Flood Song

January 17, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I sensed the knife in your past,
its sharp edge shanked from the canyon stream—
a silver trickle between the book jacket,
nihízaad peeled open inside a diabetic mouth.

The waters of my clans
flash flooded—
I fell from the white of its eyes—
our fathers had no children to name their own
no baby’s cry to place between argument and arguments.

The commercial flashed a blue path
across the lakes of our veins
the bluest glint, a rock in the ear
told our tongues entwined,

that I was reaching for the corn field inside you,
that I was longing to outlive this compass
pointing toward my skull
gauzed inside this long terrible whisper

damp in a desert canyon,
white-washed by the ache of fog lights
reaching to unravel my combed hair.

by Sherwin Bitsui

‘Flood Song’ is taken from the book Flood Song, and reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Notes courtesy of Copper Canyon:

“I bite my eyes shut between these songs.” So begins Flood Song, a concentrated, interweaving, painterly sequence in which Native tradition scrapes against contemporary urban life. In his second book, Sherwin Bitsui intones landscapes real and imagined, populated with the wrens, winds, and reeds of the high desert and constructed from the bricks and gasoline of the city. Reverent to his family’s indigenous traditions while simultaneously indebted to European modernism and surrealism, Bitsui is at the forefront of a younger generation of Native writers. His poems are highly imagistic and constantly in motion, drawing as readily upon Diné (Navajo) myths, customs, and medicine songs as they do contemporary language and poetics. “I map a shrinking map,” Bitsui writes, a map tribal and individual, elemental and modern — and utterly astonishing.

Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is Diné of the Tódích’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tlizílaaní (Many Goats Clan). He holds an A.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program and is currently completing his studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He is the recipient of a 2005 Lannan Foundation Residency in Marfa, Texas, and the Whiting Writers Award in 2006. He also works for literacy programs that bring poets and writers into public schools where there are Native American student populations. Bitsui has published his poems in American Poet, The Iowa Review, Frank (Paris), LIT, and elsewhere. His poems were also anthologized in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Flood Song is the Winner of the 2010 PEN Open Book Award and a 2010 American Book Award. You can read more about Bitsui here and at his own website here, and more of his work here.

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.

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.

My Brother Was Writing Poetry

January 10, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

While I was writing my verses, my brother was working on his boat. He carefully dismantled the seats. He upturned the boat, sanded it down to white (making the cherry-tree turn white). Then he took it to a master to be given a number, to pass the test more easily. He applied putty for hours, then an undercoat, the way people polish teeth against tartar or put plasters on grazed knees. He circled it and wondered what to christen it. He named it after the hero of his favourite film. While I was working, my brother was writing poetry.

by Tsvetanka Elenkova

‘My Brother Was Writing Poetry’ is taken from the volume The Seventh Gesture by Tsvetanka Elenkova, translated by Jonathan Dunne, and reprinted by permission of Shearsman Books.

Notes courtesy of Jonathan Dunne and Shearsman Books:

Tsvetanka Elenkova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1968. She is the author of three poetry collections – The Stakes of the Legion, Amphipolis of the Nine Roads and The Seventh Gesture – together with a book of essays, Time and Relation. Her work has been translated into twelve languages and, in English, has appeared in magazines such as Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and Absinthe. An English edition of The Seventh Gesture, which Sarah Crown called ‘an unusual, uplifting collection’, was published by Shearsman Books in 2010. She translates poetry from English, Greek and Macedonian, including collections by Raymond Carver, Bogomil Gjuzel and Fiona Sampson, and has been a guest at several literary festivals (Vilenica, Poeteka, Tinos). Her translation of the anthology of Indian mystic poetry Speaking of Siva was nominated for the Hristo G. Danov National Literary Award in 2000. She is the Bulgarian Writers Association’s representative at the International Writers and Translators Centre of Rhodes, and also co-directs the publishing house Small Stations Press. You can find out more about Elenkova here, and read more of her work 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.

Virgin Snow

December 20, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It happened, not as we had hoped,
underneath the stars, or along the banks
of a lake, or in an empty pasture,
but shut in amidst a virgin
snowstorm. It was among the coats and castoffs
on the bed in one of our parents’ bedrooms,
they having vacated the premises for some exotic island
just, we naively imagined, so we might have our tryst.
The sensation, if I had to describe it,
was like stepping over the edge
of a cliff into water and not quite knowing
how deep the fall or whether we’d surface again.
I wish I could say it was sublime,
but here is what I remember:
the smoke and liquor like a halo
over the room, the scratch
of his rough jeans on my thighs,
the parting, swift as an axe
splitting wood in half.
Downstairs the party in full
motion as if Bacchus himself
were hosting the celebration
fully aware,
as the ball dropped
to announce the beginning of the new year,
and sailed down the long tunnel of Eros,
of what temptation would lead to.
There were no bells,
no feelings of enlightenment.
Later when I was alone in my bed
I thought one thing: What if it was true,
that in the end he was irrelevant?
I waited all night but not once did I hear
the nightingale fill the sky with reason,
or glimpse the sun muscle through the sky
to announce the birth of the miraculous.

by Jill Bialosky

This is the final weekly poem before the Christmas vacation. Poems will return to your inbox in the week beginning 10th January. The Poetry Centre hopes that all our readers enjoy a very merry Christmas and an excellent start to 2011! Thank you very much for your support of the weekly poem this year.

‘Virgin Snow’ is taken from The Skiers by Jill Bialosky (Arc International Poets, 2010), published by Arc Publications.

Notes courtesy of Arc:

Jill Bialosky was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She studied at Ohio University and received an M.A. in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She is the author of the poetry collections The End of Desire, Subterranean, a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Intruder, a finalist for the 2009 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in journals such as Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review and The Atlantic Monthly. She is author of the novels House Under Snow and The Life Room and co-edited, with Helen Schulman, the anthology Wanting a Child. Jill Bialosky is an editor at W. W. Norton & Company and lives in New York City. The Skiers is Jill Bialosky’s first collection to be published in the UK. You can find out more about Jill Bialosky here, and read more of her work here.

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.

Big Band Theory

December 13, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It all began with music,
with that much desire to be

in motion, waves of longing
with Nothing to pass through,

the pulsing you feel before
you hear it. The darkness couldn’t

keep still, it began to sway,
then there were little flashes

of light, glints of brass
over the rumbling percussion,

the reeds began to weep and sing,
and suddenly the horns

tore bigger holes in the darkness—
we could finally see

where the music was coming from:
ordinary men in bowties and black

jackets. But by then we had already
danced most of the night away.

by Sharon Bryan

This poem is taken from Sharp Stars by Sharon Bryan (2009).

Notes from BOA Editions:

Winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for 2009

As she’s shown throughout her career, Sharon Bryan is a rare breed of contemporary poet. A practitioner of acrobatic language that probes matters philosophical and psychological, Bryan is also playful and humorous, and this mixture of attributes reveals itself in each of these tightly-knit, succulent poems. Concerned with the interplay of matter and spirit, Bryan’s poems in this collection also address, and sometimes blend, issues of biology, astronomy, and music. The poems in Sharp Stars, from which “Big Band Theory” is taken, represent more than ten years of work. Of her last book, Flying Blind, published in 1996, Small Press wrote: “In Sharon Bryan’s most effective poems, word play is a matter of life and death… Bryan won’t let any ordinary phrase off the hook as she dangles it, circling in brilliant focus.” Indeed, in Sharp Stars we find her unraveling common phrases or sayings in the all-too-human desire for transcendence, a transcendence Sharon Bryan accomplishes with her own blend of levity and gravitas, always mindful of the complicated, vexing dynamic of body and soul. You can learn more about Sharon Bryan by listening to an interview 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. Visit the BOA Editions website to find out more.

Awater

December 6, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The small salon is ﬂanked by shelves and cupboards
and so awash with the overpowering reek
of toiletries that it seems smaller still.
Awater – I must admit I’m quite relieved
to see him, he’d almost given me the slip –
is sitting at a round ceramic sink
wrapped tightly in a cloak of starched white linen.
The barber does his job and I pretend
to be the next in line and take a seat.
I’ve never seen Awater closer by
than in this mirror; never has he appeared
so absolutely inaccessible.
Between the bottles, glittering and splintered,
he rises in the mirror like an iceberg
the scissors’ shining bows go gliding past.
But spring comes soon, and with the mist still hanging
from a sudden passing shower, the barber’s comb
now ploughs a furrow in his tousled hair.
Awater pays and leaves the barbershop.
I follow him without a second thought.
Chance takes a short cut to its destination.
Was it meant to be – Awater’s ending up
in the bar I used to visit with my brother?
It was: he’s even occupied our corner.
I sit down somewhere else. It’s hardly full.
The barman knows me. He knows the way I feel.
He wipes my table for a second time
and dawdles with the white cloth in his hand.
‘The times,’ he mumbles ﬁnally, ‘have changed.’

by Martinus Nijhoff

This poem is taken from Awater, translated by David Colmer, edited by Thomas Möhlmann, and published by Anvil Press.

Notes courtesy of Peter Jay at Anvil Press:

This is a bit of a teaser, or a trailer. It’s an extract from the middle of Nijhoff’s 300-line poem with the mysterious title, which is also the name of the mystery character in the poem. It’s not quite a detective story as there are no unexplained deaths – just unexplained lives! The story is that Awater goes to work, leaves it, and goes to the railway station via the barber’s, followed by the narrator who has decided to shadow him. Hardly material for great poetry, you might think, but it’s regarded as the classic Dutch poem of the 20th century.

The poem is formally a little more elaborate in Dutch than in the only possible English equivalent, David Colmer’s well-paced blank verse. How can a narrative poem with a plain story like this be so rich both in poetry and ideas? Simply described events become luminously riddling and mysterious: what is going on? why? what does it all mean? or are these the wrong questions?

For partial answers, you must read Wiljan van den Akker’s essay in Anvil’s new edition of the poem, edited by Thomas Möhlmann. The Dutch text is followed by three different English translations and several contributions (including from the late poet: Nijhoff lived from 1894 to 1953) which cast light on them, without ever quite solving its mysteries.

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern. You can read more about Anvil here.

Lullaby

November 29, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

People are murdered all the time,
Somewhere – be it in the laps
Of dozy valleys, or on watchful peaks
That peer; so what a cold comfort
To say ‘Ah, but it’s so far off!’
Shanghai or Guernica –
Either is just as close to my heart
As your small frightened hand,
Or the planet Jupiter high above us.
No don’t look up at the sky,
Don’t even look at the earth, just sleep.
For death is racing through
The sparkling dust of the Milky Way
And pouring molten silver
On the headlong shadows tumbling down.

1937

by Miklós Radnóti

‘Lullaby’ is taken from Forced March, published by Enitharmon Press.

Notes courtesy of Enitharmon:

Forced March is a new edition of Miklós Radnóti’s selected poems, in the powerful and moving translations of Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri. Poet Dick Davis explains why this book is so important: ‘Radnóti has emerged as the major poetic voice to record the civilian experience of World War II in occupied Europe. His poems are an extraordinary record of a mind determined to affirm its civilization in the face of overwhelming odds. He is one of the very greatest poets of the twentieth century, and Clive Wilmer’s and George Gömöri’s versions are by far the best that exist in English.’ You can find out more about this book here.

By the time the Second World War broke out, Miklós Radnóti was already an established poet. When the Nazis took over his home town of Budapest, Radnóti was sent to a labour camp at Bor in occupied Serbia. Then, in 1944, as the Germans retreated from the eastern front, Radnóti and his fellow labourers were force-marched back into Hungary. On 9 November, too weak to carry on, he and many comrades were executed by firing squad. When the bodies were exhumed the following year, Radnóti was identified by a notebook of poems in his greatcoat pocket. These poems, published in 1946 as Foaming Sky, secured his position as one of the giants of modern Hungarian poetry. You can learn more about Radnóti here and 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. Discover more about Enitharmon here.

Stagshaw Fair

November 22, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

If there’s a spectre in the air, it’s hard
to find in the mizzle smudging the line
between land and sky and the Blackface herd
that scatters as I swing past the footpath sign.

I know this place, these roads, like my own bones
and also love its secrets. I’ve walked
the fair, the north, inside myself. Its stones
are fallen walls, markers where the way forked.

A constellation of returning birds
offers itself as puzzle more than omen.
Where do we think we live? I sift the words
in layers. Who with? Gorse. Redwing. Roman.

Whether we go to the fair, or we don’t,
won’t we all come home pockets full of ghosts?

by Linda France

‘Stagshaw Fair’ is taken from You are Her (2010), published by Arc Publications.

Notes courtesy of Arc:

Linda France was born in Wallsend, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and for the past 16 years has lived close to Hadrian’s Wall, near Corbridge in Northumberland. She works as a poet (she has published 11 collections of poetry), tutor, mentor and editor, often collaborating with visual artists, particularly in the field of Public Art. Since 1990 her poetry has won many awards and prizes as well as being carved into stone and wood, cast in metal, etched in glass, stitched onto fabric and printed on enamel. Her recurring themes are landscape and history, flora and fauna, love and identity.

Linda France found the title for her new collection, You are Her, on a fading information board at Hadrian’s Wall, not far from where she lives. Locating and disorientating at the same time, it set the co-ordinates for a body of work on boundaries and identity, damage and absence. At the heart of the book is a section looking at Nature and Cultivation through the life and work of Capability Brown, who was born in Northumberland in 1716. A horse-riding accident in 1995 fractured France’s spine and cracked her pelvis. This injury, although on the surface healed, re-emerged in the form of flashbacks and chronic pain ten years later when several of her friends died in close succession. Many of the poems in You are Her chart the passage of grief and resolution, a cycle of re-orientation. You can find out more Linda France here, and and read further selections from the book here.

temporary lodging

November 15, 2010April 20, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

as good a place as any       where the book
just falls open       mid-sentence       to start
here       & subvert the order      far

from the madding       & hardly
a stone standing       cities we’d imagined
way off the beaten       the word is out

let’s follow that as far as it’ll take us
to the edge where even the largest continent
crumbles how do we bear this

awakening here where you come from
you told me once before the noise begins
at first light you can hear the lions in the zoo

all over the city you cried remembering
here at least the windows are watertight
for the time being we can take our chance

by Catherine Hales

‘temporary lodging’ is taken from the volume hazard or fall, and reprinted by permission of Shearsman Books.

Notes courtesy of Shearsman Books:

Catherine Hales grew up near the Thames in Surrey and (after a few years in Norwich and Stuttgart) 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 Shearsman, Tears in the Fence, Poetry Salzburg Review, Fire, Stride, Haiku Quarterly, Great Works and Shadowtrain. She is a co-organiser of Poetry Hearings, the Berlin festival of English-language poetry, and has been described (by ExBerliner magazine) as a “Berlin poetry heavyweight”. Her pamphlet out of time appeared in 2006; hazard or fall is her first full-length collection, and her work also appears in the anthology Infinite Difference. Her translation of Norbert Hummelt’s Selected Poems, Berlin Fresco, also appears in 2010. You can find out more about Catherine Hales here, and read more poems from her book 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.

Letter to a Lover

November 8, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Today I am going to pick you up at the beige airport.
My heart feels like a field of calves in the sun.
My heart is wired directly to the power source of mediocre songs.
I am trying to catch a ray of sunlight in my mouth.

I look forward to showing you my new furniture.
I look forward to the telephone ringing, it is not you,
you are in the kitchen trying to figure out the coffeemaker,
you are pouring out the contents of your backpack.

I wonder if you now have golden fur?
I wonder if your arsenal of kind remarks is empty?
I remember when I met you you were wearing a grey dress,
that was also blue, not unlike the water plus the sky.

They say it’s difficult to put a leash on a hummingbird.
So let us be no longer the actuary of each other!
Let us bow no longer our heads to the tyranny of numbers!
Hurry off the plane, with your rhinestone covered bag

full of magazines that check up on the downfall of the stars.
I will be waiting for you at the bottom of the moving stairs.

by Matthew Zapruder

‘Letter to a Lover’ is taken from Come On All You Ghosts, and reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Notes courtesy of Copper Canyon:

Editor, translator, and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award, Matthew Zapruder in his third book blends humor and invention with love and loss, as when the breath of a lover is compared to “a field of titanium gravestones / growing warmer in the sun.” The title poem is an elegy for heroes and mentors—from David Foster Wallace to Zapruder’s father—and demonstrates a new, expansive range for the poet, highlighting as well a larger body of poetry that is surprising and direct: writing that wrestles with the desires to live rightly, to make art, and to confront the vast events of the day.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of three collections of poetry, American Linden(Tupelo Press, 2002), The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), and Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon Press, forthcoming 2010). The Pajamaist was selected by Tony Hoagland as the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. He has been a Lannan Literary Fellow in Marfa, Texas, and a recipient of a May Sarton prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He works as an editor for Wave Books, is a member of the core faculty of UCR-Palm Desert’s Low Residency M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and is the Fall 2010 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley. He lives in San Francisco.

River Sonnet

October 25, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

When the old she-salmon swam to my rock
where I had sat to watch her moldering
transform into a fruiting body, clock
of flesh stretched above pale pebbles, ticking
tail where her roe lay like scattered apple
blossoms the rain has adhered to the road
and her great heaving sides stained with the dull
flowering shapes of fungus, I could not know
what secret pain it took for her to nose
against the current there, the large head scarred,
flanks those of a barnacled ship: she rose
from shallow water, a calcified shard
bearing time’s white etchings, and one dark eye—
lidless—that willed I mark her drifting by.

by Keetje Kuipers

‘River Sonnet’ is taken from Beautiful in the Mouth, and reprinted by permission of BOA Editions.

Notes courtesy of BOA Editions:

Keetje Kuipers is a native of the Northwestern United States. She earned her B.A. at Swarthmore College and her M.F.A. at the University of Oregon. She is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. In 2007 Keetje was the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She used the residency to complete work on her book Beautiful in the Mouth, from which ‘River Sonnet’ comes. This latest collection was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize.

Written over the course of five years and a geographic journey spanning Paris to New York to Oregon, Kuipers’ Beautiful in the Mouth examines contemporary female loss in terms of literal and figurative geography: the empty bedroom of a dead child, a clear-cut hillside outside of a logging town. From her own unique perspective, Kuipers continues in the spirit of poets like Elizabeth Bishop to examine how loss forces itself upon unwilling landscapes and how those landscapes must alter to receive that loss.