Covenant

January 9, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Thick weave of winter. Skeins of brown
and dun. Wrapped in these

garments, the sky
heavy on our backs,

we stand in the rainfield
and make a covenant with the silence:

let us trample this trampled ground
as the long-eyed horses do,

go cross-field through rain
and ask for only

blue clouds, slow across
hilltops. Dark footholds of earth.

by Nina Bogin

Notes from Anvil Press:

Nina Bogin writes of her second collection that she has ‘drawn together poems that deal with the personal – family, friendship, love and loss; poems about landscape and place; and poems that try to come to grips with the larger world and its chaos. Uniting the poems is a common thread: the natural world and its impenetrable presence which, though threatened, remains a source of renewal and, therefore, of faith.’

Nina Bogin was born in New York City in 1952 and grew up on Long Island. She has been living in France since 1976. She works as a translator and as a teacher of English. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines in the United States, England and France. She received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1989 and published her first volume of poems, ‘In the North’, in the same year. A new collection, The Lost Hare, will be published by Anvil in April 2012.

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.

Six Million Hand-driven Rivets

December 19, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My father is dying – tentatively, unhappily –
and I give him a bridge.

Precisely, I give him Sydney Harbour Bridge,
this Christmas, this turning year,

as I travel under it, gazing up at all its iron.
Girder-strong, massive, the old world built this

into the new. There are photos of Englishmen
in 1930 in waistcoats and cufflinks

and neat bowties, straddling the sky, hammering
rivets into air. My father would approve:

How many rivets? he’d ask me.
Facts, hard facts. I’d tell him the answers

to ease the time – and the number of man hours,
the number of years, before they could journey

over the water with perfect confidence,
step on step, to reach the other side.

by Robert Seatter

This is the last of the weekly poems for this year. Poems will start appearing in your inbox again on Monday 9th January. Many thanks to all our readers for your continued support of the Weekly Poem. If you’re on Facebook or Twitter, don’t forget you can catch up with us there. In the meantime, the Poetry Centre hopes that you enjoy a very happy Christmas and an excellent start to 2012.

Robert Seatter has published two previous collections with Seren: Travelling to the Fish Orchards and On the Beach with Chet Baker. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked as an EFL teacher in Italy and France, as an actor and journalist, and also in publishing and broadcasting. He lives in London where he currently works for the BBC. You can read further selections from Writing King Kong here (click on the book’s cover), and here, and you can see and hear Robert Seatter reading from his work on this page.

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.

Backpacking Across Pangea

December 12, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

In its last throes, when the earth huddled back together
for warmth, a single crust floating in a soup bowl,
you could walk ten thousand miles and never reach the sea.

We packed The Rough Guide to Pangea, a work in seven parts,
a stack of t-shirts, and a compass that did nothing but spin.
We crossed the great land bridge that rose out of the Channel.

We stepped from Eurasia to Gondwana while they scanned
our retinas and rummaged through our DNA.
In the mountains of Oman, we met musicians

who plied us with Yak blood and sweet potatoes
while we listened to their songs of a separated world: the spindle
of central America; the anachronism of island nations.

In the old Aegean, the sole of my boot peeled off
like a transfer; within six steps the other did the same.
Our navigation implants made our heads ache.

This was many years ago, before the mantle
began to melt, when you could tread the earth in bare feet,
all of the world a golden outback.

In the hills of Matabeleland, the devil appeared to us
in the form of a toad, while an angel drove by
disguised as a tractor driver with a swollen hand.

It was possible we had skipped an injection or two.
When we awoke we found ourselves on a white headland
with a single red hut selling herring and Coca-Cola.

We returned on the Trans-Pangea Express – forty three days
without a stop. On the train a beautiful old woman smiled at us
with our golden hair and brown skin

while we drifted into sleep; we dreamt of the slow dance
of the continents joining hands in a ceilidh of lithospheric plates
parting and drifting back together.

We arrived on The Last Night of The Proms
and sang ‘Rule Pangea, Pangea Rules the Waves’.
As the waters rose, we waved our single flag of woe.

by Christopher James

The One Who Writes

December 5, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You write. About the things that already exist.
And they say you fantasize.

You keep quiet. Like the sunken nets
of poachers. Like an angel
who knows what the night may bring.

And you travel. You forget,
so that you can come back.

You write and you don’t want to remember
the stone, the sea, the believers
sleeping with their hands apart.

by Nikola Madzirov

‘The One Who Writes’ is copyright © Nikola Madzirov, 2011. It is reprinted by permission of BOA Editions from Remnants of Another Age, translated by Peggy and Graham W. Reid, Magdalena Horvat and Adam Reed, and with a Foreword by Carolyn Forché. BOA has today featured Nikola Madzirov’s work on its blog.

Notes from BOA Editions:

Born into a family of Balkan Wars refugees in 1973 in Strumica, Macedonia, poet, essayist and translator Nikola Madzirov has emerged as one of the most powerful voices of the new European poetry. His work has been translated into thirty languages and published in collections and anthologies in the US, Latin America, Europe and Asia. Two short films based on his poetry have been shot in Bulgaria and Croatia. Oliver Lake, the contemporary jazz composer who has previously collaborated with Björk and Lou Reed, has composed music based on Madzirov’s poetry, which was performed at the Jazz-Poetry Concert in Pittsburgh in 2008. You can read another poem from Remnants of Another Age here, and a recent interview with Madzirov here. You can also see and hear Madzirov reading from his work in this video from March 2011.

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. This year BOA celebrates its thirty-fifth anniversary. To find out more about BOA Editions, click here. You can also find and ‘like’ BOA on Facebook, and follow the publisher on Twitter by searching for @boaeditions.

Smoke

November 28, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

In order to revive the orange age, you must assemble all of the witnesses, all those who suffered, those who laughed and even the youngest and those who were furthest away.

You must rekindle your grandmothers; make them come with their great crucifixes of cinnamon in tow and well-nailed with those large aromatic cloves, just as when they lived surrounded by fire and syrup.

You must interrogate the gillyflower and harass her with questions, until not a single purple detail is lost.

You must talk with the butterfly, seriously, and savage roosters with their hoarse voices and great silver talons.

And the veronicas shall come from way back when, pale veronicas—wandering among the flowers and smoke and trees—and the face of sugar, the portrait of the figs shall return.

And advise the wisteria so that they bring their old resemblance to grape. And the populous pomegranate, and the procession of yuccas, and the guardian of the loquat tree, yellow and hateful, and my mane of hair from that time, all of it full of witches and planets, and the wandering livestock and the angel of the hills and of the amethysts—with one pink and one blue wing —and the lemon blossoms, as big as spikenards.

And all of the silverplated cages shall come and all of the colored bottles and the keys and the fans and the Christmas cake standing on its cherry stilts.

In order to revive the orange age, you cannot forget anyone, you must call everyone, most importantly the smoke man, who is the most serious and the most delicate and the most beloved.

And you must invite God.

by Marosa di Giorgio, translated by Susan Briante

The Poetry Centre is on Facebook and on Twitter – join us there!

This section from ‘Smoke’ is copyright © Shearsman, 2011; translation © Susan Briante, 2011. It is reprinted by permission of Shearsman Books from Hotel Lautréamont: Contemporary Poetry from Uruguay , edited by Kent Johnson and Roberto Echavarren.

Notes from Shearsman:

Named in homage to Isidore Ducasse, the Uruguayan-French poet who wrote Maldoror under the name Comte de Lautréamont, and with a knowing nod to John Ashbery’s book of the same title, Hotel Lautréamont is the first major English-language survey of contemporary Uruguayan poetry for some 40 years. It features the work of Roberto Appratto, Nancy Bacelo, Amanda Berenguer, Selva Casal, Marosa di Giorgio, Roberto Echavarren, Eduardo Espina, Gustavo Espinosa, Silvia Guerra, Circe Maia, Eduardo Milán and Idea Vilariño. The volume is bilingual. You can find out more about the book from Shearsman’s page dedicated to it, and read further selections from the volume here.

Marosa di Giorgio (1932–2004) was born in Salto in Uruguay to Italian immigrant parents. After she studied law and briefly acted in a professional theatre company, she took a job in Salto’s municipal government and devoted her free time to reading extensively and writing fifteen books of poetry, three books of short stories and one novel. She is increasingly considered to be one of Latin America’s greatest poets of the 20^th century. You can learn more about Marosa di Giorgio at the official website for her work here (in Spanish, but with a translation option), and hear her read from her work at this link (in Spanish).

Susan Briante is the author of two collections of poetry: Pioneers in the Study of Motion (Ahsahta 2007) and Utopia Minus (2011). Her translations of Latin American writers have appeared in Bomb, Translation Review, and Reversible Monuments (Copper Canyon Press) among others. From 1992–1997, she lived in Mexico City where she worked for the magazines Artes de México and Mandorla.

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 here.

River is the Plural of Rain

November 21, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Each of us is water Carole Satyamurti

From a mouth of soil among sedge and willow
water calls out on its journey
to all its other selves: follow

follow us from the shallows into the deep. Below
the surface currents strain their sinews
spilling white foam over stones to follow

the earth vein where it flows,
furling and ravelling together
as stream follows after stream.

Its pulse is the undertow,
its pores are the rain,
and every drop is dreaming of sky.

by Rebecca Gethin

Notes from Oversteps:

Rebecca Gethin’s first collection, River is the Plural of Rain, named after this poem, was published in 2009 by Oversteps Books. Rebecca lives on Dartmoor in Devon, but also returns frequently to the mountainous valley in Italy where her ancestors lived. She teaches poetry at Dartmoor Prison, and has recently published her first novel, Liar Dice. You can find out more about Rebecca Gethin at this link, where you can also read another poem from the collection.

Oversteps Books publishes some of the best in contemporary poetry, covering a wide range of established and new poets. There is a rigorous editorial policy, and the books are produced to the highest standards both in terms of editorial accuracy and the beauty of the finished books. Oversteps poets also give regular poetry readings at festivals and other events. Oversteps Books was founded in 1992 by the poet and translator, Anne Born (1924–2011). The poet and lecturer, Alwyn Marriage, became Managing Editor in 2008. You can find out more about the press here, and sign up for Oversteps’s mailing list.

Mosquito

November 14, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Fancy this in October, the last
Mosquito of summer left buzzing alone,
Its last fling in my room on the sixth floor
Of a tower block hotel; marooned like one
In the seventh decade with only the past
To look forward to, as the one sure

Topic he can buzz round with some old chum.
‘I had a good bloody summer,’ it seems to say,
‘With waiter and bellman, and that prim peach
Who keeps the consultant’s books across the way.’
And for one last sally it swoops and bites my thumb.
So I bite mine back at it, and reach

For a folded newspaper; all the same aware
How much I resemble it, my own small spites
And hopeless needs reduced to the last fling
Of one who doles out charm in sexless bites
To check-out girls and bank clerks as if to swear,
‘Oh man, I buzz and suck like anything!’

by Alan Brownjohn

Notes from Enitharmon:

Drawing on six decades of work, this new selection charts Alan Brownjohn‘s idiosyncratic take on the issues for which his poetry is known – love (and sex), time (and mortality) and our ecological and cultural environment (threatened and abused).

Brownjohn was born in London in 1931 and was educated at Merton College, Oxford. He worked as a schoolteacher between 1957 and 1965 and lectured at Battersea College of Education and South Bank Polytechnic until he left to become a full-time freelance writer in 1979. A regular broadcaster, reviewer and contributor to journals including the Times Literary Supplement, Encounter and the Sunday Times, Alan Brownjohn was poetry critic for the New Statesman and was Chairman of the Poetry Society between 1982 and 1988. He has also served on the Arts Council literature panel, was a Labour councillor and a candidate for Parliament. In 2007, he received the Writers’ Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award. You can find out more about Brownjohn in these interviews, and hear him read some of his poems at the Poetry Archive.

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.

Songs and Sonnets: 248

November 7, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Look at her. You will see nature’s power
Hanging like the sun over a blind world.

Quickly. Death searches out the gentlest.
Loveliness is mortal. She is looked for.

He sidles up beside a creature in spring
Temper, everything wonderful in one flesh.

My crazed verse is stricken with sun.
Look on this glare before blindness

Rides weeping over the world.

by Francesco Petrarch, trans. Nicholas Kilmer

This translation of ‘Songs and Sonnets: 248’ is copyright © Nicholas Kilmer, 2011. It is reprinted from Songs and Sonnets (Poetica 8), published by Anvil Press, 2011. This is an enlarged edition of Songs and Sonnets from Laura’s Lifetime published by Anvil Press in 1980.

Notes from Anvil Press:

‘Petrarch deserves to be valued as a real man, a careful thinker, a good poet,’ writes Nicholas Kilmer introducing his enlarged selection of the great Italian poet who lived from 1304 to 1374. Free in form yet holding close to the central impulses of Petrarch’s inspiration, Kilmer’s ‘readings’ in this bilingual edition present Petrarch as a confessional poet and a humane moralist of startling honesty.

Nicholas Kilmer lives in Cambridge, MA, USA. Since leaving teaching in 1982 he has worked as an art dealer and curator. As well as poetry and translations, he also writes mysteries set in the art world. You can learn more about Kilmer here.

The Tadpole Goddess

October 31, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My Lethe, motionless between green thickets
Where flags prick up their rust-stained saffron ears,
You hear no splash of oars, no dust-up of lost souls
Except for dragon-flies a-spin, and tadpoles
That hang like little mud-bubbles, expecting
Their childhood gloom to lift, and life bounce up in them.
Your spirit’s airless, Lethe; boot-top-deep,
You’re less ditch than a mouthful of saliva
Drained by a dental tube. So why this leaning
To breathe into your film of suspect glitters,
And leave my slutty kiss? The final flutter on
Posterity? Perhaps a faster current
Washes the tubers, where my hair would tangle
And pass, and finally drag me to pure water.
I’d travel free of earth, rapid and weightless
And miles out of my depth, my shadow flinging
north and north, my coughed-up lungs your rattles
To play with till their fragments swam like tadpoles.
I’d find my cold Elysium, and to keep.

by Carol Rumens

A poet, novelist, translator, and editor, Carol Rumens was born in South London in 1944. She started writing at school and went on to study (and drop out from) a philosophy degree at London University. She has won many awards for her writing and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Rumens’s latest collection, De Chirico’s Threads, features a play-for-voices about the life of the painter Giorgio de Chirico, as well as a number of occasional poems, such as ‘The Tadpole Goddess’. You can read a number of other poems from the new collection at the link to the book above. In addition to her own work, Carol Rumens selects and comments upon another poet’s writing each week in her blog on the Guardian website here. She also maintains a website here.

Young John Clare

October 24, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Helpston, Northamptonshire, 1806

Not often do I find a nest fallen
Among seed pods in autumn, three blue-white
Eggs broken, rags of rucked and yellow flesh
And hinge of beak still beckoning ants, but
One egg sealed, the fluids of birdmaking
A milky galaxy bundled inside—
So smooth and dry I want to swivel it
Wholly into my mouth despite dirt-flecks,
Leave the vowel-sheen off the oval shell,
Tumble that globule of starling within
Until its unspooled trill begins to boil,
Slips its bony case and kindles my voice.
O then would I sing! I would have no choice.

by Michael Waters

Welcome to the Poetry Centre’s new series of Weekly Poems. As always, we are most grateful to our publishers for providing us with such good work, and encourage you to read widely amongst their authors. If you use social media and haven’t already ‘liked’ us on Facebook, do look up our page here, and then follow us on Twitter by searching for @brookespoetry. We hope you enjoy this year’s selection of poems.

Michael Waters’ previous book, Darling Vulgarity, was a finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has published ten collections of poetry, including five from BOA Editions. In 2004, he chaired the poetry panel for the National Book Awards. He is Professor of English at Monmouth University and also teaches in the Drew University MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation. Waters lives with his wife, poet Mihaela Moscaliuc, in Ocean, NJ.

You can watch a video of Michael Waters at a BOA event reading from this collection at this page, and read an interview with him at poetrynet.org.

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. This year BOA celebrates its thirty-fifth anniversary. To find out more about BOA Editions, click here. You can also find BOA on Facebook, and on Twitter by searching for @boaeditions.