 2008) was shortlisted for the 2009 Michael Marks Pamphlet Award. She currently teaches English Literature and Creative Writing part-time at Lancaster University. ‘The Glorious Fellowship of Migraineurs’ comes from Polly Atkin’s MsLexia prize-winning pamphlet, Shadow Dispatches. Writing about her work, the poet Paul Farley has commented: ‘Polly Atkin’s first short collection is shot through with wit and imaginative invention and an attractive acuity. For the approaching reader: this book is truly available.’ You can read more about Shadow Dispatches at Seren’s site here, and follow Polly Atkin on Twitter here.

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.

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.

Natural Mechanical

~ oxfordbrookesuni

See this boy – this Rocky.

At three years: the back door opened.
Out he goes. Prompted. Prodded. Pushed.
Squat body. Crew-cut. Short trousers. Green vest.
Little fists clenched into little pink rocks.

     He’ll be a hardy wee bugger this one.

His father. Nailing the child’s bedroom window open.
Four inch gap. Forever. No curtain.

The third of three children; the Benjamin.
Following the second sister by five years.
No more to come after.

     He’s been up and running
     for half his whole life.

His mother. Allowing the wind to slam shut the door.

     Let him play out where my legs
     are least likely to find him.

     And if he doesn’t come back when called
The father again:
     then it’ll be the webbing belt.
his Victorian ideals coming fifty years too late.

And this boy – this Rocky – takes to it, quick.
An t-Eilean Sgitheanach. The Wingèd Isle. Isle of Skye. His.

And when they later call his name
over wind, over heath, over burn, over bog

he doesn’t hear, and he doesn’t come.

by J.O. Morgan

This excerpt from Natural Mechanical is copyright © J.O. Morgan, 2009. It is reprinted from Natural Mechanical by permission of CB editions.

Notes from CB editions:

The above extract from J.O. Morgan‘s book Natural Mechanical comprises the opening lines of a book-length verse memoir of the childhood of a man – known to the poet – who grew up on the Isle of Skye in the 1950s. Dyslexic, he sought out his own education from the fields and streams around him; the many episodes recounted include a solo trip to France with just a few coins in the pocket of his shorts. (A sequel, Long Cuts, was published in 2011.)

Natural Mechanical – by a poet who had never previously published – won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize. The book was widely praised both for the formal skill of its writing (Andrew Motion called it ‘a memoir written in language that is cannily involved with the ordinary miracles of childhood’), and for its appeal to a readership which might not usually engage with poetry: ‘If those who never touch poetry tried a few pages of this, they might become converts,’ said Rosemary Goring in The Herald.

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 twice been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize. 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 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.

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 Necktie Quilt

~ oxfordbrookesuni

After his death at eighty-three, which she believed was premature
and the fault of paramedics who’d ‘taken their time’ to arrive,
she set about thirty years of his neckties, the gifts of grateful clients
whose grubby affairs he’d settled in and out of court,
while she’d looked on, applauding his victories, folding away ties.

Now she selected only the silk ones, unpicked them with meticulous
care, pressed them under a damp cloth until every crease was smoothed,
arranged them on the dining room table: the bold paisleys, their backs
curled against regimental stripes, the gaudy florals, which had made him smile,
but were never worn, cheeky polka dots, a couple of sombre knits
she suspected were synthetic.

Day after day, the old Singer hummed and whirred as she tacked
the strips together, and when the backing was attached, the borders
feather-stitched by hand, she found a place for every scrap left over:
trim for a dresser scarf, appliqué for scatter cushions, a white curtain
tied back with a sash of hand-painted peacocks, an old dressing gown
with a new belt, flaunting wild geometrics.

Swathes of unexpected colour cropped up in unexpected places,
the fallen-fruit silks of mulberry, gold and plum, a splash of scarlet
in an inner sleeve, reminding her of the flash of a whore’s petticoat—
a certain woman she saw once, slipping out of his office.
When it was finished, she shook it out, flung it across her single bed.

by Wendy Klein

There are some exciting creative writing and poetry events happening in Oxford over the next two weeks. From 7-11 May, the Pegasus Theatre hosts Oxford Brookes’ Amazing Acts festival, which this year features, amongst other events, a creative writing showcase hosted by Philip Pullman; ‘Visions of the Future’: pieces of writing born from collaborations between the sciences and humanities; and ‘Poetry and Business: Risk, Recession, Recovery’, in which MBA students and established poets collaborate. Find out more about the festival and how to buy tickets on this page.

This week’s poet, Wendy Klein, will be reading at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Oxford with Dorothy Yamamoto on Wednesday 15 May at 8pm. You can find more details on our Facebook page.

‘The Necktie Quilt’ is copyright © Wendy Klein, 2013. It is reprinted from Anything in Turquoise by permission of Cinnamon Press.

Notes from Cinnamon Press:

By turns raw, tender, and humorous, Anything in Turquoise takes us on a lyrical and emotional journey from an American childhood filled with ‘Bebbe Meises’ (old wives’ tales) to points east – Mongolia, from where ‘Having failed and failed to grasp lessons/about cultures in varying states of disrepair/having walked away even sadder’, we are moved to Vietnam where not only an American helicopter, but the poet is ‘caught and pinned’, and to Cambodia, where a school-turned-Khmer Rouge holds ‘a single framed image/for each grisly death, galleries/or portraits … half a holocaust /under my feet.’ Moving West we are caught in ‘Hurricanes and other Storms’, ‘the tilted headstones and bones left by Katrina … they know how to bury their dead’, before finding ourselves in California where a slippery past intrudes on the present and the poet’s mother is sharpening ‘her Semitic tongue’ to ‘lacerate the soul-less goyem’ before ‘lurching towards incarceration, divorce,/death.’ Finally we find ourselves ‘Elsewhere’ in the company of Jackson Pollock repainting the cave until we stand, ‘blinded/by this orgy of naked colour, already pining for our past.’ You can find out more about the collection at Cinnamon’s site here.

Wendy Klein‘s poetry has appeared in many anthologies and poetry magazines. A retired family psychotherapist, she is a regular reader at the Troubadour and Poets’ Cafe in Reading. Her first collection was Cuba in the Blood (Cinnamon Press). She enjoys belly-dancing and the curative company of dogs.

Cinnamon Press is an independent publisher run by a family team and based in North Wales and the Midlands. We select books that we feel passionate about and concentrate on a list of poetry and fiction titles into which we put maximum effort at every stage of development. We also run regular writing courses and writing competitions, including major awards for poets, novelists and short story writers and a series of mini competitions. Find out more about the publisher and join their mailing list here. You can also find Cinnamon on Facebook and on 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.

On a Forbidden Star

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I was born on a forbidden star. From there
driven ashore, I trudge along the sand.
The surf of celestial nothingness takes me up,
and plays with me, then casts me on the land.

Why I repent I do not even know.
It is a puzzle buzzing in my ear.
If any of you should find me on this beach,
this sunken beach, don’t run away, stay here.

And don’t be scared. Don’t run away. Just try
to mitigate the suffering in my life.
Shut your eyes and press me to yourself.
Press me boldly, as you would a knife.

Be reckless too: look on me as the dead
look on the night, seeing it as their own,
your shoulder there to aid my weaker one.
I can no longer bear to be alone.

I never wanted to be born. It was nothingness
who bore and suckled me; with her I started.
so love me darkly. Love me cruelly. Love me
like the one left behind by the departed.

by János Pilinszky

‘On a Forbidden Star’ is copyright © János Pilinszky. It is reprinted by permission of Worple Press from Passio (2012), translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri.

Notes from Worple Press:

János Pilinszky (1921-81) is one of the great European poets of an extraordinary generation: that of Paul Celan, Zbigniew Herbert and Yves Bonnefoy. Like them he grew up to a world physically and morally devastated by the Second World War and the Holocaust. Ted Hughes described his achievements and stature thus: ‘His “greatness” […] is not a greatness of imaginative and linguistic abundance. It has more to do with some form of spiritual distinction. The weight and unusual temper of his imagination and language derive from this.’ In Passio, Clive Wilmer translates from Hungarian in collaboration with George Gömöri, whom he first met in 1971. A Hungarian poet himself, George Gömöri belongs to the generation that felt Pilinszky’s influence. Over the past forty years Gömöri and Wilmer have translated work by more than twenty poets, and introduced many British readers to the poems of Miklós Radnóti and György Petri. Many of the poems here are taken from Pilinszky’s second book, Harmadnapon, published in 1959. Find out more about Passio by visiting Worple Press’s page here.

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 Janos Pilinszky from Clive Wilmer and George Gomori; 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 include work from John Greening, Michael McKimm, Peter Robinson, Mary Woodward and Sally Flint.  More information can be found on Worple Press’s new website and Facebook page.

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.

Fairchild’s Mule

~ oxfordbrookesuni

A dried specimen of the first artificial hybrid was presented to the Royal Society in 1726.

To be suddenly wide-awake
sowing leaf-shadows
in the moonlit hours.

To attend.

To wait red-eyed
in the gold mist of the city’s dawn
for the opening of the flowers.

Under the breath, to say
a prayer for the soul.

To steady the hand.

With a feather
to harvest the pollen-grains,

brushing only the topmost tips
of the buttery stamens.
Sweet william. Then by feel

with the forefinger and thumb of the left hand
to find the gillyflower’s pistil

and hold it in the fullness of light.

To marry pollen to stigma.
Not to know, this glorious morning,

the seed can never come true.

by Lesley Saunders

‘Fairchild’s Mule’ is copyright © Lesley Saunders, 2012. It is reprinted from Cloud Camera by permission of Two Rivers Press.

Notes from Two Rivers Press:

If scientific instruments and objects – the early twentieth-century cloud camera or Herschel’s ‘comet sweeper’ telescope or Florence Nightingale’s diagram of hospital deaths or Freud’s couch – could have a dream life, the poems in Cloud Camera are an attempt to evoke it. The book inhabits an imagined, even a haunted, world of science and technology – there are poems that conjure anything from the first balloon flight made by a woman or the effect of experiments with laughing-gas, to how Braille was invented, when the first artificial plant hybrid was created and what the impact of static electricity on the human body looks like. The poetry both celebrates and laments the endless human curiosity to find out ‘what the terrestrial body can stand, / at what point the mind turns itself inside out.’ You can read ‘Germ Theory’, another poem from the collection, on the Two Rivers site here.

Lesley Saunders is the author of several books and pamphlets of poetry, including Christina the Astonishing (with Jane Draycott and artist Peter Hay) and Her Leafy Eye (with artist Geoff Carr), both published by Two Rivers Press. Lesley’s work has been widely published in journals and anthologies, and has won major awards; she has held several poetry residencies, and is involved in various collaborations and commissions. Find out more about her work on her website.

Two Rivers Press was founded in Reading in 1994 by Peter Hay (1951–2003), an artist and enthusiast for the town and its two rivers, the Kennet and the Thames. In nearly two decades of publishing and with over seventy titles since its inception, it has been described as ‘one of the most characterful small presses in the country’. It focuses on local poets and a significant part of its work explores and celebrates local history and environment. Bold illustration and striking design are important elements of its work, used to great effect in new editions of classic poems, especially ones with some Reading connection: for example, Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and in collections of contemporary poetry from local poets such as Reading Poetry: an anthology edited by Peter Robinson. It has recently published A Mutual Friend: Poems for Charles Dickens, an anthology with a very distinguished list of contributors, also edited by Peter Robinson. The Press is strongly rooted in the local community and has close links with the University, Poets’ Café, RISC, Museum of English Rural Life and other local groups. Its contribution to Reading’s culture won for it a Pride of Reading award in 2008. You can find more information at the press’s website, and on its Facebook page.