the true color of the sea

April 11, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

sages’ gardens, ginger root, and siren
glow of mist, green tongues of light
smoke and portents arousing hungers
magnolia plumed gold moonstone heart
collecting rain in turtle shell hollows
of shoals and shelter, of stones that sing
of coral, of wine, of luminous unnamed

cinnamon groves, veil of monsoon
moonless midnight’s milky stars
the finest gold dust, tinder, mirror
of angels’ tears, of devils’ blood
of cooing doves, a child’s fine bones
of sugarcane, and fistfuls of salt
of silk brocade, of laughter, of waiting

by Barbara Jane Reyes

Notes courtesy of BOA Editions:

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of two previous poetry collections including Poeta en San Francisco which was awarded the 2005 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She was born in Manila and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works as adjunct professor in Philippine Studies at University of San Francisco. You can read an interview with Barbara Jane Reyes here, and find out more about her from her website, where she frequently updates her blog. Reyes also recently contributed to Harriet, the news blog for the Poetry Foundation, and you can find her entry here. There are a number of recordings of Reyes reading at this site (scroll to the bottom of the page).

In her book Diwata, from which ‘the true color of the sea’ comes, Reyes uses such Filipino oral tradition devices as meter, repetition and refrain, call and response, incantatory verses which verge on song, and the pantoum (which has Southeast Asian origins). She frames her poems between the Book of Genesis creation story, and the Tagalog creation myth, placing her work somewhere culturally in between both traditions. Also setting the tone for her stories is the death and large shadow cast by her grandfather, a World War II veteran and Bataan Death March survivor, who has passed on to her the responsibility of remembering. Reyes’ voice is grounded in her community’s traditions and histories, despite war and geographical dislocation.

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. To find out more about BOA Editions, click here.

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.

Invocation

April 4, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

These days they say she’s sometimes mistaken
for the revving of a little petrol engine –
her propulsive churr-churring lost in the dark.
But age-old tricks can still be made to work.
Launch a white handkerchief into the air
and – if you are lucky – she’s gliding there,
attracted to you like a catch in the throat,
summoned by signs of life – the hot, the salt
of sudden tears you’d rather were hidden,
making your nose run like a child’s again.
Or she’s drawn to the blood-spill of hurt
that opens flesh and bone. Or she will start
from the dusty roof-space above the bed,
find you wiping love from between your legs.
The white flag of individual weakness
is what serves always to conjure her best
as when old habits, uncertain eyes give out,
when it’s dark wherever they put the light,
she comes then – I think – and this time stays,
cover him, cover him, cover his face.

by Martyn Crucefix

A note to our readers: Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre has just joined the social networking site Facebook. Our page there will feature information about the Centre and links to stories about the poets and publishers we feature, as well as general poetry news that we can’t otherwise mention via the weekly e-mail. Such an interactive site matches our aims of encouraging connections between poets, academics, and readers of poetry, and creating space for discussion of issues surrounding C20th and C21st poetry, so we look forward to hearing from you there. If you are a Facebook user, please do ‘like’ us by clicking here, or by searching for ‘Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre’.

Notes courtesy of Enitharmon:

Martyn Crucefix has won numerous prizes including a major Eric Gregory award and a Hawthornden Fellowship. He has published five collections, including An English Nazareth (Enitharmon, 2004). His translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies was published by Enitharmon in 2006, shortlisted for the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation and hailed as ‘unlikely to be bettered for very many years’ (Magma). Crucefix’s new collection, Hurt, from which ‘Invocation’ is taken, was published in 2010, and you can find more about it at Enitharmon’s page here, where you can also hear the poet read ‘Stag Beetle’. More of Martyn Crucefix’s work can be read at this link.

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. Discover more about Enitharmon here.

One with Others [a little book of her days]

March 28, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

There is black blood and white blood. There is black air and white air. And
this selfsame lie takes aim, even if by indirection, at the stifled lives of those
inflicting the harm, the lives of witting and of unwitting ignorance, and those
who must live among the stiflers, as if one of them, by all outward and visible
signs one of them, but on the reverse side of their skin lie awake in the scratchy
dark, burning to cross over. Not to become one of the harmed but to shed the
skin, you get my meaning, the tainted skin of the injuring party.

by C.D. Wright

This week’s poem is taken from the book One With Others [a little book of her days], and reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Notes courtesy of Copper Canyon:

Investigative journalism is the poet’s realm when C.D. Wright returns to her native Arkansas and examines an explosive incident from the civil rights movement. Wright interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, newspaper accounts, and personal memories—especially those of her incandescent mentor, Mrs. Vititow—with the voices of witnesses, neighbors, police, activists, and black students who were rounded up and detained in an empty public swimming pool. This history leaps howling off the page.

C.D. Wright has published twelve collections of poetry and prose. Reviewing her previous book, Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon, 2008), The New York Times noted: ‘C.D. Wright belongs to a school of exactly one.’ Wright is currently the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University, and lives outside Providence, Rhode Island.

One With Others won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a 2010 National Book Award Finalist. You can read a short interview with C.D. Wright here, learn more about her at this page, hear her discuss the book here, and hear her read parts of One With Others at this link.

Copper Canyon Press is a nonprofit publisher that believes poetry is vital to language and living. Since 1972, the Press has published poetry exclusively and has established an international reputation for its commitment to authors, editorial acumen, and dedication to the poetry audience. As the preeminent independent publisher of poetry, Copper Canyon Press fosters the work of emerging, established, and world-renowned poets for an expanding audience. Copper Canyon Press publishes new collections of poetry by both revered and emerging American poets, translations of classical and contemporary work from many of the world’s cultures, re-issues of out-of-print poetry classics, anthologies, and prose books about poetry. Click here to visit the Copper Canyon website.

Calligraphy

March 21, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Aha, I find the late fourth century pope Damasus
Had seen to it that the tombs of martyrs

Were given fresh distinction by calligraphy.
With a calligraphy from his own pen old stones

Were incised by a mason selected not only
For his dexterity, also for his sympathies.

How different it is, that order of things,
From the reburial, pronto, of carving dismembered

By the constructors of emporia and office blocks
Over the sunken city in modern Mylasa—

What do the planners care about things Greek,
Ancient inscriptions or extended gods

Who still cling with touches of sunlight
To fluted stone scheduled for reburial?

If mind did not become a Mylasa, who’d recall
The crates of American rifles in summer 1940,

And how the girls and boys of freedom lift
Those greased guns from the crates in England,

Old grease, with rags wipe every vestige off,
Clots of grease hidden in the dark magazines?

Plain or grainy, the wooden rifle butt,
Polish it up until it glows

Fitting snug into your skinny shoulder—
An age before you knew what calligraphy was.

by Christopher Middleton

Copyright © Christopher Middleton, 2010. ‘Calligraphy’ is taken from the volume Poems 2006-2009 by Christopher Middleton, published by Shearsman Books, 2010. It is reprinted here by permission of Shearsman Books.

Notes courtesy of Shearsman Books:

Christopher Middleton was born in Truro, Cornwall, in 1926. He studied at Merton College, Oxford and then taught at the University of Zürich, at King’s College, London, and finally as Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He has published translations of Robert Walser, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Goethe and many contemporaries, receiving several awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schegel-Tieck Translation Prize. His poems, essays and selected translations are all published in the UK by Carcanet Press; his poems are published in the USA by Sheep Meadow Press. His most recent publications are: Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2008), The Anti-Basilisk (poetry, Carcanet Press, 2005—published as Tankard’s Cat in the USA by Sheep Meadow), Of the Mortal Fire (poetry, Sheep Meadow, 2003), Crypto-Topographia (prose, Enitharmon Press, London, 2002), The Word Pavilion and Selected Poems (Carcanet / Sheep Meadow, 2001), Jackdaw Jiving: Selected Essays on Poetry and Translation (Carcanet, 1998), Faint Harps and Silver Voices: Selected Translations (Carcanet, 2000). Christopher Middleton lives in Austin, Texas. You can find out more about his latest work here, hear him read from his work at this page, and read other selections from Poems 2006-2009 (in pdf) here.

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.

Anniversary

March 7, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Didn’t I stand there once,
white-knuckled, gripping the just-lit taper,
swearing I’d never go back?
And hadn’t you kissed the rain from my mouth?
And weren’t we gentle and awed and afraid,
knowing we’d stepped from the room of desire
into the further room of love?
And wasn’t it sacred, the sweetness
we licked from each other’s hands?
And were we not lovely, then, were we not
as lovely as thunder, and damp grass, and flame?

by Cecilia Woloch

Notes courtesy of BOA Editions:

Cecilia Woloch was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up there and in rural Kentucky, one of seven children of a homemaker and an airplane mechanic. She attended Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, earning degrees in English and Theater Arts, before moving to Los Angeles in 1979. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University L.A. in 1999. A celebrated teacher, Ms. Woloch has conducted poetry workshops for thousands of children and young people throughout the United States and around the world, as well as workshops for professional writers, educators, participants in Elderhostel programs for senior citizens, inmates at a prison, and residents at a shelter for homeless women and their children. She is the founding director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild and of The Paris Poetry Workshop, and is currently a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Southern California as well as a member of the core faculty of the low-residency MFA Program in Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University.

Well-controlled eulogies to her dying father in rural Kentucky, lush lyric and prose poems to lovers and former-lovers in Paris and various Eastern European countries, and compelling anaphoric-based narratives that meander between innocence and experience, body and soul – these are the motifs in Cecilia Woloch’s stirring collection, Carpathia, from which ‘Anniversary’ is taken. You can find out more about Carpathia here, and more about Cecilia Woloch here.

Ecology of the lichen

February 21, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

We paddle head over ears in a field of yellow flowers,
with only heads surfaced in an unplanned discourse,
attuned, swimming in meadow meandering among
old crypts and tombs. I mistrust their shapes, their
sepulchral postures made of bath stone, chalked

extravaganza. You can tell, I haven’t yet wrapped bodies
in linen, you smile. It gives a shape like that, and facing
me you cut a sarcophagus out of the moist air crafting
the swift choreography of a corpse, outlining my outline.
These lime stones are hollow, look. We stare through

their tunnels, sliding our hands in their craters for names
and dates, for one or two initials; but none. Have you,
have you done it before? In the bare space only a slice
of a face, fraction of a glare, mouth half open, your voice
slips through. You laugh. Who do you think prepares them?

You dip your finger into a soft headstone coated with deep
pigments of lichen, orange, red and brown. Like catacombs’
network, complicated under the microscope’s lens. They live
with their photosynthetic partner – you say brushing yellow
pollen off my skin – who produces food for them from sunlight.

by Ágnes Lehóczky

Ágnes Lehóczky is an Hungarian-born poet and translator. She completed her Masters in English and Hungarian Literature at Pazmany Peter University of Hungary in 2001 and an MA with distinction in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2006. She holds a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from UEA. She has two short poetry collections in Hungarian, Station X (2000) and Medallion (2002), published by Universitas, Hungary.

Ágnes’s first full collection, Budapest to Babel, was published by Egg Box in 2008. (Click on the link to hear her read from the collection, and to read more poems from this book.) She was the 2009 recipient of the Arthur Welton Poetry Award and the winner of the Daniil Pashkoff Prize 2010 in poetry. She is currently working on her second collection to be published by Egg Box in 2011, and her collection of essays on the poetry of Ágnes Nemes Nagy is to be published this year by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Ágnes currently teaches creative writing on the Masters course at the University of Sheffield.

Egg Box is a small, independent poetry publisher based in Norwich, run by poet Nathan Hamilton. It is rapidly establishing a strong reputation for its freshness of approach and keen eye for talented newcomers. Click here to visit Egg Box’s website.

exit

February 14, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

it’s not just in dream that it’s often happened to
me that I’ve been unable to find the exit through
the right door got into trains going in the wrong
direction it was a station I only half recognised
that was a fright but I was under glass and was
fixed to that spot and could not move because
I had just got to that place in the book I began
to sense surging flushes in my blood I walked
around in the woods and could feel warm light
and slackly let myself be led to an edge images
came but they were not giving me pain any more
like they used to for beneath dead treetops the
wilderness was coming alive with fern and fox-
glove and I went back into the gullies of streets
incomprehensibly distant in my blood in its
suites of rooms without windows I walked and I
ran in circles for a while until something beneath
my jacket heaved I clutched at it with my right
hand and held it and breathed hard at the edge
of the platform I bent forward and saw the tracks

by Norbert Hummelt

Copyright © Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 2007. Translation copyright © Catherine Hales, 2010. ‘exit’ is taken from the German volume Totentanz, and appears in English in Berlin Fresco — Selected Poems by Norbert Hummelt, translated by Catherine Hales, Shearsman Books, 2010. It is reprinted here by permission of Shearsman Books.

Notes courtesy of Shearsman Books:

A poet, essayist, publisher, and translator, Norbert Hummelt was born in Neuss am Rhein in 1962. From 1983 to 1990 he studied German and English in Cologne and since 1991 he has been a freelance writer. He has been living in Berlin since 2006, having previously also lived in New York, Dublin and Amsterdam. Since 2005 he has been publisher of the Lyrikedition 2000, which publishes new editions of out-of-print 20th century poetry collections, as well as first collections by new poets. He is also editor of the journal Text+Kritik. He has taught at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut (German Literature Institute) in Leipzig and at the Universität der Künste (University of the Arts) in Berlin. He has translated the poetry of W.B. Yeats, Wordsworth and Inger Christensen, as well as T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and The Waste Land. You can read more from the book here, and hear Hummelt read from his poems (in German, with a number of translations of the texts) at this page.

The translator, Catherine Hales, grew up in Surrey, but now lives near the Spree in Berlin, where she works as a freelance translator. Her poetry and translations of contemporary German poetry have appeared in many magazines, including Tears in the Fence, Poetry Salzburg Review, Fire, Stride, and Shadowtrain. Catherine Hales’s poem ‘temporary lodging’ was the Brookes weekly poem for 15 November, 2010.

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.

[Two untitled poems]

February 7, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

[untitled 1]

To return to the poplar its weight,
I would have to reject narrative’s convulsed form.
To accomplish
a literary work,
I would have to oust the stage of review
without
worsening the rest of it.
Meanwhile,
all is impossible to me and language exploits the fact.

Pour rendre son poids au peuplier,
il faudrait
que je repousse la figure convulsée du récit.
by François Jacqmin
Pour accomplir
une œuvre littéraire,
il me faudrait évincer le temps du compte rendu
sans
exaspérer le reste.
En attendant,
tout m’est impossible et le verbe en abuse

[untitled 2]

The landscape is fixed. It is that powdery
yoke
which bogs down in its whiteness. .
Its axles
sink deep in the despotic innocence
of the snow.
Though not quite lost, we start to dread
nowhere, and especially
that inclement silence
which thunders against the affront of all travel.

Le paysage est arrêté. Il est cet attelage
yoke poudreux
qui s’enlise dans sa blancheur
Ses essieux
s’enfoncent dans l’innocence despotique
de la neige.
Sans être égarés, nous commençons à redouter
le nulle part, et surtout
ce silence inclément
qui tonne contre l’affront de tout voyage.

These two untitled poems are taken from The Book of the Snow by François Jacqmin, translated by Philip Mosley, with an introduction by Clive Scott (Arc ‘Visible Poets’ translation series No. 28), and published by Arc Publications.

Notes courtesy of Arc:

François Jacqmin, acknowledged as one of the foremost francophone Belgian poets of the latter half of the twentieth century, was born in 1929 in Horion-Hozémont in the province of Liège. In 1940 his family fled to England to escape the German occupation. He learned English in a school run by Spanish Jesuits, discovered English literature, and wrote his first unpublished poems in English. He returned to Belgium in 1948 and rediscovered his native language and literature. His association with the irreverent, experimental group that formed around the magazine Phantomas inspired him to develop a distinctive identity as a poet inspired by art, nature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. His three major volumes of poetry are Les Saisons (1979), Le Domino gris (1984), and Le Livre de la neige (1990). Eléments de géométrie, a volume of prose poems written a few years before his death in 1992, was published in 2005. You can learn more about Jacqmin and the translation here, watch a short film about him here (in French), and read another poem from this book here.

The translator, Philip Mosley, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He earned his M.A. in European literature and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of East Anglia. Among his book publications are Split Screen: Belgian Cinema and Cultural Identity, Ingmar Bergman: The Cinema as Mistress, and Georges Rodenbach: Critical Essays. He has translated The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlinck, Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach, Tea Masters, Teahouses by Werner Lambersy, and October Long Sunday by Guy Vaes. In 2008 he was awarded the Prix de la Traduction Littéraire by the French Community of Belgium for his translations of Belgian authors into English.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc 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. Find out more about Arc by visiting the publisher’s website, where there are discounts available on Arc books.

A Diamond is not a Stone

January 31, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A car is not a purse
I want to say to the man
down the road whose house
is so full of things
he can’t throw away
he buys car after car,
fills them with newspapers
he plans to read, letters
he hopes to answer.

The cars still run
when he abandons them,
weighed down like trees
with too much fruit,
like the trees in his yard.

by Wyn Cooper

Notes courtesy of BOA Editions:

Wyn Cooper has published four books of poems: The Country of Here Below (Ahsahta Press, 1987), The Way Back (White Pine Press, 2000), and Postcards from the Interior, (BOA Editions, 2005), and, most recently, Chaos is the New Calm (BOA Editions, 2010), as well as a chapbook, Secret Address (Chapiteau Press, 2002). His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Slate, and more than 75 other magazines. His poems are included in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry, including The Mercury Reader, Outsiders, and Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms.

Chaos is the New Calm, from which ‘A Diamond is not a Stone’ comes, is a book of sonnets and sonnet-like poems, some rhymed, some not. Starting with the idea of the sonnet as a fourteen-line lyric poem, this book plays with the form, putting rhymes in unusual places, inventing new stanza forms, and addressing an unusually broad variety of subject matter. You can find out more about the book here, and more about Wyn Cooper here.

Accents

January 24, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I lay down under the cherry trees
in our garden where the grass was balding

a little, and looked up into the branches.
I was learning the catechism,

and I went over a few questions
and answers as absolutes; I was thinking

of a dance I had been to on a farm
a dress I wore, something I said

too revealing of feeling;
those chicks left in an open crate

in the shade behind the farm, near a wall,
came into my mind. I thought of how

they might have struggled all wet
out of their eggs, like light escaping;

Senorita Morales came into my thoughts too,
her long fingernails when she pointed out

where the accents should go over the words
on the blackboard, and the way she said

penultima silaba and antepenultima;
and all these thoughts lightly hooked together

like young girls walking down the street
holding each others’ hands by the little finger.

by Jane Duran

Notes courtesy of Enitharmon:

As a young girl, Jane Duran moved to Chile with her family, travelling from New York to Valparaiso on the Santa Barbara, one of the Grace Line fleet. This long journey, passing through the Panama Canal and down the Pacific coast of Latin America, has inspired her collection of poems Graceline. These meditative poems cross over continually between illusion and reality, past and present. Although they evoke the journey, and the extraordinary landscapes of Chile, they also explore darker undercurrents. Her sequence ‘Panama Canal’ evokes the terrors of the Canal’s construction; a sequence on the regime of Augusto Pinochet (‘Invisible Ink’) interweaves cityscapes and landscapes with allusions to the cruelties and bereavements of that time. But the poems are also about her life as a young girl in Chile, the impact of the Chilean landscape on her, and convey a powerful feeling of love for that country. You can learn more about her book here, and more about Jane Duran here. At the second link you can hear her reading from her own work.