To a Fraud Whose Work Has Come to Be Canonical

June 11, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Now all the lies are told
go public and seek praise
as prizes now unfold
like afternoons on days
dishonor schemes in groves
and shame lurks in the eyes
and lips can only love
a self which they contrive.

Born to charm and born
for easy triumph, turn
this way and like some
weeping thing amid a field
of bones, anthologize despair
and cry at last Forlorn!
because in all this barren yield
there is no living air.

by John Matthias

If you are around Oxford this weekend, the Poetry Centre warmly invites you to attend our performance poetry event on Sunday 17 June at the Old Fire Station. It features six leading local voices: George Chopping, Paul Askew, Tina Sederholm, Alan Buckley, Jennifer A. McGowan, and Vahni Capildeo. We also have a guest headlining act: Rose Solari. Tickets will be available on the door or in advance from WeGotTickets.com. Find out more about the event and some of the poets taking part by visiting our new Poets in Oxford page.

Notes from Shearsman:

John Matthias was born in 1941 in Columbus, Ohio. For many years he taught at the University of Notre Dame and continues to serve as poetry editor of Notre Dame Review. He has been a Visiting Fellow in poetry at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and lived for much of the 70s and 80s in East Anglia. His books of verse include Turns, Crossing, Northern Summer, A Gathering of Ways, Swimming at Midnight, Beltane at Aphelion, Pages, Working Progress, Working Title, New Selected Poems and Kedging. He has also published translations from the Swedish, editions of David Jones’s work, and a volume of literary criticism, Reading Old Friends. In 1998 Robert Archambeau edited Word Play Place, a selection of essays on Matthias’s work. Another book of essays on his poetry appeared in 2011 in the Salt Companion series, edited by Joe Francis Doerr. In 2011, Shearsman Books also published his essays in Who was Cousin Alice? And Other Questions. His collected poems are being published in three volumes, with the Collected Longer Poems slated to appear in October, and the Collected Shorter Poems Vol. 1 in 2013. You can watch John Matthias reading from his shorter poems at UC Berkeley here (his reading begins at around 10:30).

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with an active translation list. You can learn more about the publisher here, and find Shearsman on Facebook.

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

At the Yeoman’s House

May 28, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

June, Nine p.m.

The social bees work late,
Barren girls with honeyed thighs
Labouring among aquilegia,
The eagle flower, purple-spurred,
Multitudinous, nearly a weed.

I sit in the mid-year garden
To hear the poplars clatter,
And to admire what I have done.
The day is advanced, the bees
Drone vespers, the sun hits the wheat.

Farmers sat on the doorstep
At this hour, aching and comfortable,
Their eyes registering
A patch of pinks and mignonette
As their gaze settled for the big field.

An ancient man who had been
Young here arrived to say,
‘Mother saw to the flowers, of course’.
Of course. Father saw to that.
Their ancient son spoke of hives,

Hives here? ‘Hives, honeybees,
Pears in the orchard, muck
In the soil, all you had to have.’
The same water plashing, as
They put it then, and gulped by the horses.

Their shoes turn up in the beds.
I see my luckless father
Ploughing, confident in his rut,
His eye on the holly marker,
His tongue conversing with beasts,

Social bees will not pause
While there is light, while an anther
Can be seen to yield. And the poplars
Applaud them with gray and silver leaves,
The roses blacken, the cornfield fades.

by Ronald Blythe

Notes from Enitharmon:

Ronald Blythe has written novels, short stories, poetry, literary criticism, and social history. Among his books are Akenfield, now a Penguin Modern Classic, The Age of Illusion, The View in Winter, Divine Landscapes, Aldeburgh Anthology, The Assassin (his most recent novel), and Aftermath: Selected Prose 1950-2010. He has published critical studies of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, William Hazlitt and Henry James and for many years has been President of the John Clare Society. He has received honorary doctorates from the universities of East Anglia and Essex and in 2006 was awarded the Benson Medal, the highest honour of the Royal Society of Literature.

When as a young writer in 1947 Blythe first visited Bottengoms Farm on the Essex-Suffolk border, the ancient house of the artists John and Christine Nash, he could not have guessed that this would in time become his own home and the centre of the writing life. The old farm nestled in a valley, in a landscape little changed since the Middle Ages, immediately surrounded by a richly-stocked garden created by the Nashes from the flinty fields. From his current perspective, Blythe looks back in this collection with affection to the friendships with artists, writers, farmers, gardeners, and neighbours that were to enrich his life. You can read more about Blythe’s relationship with the farm and the people he met there in this interview by Patrick Barkham on the Enitharmon site, and hear Ronald Blythe interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs 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.

Loie Fuller’s Dancing School

May 21, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I am terpsichorean
a figure in burlesque.

Sometimes Miss Pepper stranded on the prairie
sometimes Buffalo Bill’s navvy
sometimes a soubrette.

Imagine my surprise at the spectacular
a bijou opera house.

An alien in melodrama
Aladdin-girl in melos.

In the cave of the fire of life,
I am Ayesha of two thousand years

finding a silhouette
within slimness.

Such methods of the divine
becomes a gal from Chicago.

by Nerys Williams

Notes from Seren:

Originally from Pen-y-Bont, Carmarthen, Wales, Nerys Williams has been a recipient of a Fulbright Scholar’s Award at UC Berkeley and a winner of the Ted McNulty Poetry Prize. She gained a DPhil at Sussex in 2002 through research focused on a reading of error and the lyric in contemporary American poetics. Nerys has lectured in American Literature at University College, Dublin since 2003. A native Welsh speaker, she has also worked at BBC Wales and as a care assistant on psychiatric wards. Nerys has published poems and critical essays widely and is the author of A Guide to Contemporary Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) as well as a study of contemporary American poetry, Reading Error (Peter Lang, 2007). She recently published her first collection of poetry, Sound Archive (Seren 2011), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize’s Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and the Michael Murphy Prize. Of her first book Poetry Review wrote that ‘a certain other-worldliness combines well with a vigorous realism to tease the reader into putting two and more than that together to perceive something rare and beautiful.’

You can read more about the collection and watch Nerys Williams read from her book here, and follow her thoughts on her blog here. Nerys was interviewed on RTE 1 about her collection, and you can hear the discussion at this link. You can also follow the poet on Twitter; search for @archifsain.

You can find out more about Loie Fuller, the subject of the poem, at Susan Gillis Kruman’s page about the dancer and (possibly?) watch her in action here.

Seren is based in Wales (‘Seren’ means ‘star’ in Welsh) and recently celebrated its 30th birthday. Begun as an offshoot of the magazine Poetry Wales by Cary Archard and Dannie Abse in the latter’s garage in Ogmore-by-Sea, the press has now grown and employs a number of staff. It is known for publishing prize-winning poetry, including collections by recent Forward winners, Hilary Menos and Kathryn Simmonds, as well as books by Owen Sheers, Pascale Petit, Deryn Rees-Jones, and many others. The fiction list features a new title by Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days, that was longlisted for the Booker Prize. The high-quality arts books include the recent collaboration between the poet John Fuller and the photographer David Hurn, Writing the Picture.

For more details about Seren, visit the publisher’s new 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.

Bull-Box

May 14, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I have acquired all the furniture I need
and left it behind, done all my repairs
and bought enough clothes.
The less you possess, the more they are
not decorations but what is more needed: icons
requiring as icons do small space to give up their worth –
this water jug, this stove, this lamp, this spade,
this small table and chair.
All of it “junk” in any place but here

in this hut
so tender in my feelings that when I turn the corner
I fear it might have proved a chimera,
a space among nettles, the victim of vandals.
For the dream is frail, yet firm the stone
of what is called “The Bull-Box” and that has held
one beast or another for a hundred years
so traditional is it, stone roof, stone walls,
no guttering, no drain-pipe, nettles rising to
a half-door and square window
that look onto a half moon meadow
seeded with wild wheat to a curve of stream.

In the sun
I watched a trout leap, a silver sword
small, quick, cutting air
as I built steps out of brook-stones
dug a pool for my washing-water
and saw a red-backed shrike on the thorns
that are overgrown behind The Bull-Box.
I was immortal then, not seventy but
a lithe, inquisitive
child again.

by Glyn Hughes

The first Poetry Centre podcast has been launched! Each monthly podcast features the work of local poets or general discussion about poetry. You can hear the podcast on our new website at this link, and subscribe to it in iTunes by clicking on the link on the right-hand side of the Podcasts page. This month’s podcast features Claire Cox and her poem ‘Tolstoy at Astapovo Station’, which was awarded first prize in the 2011 Barnet Arts Council Open Poetry Competition. We hope you enjoy it and we welcome your comments. Get in touch with us by replying to this e-mail, via Facebook, or through the ‘Contact us’ section of the Poetry Centre site.

Glyn Hughes is best known as a Northern poet and novelist with a string of prizes for his work, including the Guardian Fiction Prize, the David Higham Prize, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and a Welsh Arts Council Poet’s Prize. He was also shortlisted for the Whitbread, Portico and James Tait Black Prizes. He was resident in the Calder Valley, Yorkshire, for forty years, and most of his work is based on the county. Glyn Hughes was diagnosed with lymphoma cancer in 2009. He had recently been granted use of an isolated stone hut – the ‘Bull-Box’ – in the Ribble Valley and the time spent there and in its environs was a major part of his healing. The poem sequence, A Year in the Bull-Box, describes the experience. Glyn Hughes died in May, 2011. You can read more poems from A Year in the Bull-Box here, some notes about him by Tony Ward at this link, and an obituary by David Pownall on the Guardian website.

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 now 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.

Children in the Cherry Tree

May 7, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

They perch in the cherry tree – two fledglings
Not quite hidden, gigglers in the dusk, hatching a plan.
The tree begins to shake them. It is not laughing,
It groans, its limbs beat slowly like prehistoric wings
And skin-soft leaves, yellow and pink and red cascade.

So high and so cold, the tree now such a stranger.

Peering out from their eyrie, and down through the web
Of branches, the silent high-riders hear shouts
In their throats. Their colours are lowered, dashes
Of scarlet and white legging it down as light fails.
As darkness lopes along the waiting blue hills.

by Kevin Crossley-Holland

Upcoming events from the Poetry Centre

This week, as part of the Amazing Acts festival at the Pegasus Theatre in Oxford, Oxford Brookes presents two literary events. On Thursday 10th May at 7pm, Philip Pullman and Kate Clanchy host a showcase for competitively-selected students of the prestigious Oxford Brookes Creative Writing MA Programme. On Friday 11th May at 7.30, poet Fiona Sampson presents ‘Science Writes to Life’, an event in which budding and professional poets read original writing inspired by contact with scientists at Oxford Brookes. Fiona Sampson will also be reading some of her own work, commissioned by the Poetry Centre. All are welcome to these evenings, and more details about these and other festival events, including ticket information, can be found on the Oxford Brookes website.

Notes from Enitharmon:

Kevin Crossley-Holland is a poet, translator from Anglo-Saxon, and Carnegie Medal-winning author for children. His new and selected poems, The Mountains of Norfolk, was published in 2011, and brought together poems from eight previous collections. These works are spare yet sensuous, bearing witness to relationships, history, East Anglia, language and the craft of writing, and the meeting-places of body and spirit. The volume also contains a group of new poems musing on youth and old age, friendship, love and the layers of landscape. Kevin Crossley-Holland is the author of the bestselling Arthur trilogy, Gatty’s Tale and The Penguin Book of Norse Myths. His most recent book for children is Bracelet of Bones, in which a Viking girl travels from Norway to Constantinople, and he is the author of The Hidden Roads, a memoir of childhood. Kevin has worked with many composers and artists, and with Lawrence Sail he has edited two anthologies for Enitharmon Press: The New Exeter Book of Riddles and Light Unlocked: Christmas Card Poems. Kevin is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Patron of the Society for Storytelling and of Publishing House Me, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. He is currently the President of the School Library Association. He lives in north Norfolk with his wife and four children. You can read another selection from The Mountains of Norfolk here, and find out more about Kevin Crossley-Holland from his website.

Small Sorrows

April 30, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You can start anywhere,
you can start with the hummingbird
that quivers at the feeder, or with a moon
lost in the corner, or the stray dog who creeps
to my window and breathes. But not with
the Lebanese woman on TV who sobs as she
trudges back to her house of rubble.

How can I tell you my small sorrows?
In Slovenia, at the Nazi prison in Begunje,
you can see the last writing of two British
soldiers. On the stone of a shared cell, each
scraped the facts he pared himself down to:
name, address, parents, schools, date of enlistment,
rank, battalion, date and place taken prisoner, and
the date which became the year of death.

I didn’t want to start there.
I don’t want to end there. But no matter where I start,
or end, I will tell you—that if I could
touch you, I would become a hummingbird, a hidden,
shining center. And the dog—she would
press her small, strong back into my hip.

by Deborah Brown

Poetry Centre announcements: Two poets based at Oxford Brookes, Steven Matthews and Claire Cox, have written poems in response to photographs by a Brookes colleague, Sabine Chaouche. The opening of the exhibition, ‘Poetry of Forms, Forms of Poetry’, is on Thursday 3 May from 12-1pm in the Tonge Building, Oxford Brookes University, Headington, Oxford. All are welcome.

On Friday 4 May, the Poetry Centre launches its monthly podcast. The first episode features local poet Claire Cox, who reads and discusses her poem ‘Tolstoy at Astapovo Station’. You will be able to listen to the podcast via the Poetry Centre website, or download it from iTunes.

‘Small Sorrows’ is copyright © Deborah Brown, 2011. It is reprinted by permission of BOA Editions from Deborah Brown’s book Walking the Dog’s Shadow, which was selected by Tony Hoagland as the 2010 winner of BOA’s annual A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and published by BOA in 2011. Together with another BOA poet, Michael Waters, whose work we featured on 24 October, Deborah Brown was recently announced as a Pushcart Prize winner, with the title poem from her collection selected to appear in the Pushcart Prize anthology, due out in November.

Notes from BOA Editions:

Deborah Brown was co-editor, with Maxine Kumin and Annie Finch, of Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics, and co-translator, with Richard Jackson and Susan Thomas, of The Last Voyage: Selected Poems by Giovanni Pascoli (Red Hen Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Margie, Rattle, The Alaska Quarterly, Stand, The Mississippi Review, and others. Brown teaches literature and writing at the University of New Hampshire-Manchester, where she won an award for Excellence in Teaching. She lives in Warner, New Hampshire, with her husband, George Brown, and four cats. You can read two further poems by Deborah Brown at ConnotationPress.com.

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.

Alfie Does Not Speak Much Now

April 23, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Dorset tenor does not speak much. Harsh mum.
Acquiescent dad. Storm forms and lasts.
Gradual to sudden invasion of dying people,
houses priced out of local reach, cows in fields.

Was lean to shed, doing time, mind slant
numinous creature to the locked lollard,
keeper of birds, hens and beans, skull herd,
hot room surgeon to flinch and buckle.

Was gaunt in the sun and rented room, crew
cut, get it right cheese maker, not so cheeky,
sing a long, what’s that in the magician’s hat,
that T. Cooper moment, mild analgesic, aspirin.

Alfie spits tobacco, his first and index fingers
tightly holding a roll-up, his right arm arcing
outwards and down. His stare fixed, seemingly
intent upon some distant object. Quiet bull.

Now owl, lady’s bedding, dace out of school,
ace in the hole in an underworld of muteness,
nod and nudge, flutterer of bets, plough of silence,
confederacy of dunces, apocrypha and apocryphal.

by David Caddy

Notes from Shearsman:

David Caddy is a poet and critic from the Blackmore Vale in north Dorset. He was educated as a literary sociologist at the University of Essex. He founded and organised the East Street Poets, the UK’s largest rural poetry group from 1985 to 2001. He directed the legendary Wessex Poetry Festival from 1995 to 2001, and later the Tears in the Fence festival from 2003 to 2005. He has edited the independent and eclectic literary magazine, Tears in the Fence, since 1984. He co-wrote a literary companion to London in 2006, has written and edited drama scripts and podcasts, and regularly contributes essays, articles and reviews to books and journals. Read more selections from The Bunny Poems by visiting Shearsman’s page about the book here, and watch David Caddy reading from his work at Whittier College’s Dezember House last year.

Vigil

April 16, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The log flared on the grate
as I poked its side, poor demon

left to its own devices, hissed
blue lipped, then shriveled

into itself like a stunned
worm, before turning to ashes;

I stirred in my chair, half conscious
of darkness lapping –

even you, my lambent fawn, soft
hammered in copper,

leapt back into the shadows
of the holy mountain

(whose rock makes us fierce)
with nothing to confess

when I rose without ceremony
and called it a night.

by Gabriel Levin

Notes from Anvil Press:

With Jerusalem as its epicentre, The Maltese Dreambook extends Gabriel Levin‘s quarter-century-long ramble through the Levant, his adopted homeland. On a Greek island, in the desert wastes of southern Jordan, and in Malta, whose Stone Age temples serve as a backdrop to the title poem, this collection abounds in unforeseen encounters that blur the borders between the phantasmal and the real, the modern and the archaic, the rational and the imaginary.

Gabriel Levin was born in France, grew up in the United States, and has been living in Jerusalem since 1972. He has published two collections of poetry, Sleepers of Beulah (1992) and Ostraca (1999), and several translations from the Hebrew, French, and Arabic, including a selection of Yehuda Halevi’s poetry, Poems from the Diwan (Anvil, 2002). He is one of the founding editors of Ibis Editions, a small press established in Jerusalem in 1997 and dedicated to the publication, in English, of literature from the Levant. His new collection To These Dark Steps will be published by Anvil this month. You can find out more about Levin’s books on Anvil’s site, and read a review of The Maltese Dreambook here.

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.

Seedcorn

April 9, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

In Nutwood, Rupert’s father wore a bracken-
coloured jacket when he did the garden;
his mother stayed indoors, in an apron

frilled like the mantelpiece. Bluebell woods
had winding paths which led him home again
after his visit to the elves, deep in their caves

where lanterns flamed with trapped sunshine.
On the next page you could make an elf
by folding paper on the dotted line.

One day in Bournemouth, my teenage heroine
hopped on a bus because she liked its name,
then spent a golden summer out of time;

the hidden house she camped in, she revived:
pulled paper off the wainscot, scrubbed it white,
trundled the mildewed chairs off-stage, repaired

a lacquered bed inlaid with tourmaline;
then, dead on cue, right on the final page
our hero returned to claim his lost domaine.

Jan Morris made up Hav from everywhere
she’d been: the iron dog from Venice, a bridge
from Newport in South Wales; she wove it all

together. We’re the same, framed by the dots
we’ve joined as bandage, hammock, parachute.
We glut on stories, we slip between their lines

to sleep, still in their dream-mesh caught.
In a cocooned trance we are re-formed:
this is where we come from, how we make our home.

by Ellie Evans

Ellie Evans is Welsh-speaking and lives in Powys, mid-Wales. The Ivy Hides the Fig-Ripe Duchess is her first poetry collection, but she has already been widely published in magazines and anthologies, and has read at many poetry festivals. Using a surrealist palette of imagery and a tightly focused idiom, the author takes us on strange journeys: to the post-apocalyptic world of the title poem, or into a skewed 18th century Venice in ‘The Zograscope’. These strange worlds are always to the purpose; they are, as Marianne Moore famously said of poetry, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’ The novelist and poet Gerard Woodward has written that ‘Evans has an extraordinary ability to conjure startling and surprising images out of the most commonplace material. There is a very interesting juxtaposition of the domestic and the exotic in her work.’ You can read more about Ellie Evans and see her read from her work here, and visit her website at this link.

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.

Yves Tanguy

April 2, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The worlds are breaking in my head
Blown by the brainless wind
That comes from afar
Swollen with dusk and dust
And hysterical rain

The fading cries of the light
Awaken the endless desert
Engrossed in its tropical slumber
Enclosed by the dead grey oceans
Enclasped by the arms of the night

The worlds are breaking in my head
Their fragments are crumbs of despair
The food of the solitary damned
Who await the gross tumult of turbulent
Days bringing change without end.

The worlds are breaking in my head
The fuming future sleeps no more
For their seeds are beginning to grow
To creep and to cry midst the
Rocks of the deserts to come

Planetary seed
Sown by the grotesque wind
Whose head is so swollen with rumours
Whose hands are so urgent with tumours
Whose feet are so deep in the sand.

by David Gascoyne

Notes from Enitharmon:

David Gascoyne’s death in November 2001 was marked by lead obituaries in all the British broadsheets as well as in Le Monde. As a poet and translator he had been internationally renowned since the 1930s. He was the first chronicler in English of the Surrealist movement (whose members numbered the painter Yves Tanguy, the subject of this poem), and an essayist and reviewer of dazzling range. His association with Enitharmon Press dates back to 1970 and in the past decade there have been eight publications which will be lasting testaments of his importance. As well as his poetry, Enitharmon also publishes Gascoyne’s Selected Prose 1934-1996, and his Journal 1936-1937. You can read more about his Selected Poems at Enitharmon’s website here, where it is possible to hear Gascoyne read two other poems from the collection. You can also hear the poet read more of his work at the Poetry Archive. Ian Sinclair reviewed a new biography of Gascoyne in Saturday’s Guardian.