Ishibe

November 5, 2012April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Night plummets as it does on the plain,
mist ambles through woods.
Only the tips of the mountain, grey
for a while, and the sea in the distance,
stretching its vast empty limbs.
Hiro stands and watches
the colour drain from the day.
Some will make it.
Some won’t.

Michi ni mayotte shimaimashita*

Then light from an inn trips into the street,
dancers let what comes
go. Others leave the little show,
walk towards the acid blue horizon.
She greets him with a cup of rice wine

It will be a radiant night.

You’re just one among many
who vanished.

[* ‘I have lost my way’]

by Nancy Gaffield

Notes from CB editions:

Nancy Gaffield works as a senior lecturer at the University of Kent; she was born in the United States and lived in Japan for many years. Tokaido Road won the 2011 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize. Gaffield’s sequence of poems responds to Hiroshige’s woodcut prints (1833–4) depicting the landscapes and travellers of the Tokaido Road, which linked the Japanese eastern and western capitals of Edo and Kyoto. Submitting to the road and its relentless succession of departures and arrivals, the poems discover a freedom to move beyond the frames established by Hiroshige, not least in their voicing of regret and longing, grief and desire. You can find out more about Tokaido Road on CBe’s page, and view Hiroshige’s prints, ‘The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Road’, here.

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 Wash House

October 29, 2012April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The turning on was slower done — the firebox stoked,
the wooden lid the copper had, gilded shine of its deep pan.
And side by side two great stone sinks
for suds and rinse, could hold a muddy child.

The place became a store — chook mash,
pig grits — housed a mat and dust of wares,
played host to mouse. Cat found a hide for bed
and laid her kittens there.

One small window choked with web,
light gave way across the floor; each step
softening to listen hard
though you could never say what for.

Warped tracks of tallboy teased, opened to a world of finds.
A jar of pennies turned to bank. Rust crept
along the blades of knives. And each oilskin coat, from its nail,
stiffened like a corpse impaled. The kittens ended in a sack.

The shedding held small lost endeavour, walls with cracks
poached by the weather, dissolved the meanest acts of time
where garden slept in seed sachets, the mewing
ghosts, the lynching strength of binder twine.

by Rhian Gallagher

Notes from Enitharmon:

Rhian Gallagher was born on the South Island of New Zealand. She lived in London for 18 years and returned to New Zealand in 2006. Gallagher’s first collection, Salt Water Creek, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for First Collection in 2003. She received a Canterbury History Foundation grant (NZ) in 2007 and the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award (NZ) in 2008. Feeling for Daylight: The Photographs of Jack Adamson was published by the South Canterbury Museum, NZ, in 2010, and her second collection of poetry, Shift, was published in summer 2012. In this collection she beautifully evokes a long-distance love affair as it blooms and ages, alongside the estrangement and joy of a life lived beyond national boundaries. In the three sections of Shift, home, love, and self are each explored in a different poetic style, each given a chance to live freely, for ‘[g]iving up on words is the final failure’. The book won the New Zealand Post Poetry Award 2012, and you can read more about it 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.

The mushrooms are born in silence

October 22, 2012April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The mushrooms are born in silence; some are born in silence; others, with a brief shriek, a bit of thunder. Some are white, others pink, that one’s gray and looks like a dove, the statue of a dove; some are gold or purple. Each one bears—and this is the horrible part—the initials of the dead person from which it springs. I don’t dare devour them; that tender flesh is our relative.
But in the afternoon the mushroom buyer comes and starts to pick them. My mother lets him. He chooses like an eagle. That one, white as sugar, a pink one, a gray one.
Mama doesn’t realize she’s selling her own kind.

by Marosa di Giorgio

Notes from BOA Editions:

Marosa di Giorgio has one of the most distinct and recognizable voices in Latin American poetry. Her surreal and fable-like prose poems invite comparison to Kafka, Cortázar, and even contemporary American poets Russell Edson and Charles Simic; but di Giorgio’s voice, imagery, and themes—childhood, the Uruguayan countryside, a perception of the sacred—are her own. Previously written off as ‘the mad woman of Uruguayan letters’, di Giorgio’s reputation has blossomed in recent years. You can find out more about Marosa di Giorgio from her official website (in Spanish – or in English with the help of Google Translate!) here, and from BOA’s page here.

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.

Richard Branson

October 15, 2012April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My love, I feel like this print of Rothko.
I am small and glassy and I want to impress you,
even if it means murdering one of your work colleagues.

You think if you stare long enough at your noodles
you’ll see the combination to the safe.
I don’t have the heart to tell you the truth.

Even the elephant on the 20 Rand note
you gave me for good luck back in 2009
will end up spent in the end.

You adjust my tie and I grow a little older.

On cold hungover days, the white sun follows us
through Jesus Green to the Carphone Warehouse.

Shrek watches from the electrical shop across the street;
seven Shreks, running in parallel across a burning rope bridge.
It’s impossible to root for any of them.

A millionaire’s hairstyle
is trapped in the era they first made their money.

The air turns green above the poles of the Earth.

by Ross Sutherland

The Poetry Centre’s latest podcast, featuring the poet Gill Learner (whose poem ‘About the olden days’ was the Weekly Poem on 4 June 2012), is now live! Visit this page to hear Gill read her poem ‘The power of ice’, and discuss it and her work in general. You can find out more about Gill’s collection The Agister’s Experiment on the Two Rivers Press website.

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

Ross Sutherland was born in Edinburgh in 1979. A former lecturer in electronic literature at Liverpool John Moore’s University, Ross works as a freelance journalist and tutor in creative writing. His first collection, Things To Do Before You Leave Town, was published in 2009, followed by the limited edition mini-book Twelve Nudes in 2010 and the e-book Hyakuretsu Kyaku in 2011. Ross is a member of live literature collective Aisle 16, and has toured solo and collaborative shows nationally and internationally. Emergency Window is his second full collection, and its ‘lucid observations, smart conceits and insight into the contemporary world’ have been praised by The Independent. Discover more about this latest collection at the Penned in the Margins site here, where you can also enjoy Ross Sutherland reading his poem ‘Liverish Red-Blooded Riffraff Hoo-ha’.

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.

Kouros

October 8, 2012April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Blow after vertical blow severed you from the rock-face
in the abandoned quarry

the impact shatters the crystals deep inside you

and renders you opaque, lying there like a stunned space warrior,

oversized, grey-speckled feet pointing seaward
above the rooftops, while your double, sprawled in a grove

on the other side of the island, is having his torso

tickled by overhanging branches. – Imperturbable

youth, who once strode forward smiling, hands clenched
at your sides, undeterred, provides a seat

for the span of an hour. I hadn’t realized the long descent

from the village-that-makes-verses on the mountain slope

would tire me so, leaning against your foursquare
frame, I doze, and wake, and doze again,

while the industrious ant, mistaking me for the figure

I’ve come to admire in its gritty silence, must about-face

as my right leg shudders and twitches involuntarily,
as if to say, behold the man.

by Gabriel Levin

This Thursday (11 October), Steven Matthews, the Director of Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre, will be launching his collection of poetry, Skying (Waterloo Press, 2012). The launch will take place at Blackwell’s Bookshop, Broad Street, Oxford, and will begin at 7pm. Steven will be reading from this new collection alongside Helen Farish, whose own recent collection, Nocturnes at Nohant: The Decade of Chopin and Sand, is published by Bloodaxe Books.

‘Kouros’ is copyright © Gabriel Levin, 2012. It is reprinted from To These Dark Steps (2012) by permission of Anvil Press.

Notes from Anvil Press:

Gabriel Levin’s fourth collection, To These Dark Steps, moves from the Mediterranean world that has engaged his imagination for the last thirty years, to the sombre title sequence written in the shadow of Israel’s bombardment and incursion into Gaza in 2008. These striking poems and their prose commentary (The Fathers are Watching) navigate between the depredations of war and the mind’s need to disengage itself from its surroundings. The final section of this articulate and compassionate book is a fifteen-sonnet cycle dispatched from the shores of an unnamed island, which could be everyman’s abode, in search of what might lie yonder.

Gabriel Levin was born in France, grew up in the United States, and has lived in Jerusalem since 1972. He has published three earlier collections of poetry and translations from Hebrew, French and Arabic. His translation from the medieval Hebrew of Yehuda Halevi, Poems from the Diwan, also appeared with Anvil (2002). His essays on the geographical and imaginative reach of the Levant have appeared in literary journals in England and the United States.

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.

Treachery

October 1, 2012April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It feels nearer the sun up here.
The stony track struggled up
through dark of trees towards
a growing disc of light, which swelled, broke
into majestic brightness.
Now the path levels, the valley opens.

Across the river one farm spreads yard and barns
in shadow against light. Above it rises
bare mountain, a final wall that flanks
the upper valley, curves round its distant head,
in a strange visual accord
with the valley-floor’s sharp green
of re-seeded garths, proclaiming
work, settlement, fertility.

Alongside a fence that dwindles
towards the far-off valley-head, unseen
high passes, into barren distance
runs a green road. On it, down
from hidden solitudes, a dark dot
gleams and grows, zooms into a phalanx
of mountain-bikers, black-clad, impassive,
hissing dizzily past. Unmoved,
a fat ewe suckles her twins
under a track-side thorn.

In this domain of sun,
so all-encompassing, so royal,
only the traitor mind creates
in the shiver of sun on skin
a shudder of ice-wind, subverts
with a sly imagining of snow.

by Ruth Bidgood

UPDATE! Matthew Jarvis, author of the book Ruth Bidgood mentioned below, has written a blog post in response to ‘Treachery’, giving some very valuable context about the setting for the poem. You can read it here, and find out more about Matthew’s book here.

Notes from Cinnamon Press:

In Above the Forests, perspectives of ordinary life, rendered with this poet’s effortlessly questing precision, serve as means of further discovery. Her writing has always shown ‘how different is real/from ordinary’. As she says, ‘to feel bounded is our only way of being with things, because we have fewer dimensions than actually exist…but we can feel the boundary sometimes being transcended.’ In these poems, the lie of Welsh land, local and family history, social pressures, the promptings of dream and of scientific speculation are all evoked, serving to draw the reader, often literally step by step, into processes of questioning, self-questioning and an intuitive crossing of boundaries. (Anne Cluysenaar.)

Ruth Bidgood was born of a North Welsh father and a West Country mother in Seven Sisters, Glamorgan. Educated in Port Talbot and at Oxford University in the 60s, she later returned to Wales and settled in Powys. Her second collection received a Welsh Arts Council award; the sixth and seventh were shortlisted for the Welsh Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 1993 and 1997 and Time Being was a Poetry Society Recommendation and won the Roland Matthias Prize for 2010. Above the Forests was launched to mark Ruth’s 90th birthday in conjunction with a critical appraisal of her work by Matthew Jarvis: Ruth Bidgood (University of Wales Press, 2012).

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.

The Hidden Fighters

September 24, 2012April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

We retraced our steps though the signs were bad.
At twilight a huge man stood in the road with an axe
and when he saw us he whimpered in terror and plunged into the undergrowth
though we were just two peasants, a child, and a deaf horse.
At night we found our moonlit road
obstructed by wheels: wheels of carts, phaetons,
coaches, surreys, toy horses, all frozen.
So we drifted along by the logging paths
that were sometimes just accident, angles of snow and windbreak.
Sunrise was black because we were so deep,
the rustle of the owls stopped,
we came upon a child’s swing dangling from a branch
and then another and another, a forest of swings.
We found a glass case covered with branches:
it contained an encyclopedia. Then we looked up
and saw the carcasses of butchered deer
lashed to the treetops and painted chalk white
like enormous clumps of snow and we knew
we were in the camp of the partisans
and the silence around us was not ours,
nor was it the silence of fear.

by D. Nurkse

Welcome to the first in a new series of Weekly Poems for the new academic year. It’s a pleasure to begin the series with a publisher new to the Weekly Poem, CB editions. Don’t forget that the Poetry Centre can be ‘liked’ on Facebook and followed on Twitter (@brookespoetry).

D. Nurkse lives in Brooklyn, New York; he has published ten books of poetry and has also written on human rights issues. His parents fled Nazi Europe during World War Two. Voices over Water was shortlisted for the 2011 Forward Prize. The book records the emigration of a woman and her husband from Estonia to Canada in the early 20th century; in the fine detail of their experience it evokes the larger forces to which their lives are subject: war, the unyielding land, famine, silence, and the irreducible strangeness of the bond between them. You can read more about D. Nurkse on the CB editions website, where you can read reviews of his work and some further excerpts from his book.

INSIDE THE BOOKS…

September 10, 2012April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Inside the books
is quietude –

No echo
of the poet’s landlady’s
nagging
the rumble of guns outside Jena –

Inside the very
loudest of words
is quietude –

As though they’d arrived
at a place which we
may never reach –

Even if you
plug your ears:
as though from far away
the siren song
of the blood

IM INNEREN DER BÜCHER…

Im Inneren der Bücher
ist es still –

Kein Nachhall
vom Gezänk der Hauswirtin
des Dichters
vom Kanonendonner vor Jena –

Im Inneren auch der
schreiendsten Worte
ist es still –

Als wären sie angekommen
wohin wir vielleicht nie
gelangen können –

Auch wenn du dir
die Ohren verstopfst:
wie von fern her
der Sirenengesang
des Blutes

by Ludwig Steinherr

The Weekly Poem will be taking a week’s break now to ready itself for the new term. We hope that you have enjoyed this year’s extended selection, and look forward to sending out an exciting new set of poems to you beginning in the week of 24 September. Many thanks indeed to all our generous publishers for providing us with such rich material. You can find out more about them from our Links page here. And if you have enjoyed the work, do consider supporting them by investing in some of the volumes we have featured. Thanks for reading!

‘INSIDE THE BOOKS…’ is copyright © Ludwig Steinherr, 2010. It is reprinted by permission of Arc Publications from Before the Invention of Paradise by Ludwig Steinherr (Arc Visible Poets Series, Arc Publications 2010).

Ludwig Steinherr was born in Munich in 1962, where he still lives, and studied philosophy at the University of Munich. He is now a freelance writer and lecturer in philosophy at the University of Eichstätt. Steinherr has worked as an essayist, a reviewer, a juror, a translator, and as an editor, co-founding the influential journal Das Gedicht (The Poem) with Anton G. Leitner in 1993. But it is as a poet that he has written his way into the front rank of contemporary German writers, one milestone here being the selection of his poem Legend (Sage) as ‘Gedicht des Jahres’ (‘Poem of the Year’) by the Autoreninitiative Köln in 1987. The present selection is based on the nine collections published in the twenty years after his early debut, Fluganweisung, in 1985. Steinherr’s poems have received a number of awards – including the Leonce-und-Lena-Förderpreis (1993), the Buchpreis des Verbandes Evangelischer Büchereien (1999), and the Hermann-Hesse-Förderpreis (1999) – and have been translated into various languages, including French and Czech. Steinherr was elected a fellow of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste (Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts) in 2003. You can learn more about Steinherr and read other poems from Before the Invention of Paradise at Arc’s page here. Ludwig Steinherr is reading at the King’s Lynn Poetry Festival on 21 September – find more details about the event here.

The translator of this poem, Richard Dove, was born in Bath in 1954, read Modern Languages at Oxford and taught German and English language and literature at the Universities of Exeter, Regensburg and Wales before moving to Munich in 1987, where he has since worked as a writer and lecturer. His early poems were recently collected in the bilingual volume Aus einem früheren Leben (Lyrikedition 2000, 2003), translated inter alia by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Reiner Kunze. Since moving to the Federal Republic, he has written his poems very largely in German (Farbfleck auf einem Mondrian-Bild. Gedichte, Edition Thaleia, 2002; Am Fluß der Wohlgerüche. Gedichte, Rimbaud Verlag, 2008; Syrische Skyline. Gedichte, Rimbaud Verlag, 2009) while translating into English.

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; search for @Arc_Poetry. 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.

Protest

September 3, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

There is a way to drop a body atop a hard mattress,
to scrub gentle parts too hard, yank a gown
across withered flesh, to drag a weight smaller
than your own and slam it against a pillow.
There are ways to say the night is long
and there are twenty other beds to check.

There are ways to ignore chapping lips,
not to hear a rasping voice, to avoid the task
of filling a water pitcher. There are ways
to tell them, without using words, that you hate
the job, ways to leave them cold and shivering
and naked. There are ways to leave them alone.

But they had an answer, the ones we cleaned
and dressed and moved and fed and watched
over. On chair, bed, pillow, gown, on sheet,
diaper, floor, and shoe, writ repeatedly
in stinking letters: No, I am not dead.

by Janice N. Harrington

Notes from BOA Editions:

Janice N. Harrington writes poetry and children’s books. She grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both those settings, especially rural Alabama, figure largely in her writing. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She currently teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Hands of Strangers portrays the tensions and moments of grace between aged nursing home residents and their healthcare workers. What does it mean to be a nurses’ aide in a nursing home, the lowest of the low, the typically-female worker who provides physical care for the devalued bodies of the elderly? What is it to live one’s remaining life on a county ward as an indigent elder? You can find out more about the book at BOA’s website here. Read more about Janice N. Harrington’s work and hear her read from it on her website here.

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.

A week of running beside the canal

August 27, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

On Monday, three yellow goslings
and the gander’s tongue thrust out.
On Wednesday, three goslings,
each with a dark Mohican streak,
the gander’s tongue thrust out.

A face comes back from
Earlier times; freckled, round,
brown eyes, and red, fair hair,
nothing beyond ordinary,
that always seems relaxed.

The gait below it; slightly
splayed and rolling.
On Thursday, suddenly
the may was open everywhere,
its small white clusters

like the rowan or cow parsley;
the florets twisted, flicking
on the breeze. On Sunday,
one upon the water, its head
tucked beneath its wing;

the other adult bird was resting
by the bank, the water
rippling its drowned head.
Of the goslings, nothing.
On the canal, warm dots

of summer rain. Among
the grasses, Friesians walk
from grass to grass. That face
opens out upon itself; the bee’s
feet touch the flower.

by Ian Pople

Ian Pople was born in Ipswich. He was educated at the British Council, Athens and the Universities of Aston and Manchester. His first book of poetry, The Glass Enclosure , was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His second collection, An Occasional Lean-to , was published by Arc in 2005. He teaches at the University of Manchester. Read further selections from Saving Spaces, Ian Pople’s latest collection, on Arc’s website here.