Feast – from ‘Triad’

October 18, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

This word tapping down
Into sacred rites,
Things laid out before our gods.

Against all the odds
Again the stranger
Open to the stranger’s face.

A toast and embrace
Repairing two words,
Our glasses raised, our eating

In tents of meeting,
A trust-mended pledge.
The host as guest, the guest host.

by Micheal O’Siadhail

‘Feast’ is the third part of a sequence entitled ‘Triad’, and is taken from Tongues (Bloodaxe Books, 2010).

Micheal O’Siadhail won the Marten Toonder Prize for Literature in 1998. He is a freelance writer, and was formerly a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin and a professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. His academic works include Learning Irish and Modern Irish, whilst his published poetry collections include Poems: 1975-1995 (Bloodaxe, 1999), and The Gossamer Wall: Poems in witness to the Holocaust (Bloodaxe, 2002). You can watch O’Siadhail read some of his poems here, and read more about him here.

Language pervades our world, the media, our relationships, minds and hearts. We learn it and we pass it on. In Tongues, the book from which ‘Feast’ comes, Micheal O’Siadhail delights in language and shares its wonder and fascination.

Like a genetic code, language brings human life over thousands of years into the present. It unites the personal and the social, allows for continuity and novelty and can arouse the strongest passions.

In Tongues, O’Siadhail explores individual words, plays with grammar, and meditates on pictograms and the distilled meaning of proverbs across cultures. The variety of forms from sonnets to complex rhyming and syllabic patterns matches the thematic richness.

Founded in Newcastle in 1978, Bloodaxe Books is one of Britain’s leading independent poetry publishers. Internationally renowned for quality in literature and excellence in book design, its authors and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry. Details of all Bloodaxe’s publications, plus sample video and audio clips of poets reading their work, can be found 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.

Proofs

October 11, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Death will not correct
a single line of verse
she is no proof-reader
she is no sympathetic
lady editor

a bad metaphor is immortal

a shoddy poet who has died
is a shoddy dead poet

a bore bores after death
a fool keeps up his foolish chatter
from beyond the grave

by Tadeusz Rózewicz

This is the first in a new series of weekly poems from the Poetry Centre. We hope you enjoyed a fine summer.

Notes from Anvil Press:

Tadeusz Rózewicz (born in 1921,) is perhaps Poland’s most highly regarded living poet. He is also a well-known playwright. He came to prominence in then-communist Poland in the fifties, and his poems began to be translated and published in English about the same time. Adam Czerniawski, a Polish émigré living in England, is his principal translator in Britain and is a close friend of the poet. This poem comes from the collection entitled They Came to See a Poet. Originally published by Anvil Press in 2004, a third edition of the book is to be published in January 2011. You can learn more about Rózewicz here.

Rózewicz is famous for the kind of minimalism that resulted from the view that Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, which affected Poland particularly badly, somehow made poetry superfluous, or even offensive. He found that he could write truthfully and accurately only through a stark, direct form of poetry rooted in common speech, poetry that had abandoned traditional formal niceties.

Poems of this kind are more translatable than many, since they consist largely of spare, direct statement, without metaphor. It is worth pondering what makes this a poem rather than just a series of statements. Poems are made of words not ideas, yet this plain poem is a poem because of its economy – its movement is faithfully echoed in English, its rhythms carefully controlled, the whole having the satisfying finality of a classical epigram.

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.

Far Along in the Story

May 31, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The boy walked on with a flock of cranes
following him calling as they came
from the horizon behind him
sometimes he thought he could recognize
a voice in all that calling but he
could not hear what they were calling
and when he looked back he could not tell
one of them from another in their
rising and falling but he went on
trying to remember something in
their calls until he stumbled and came
to himself with the day before him
wide open and the stones of the path
lying still and each tree in its own leaves
the cranes were gone from the sky and at
that moment he remembered who he was
only he had forgotten his name

by W.S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin has been the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Bollingen Award. He has also received fellowships from the Rockefeller and the Guggenheim foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of many books of poetry and prose. He and his wife Paula live in Hawaii, where he has lived for more than thirty years. You can learn more about Merwin here and here.

Merwin’s most recent collection, Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), from which this poem is taken, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. “I have only what I remember,” Merwin admits, and his memories are focused and profound — Pennsylvania miners and neighborhood streetcars, a conversation with a boyhood teacher or deceased parent, the distinct qualities of autumnal light and gentle rain, well-cultivated loves, and “our long evenings and astonishment.” From the universe’s contradictions, Merwin calls upon the unexpected to illuminate existence. Read more from the collection here.

Copper Canyon Press is a non-profit publisher that believes poetry is vital to language and living. For thirty-five years, the Press has fostered the work of emerging, established, and world-renowned poets for an expanding audience. To find out more about Copper Canyon and its publications, click here.

Please note that this is the last of the weekly poems for this academic year. We do hope that you have enjoyed this year’s selections, and thank you for your continued support of the Poetry Centre through your subscription to the weekly poem service. The service will recommence in September. Have a very pleasant summer!

Caput Mortuum

May 24, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

An apple orchard, meadows and a river,
a raft at a mooring where children are swimming,
an ancient ash, the sawmill and the bridge,
and at the heart the home of all our colours –

tin pales of white lead paste, and silver mica
from China, and zinc oxide from Peru,
Carrara dust, pozzuoli, burnt sienna,
red ochre, aniline, Verona green,

dammar resin, madder lake, campeachy,
bone black, indigo and dragon’s blood,
Dutch pink and gallnuts, dried black mallow flowers,
kamala, berberis root and walnut shells,

and dark in the stillness a man with a mortar and pestle,
cracking the lapis lazuli apart,
grinding the purest in the pulverisette,
a second grinding, then a sifting,

binding the powder with turpentine resin
and heated beeswax, letting it draw for a day,
then straining it in a linen bag
in a bucket of lukewarm water,

colour coming in a tide,
filling fifty pales, returning
to the first to pour the water off
and dry the sediment and sift again –

this, I think as I gaze beyond the river where the children swim,
beyond to where the sky consoles
with old familiar colours of our physics and our souls,
this in our stillness is our purest blue.

by Michael Hulse

Born in 1955, Michael Hulse grew up in England. After studying at St. Andrews, he lived for twenty-five years in Germany, working in universities, publishing and documentary television, before returning to England in 2002 to teach at the University of Warwick.

Hulse’s poetry has won him firsts in the UK’s National Poetry Competition and the Bridport Poetry Prize (twice), and Eric Gregory and Cholmondeley Awards from the Society of Authors. In the past he has co-edited the best-selling anthology The New Poetry, and in the Nineties was general editor of the Könemann literature classics series and of Arc international poets. He has also been the editor of the literary quarterlies Stand and Leviathan Quarterly, and currently edits The Warwick Review.

Hulse has translated more than sixty books from German, including works by Goethe, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, and the late W. G. Sebald.

His latest publications are a new book of poems, The Secret History (Arc), and a translation of Rilke’s novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Penguin Classics). Learn more about Michael Hulse here.

‘Caput Mortuum’ is taken from The Secret History, and you can read a selection of other poems from the collection here.

Arc Publications publishes contemporary poetry from new and established writers from the UK and abroad, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English, and the work of overseas poets in translation. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. To learn more about Arc and to see its range of titles, click here.

Broken Sleep

May 17, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I wake to a residue of milk
playing in your throat.
Through the window starlings
coagulate in the no-colour dawn,

each bird distinct, but utterly
in thrall to formations of twist,
kite, looming bee-swarm.
Your single cry’s answered

by a parched breaking in my chest
and a laboured rush
of hot liquid. As I lift you
from your crib, still balled up

and loaded with sleep, I know
soon you’ll uncurl, walk away
to a point I can’t hear you.
The birds rise together as though

on an up-draught. I spread
your outstretched fingers
on the back of my hand as you
work away at one breast –

ears pulling in time, toes curling;
your whole body drinking –
and lost milk from my other breast
grows cold as rain on my nightdress.

by Sally Read

‘Broken Sleep’ is the title poem of Sally Read‘s second collection (Bloodaxe Books, 2009). It comes from a cycle of poems addressed to a baby from a mother, moving from the uncertainty and awe at the discovery of a pregnancy through to the ecstasy of early motherhood. It charts, with tenderness, the child’s development from a foetus in the dark, to a walking, talking toddler in a bewildering and exciting world. The poems comprise a hymn and an elegy to the experience of pregnancy and early motherhood.

The second part of the book, The Glass Eye, moves swiftly into a world where loss, whether of a loved one, a breast, or simply innocence, is countered by extraordinary kinds of redemption. Whether conjuring angels, music, or lies, these pieces offer a sometimes disturbing but always marvellous alternative to the unavoidable blackness behind the glass eye.

You can find out more about the collection here, more about Sally Read at this page, and hear her read from her work at the Poetry Archive (if you cannot hear the recording here, click on the link entitled ‘open player in a new window’).

behind the lines

May 10, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

– just as you might never
find some white-worn
tongue of soap

long fluffed
beneath basin – or
fine marks of particular

weight penned in their
margin near skip-
bottom or

one flake
falling deep in a
cwm between sheer-set

neighbours of pine – or
with morning still
dark that

word
barely spoken
to your sleeping ear

by Mario Petrucci

i tulips (Enitharmon, 2010), from which this week’s poem is taken, is the new collection from Mario Petrucci, a prize-winning poet who draws upon his knowledge of science and ecology to craft arresting, modernistic verse. i tulips is an adventurous suite of spare, fractal lyrics that reveal hidden depths and complexities under the reader’s microscopic gaze. The poem ‘behind the lines’ is an example of Petrucci’s intense and inventive renovation of closely observed human experience. You can find out more about the book here, and more about Petrucci here and here.

Please note that this poem was originally posted incorrectly formatted – that error has now been corrected, and the poem appears above in its correct form.

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.

Pig’s Heaven Inn

May 3, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Red chiles in a tilted basket catch sunlight —
we walk past a pile of burning mulberry leaves
into Xidi Village, enter a courtyard, notice
an inkstone, engraved with calligraphy, filled
with water and cassia petals, smell Ming
dynasty redwood panels. As a musician lifts
a small xun to his mouth and blows, I see kiwis
hanging from branches above a moon doorway:
a grandmother, once the youngest concubine,
propped in a chair with bandages around
her knees, complains of incessant pain;
someone spits in the street. As a second
musician plucks strings on a zither, pomelos
blacken on branches; a woman peels chestnuts;
two men in a flat-bottomed boat gather
duckweed out of a river. The notes splash,
silvery, onto cobblestone, and my fingers
suddenly ache: during the Cultural Revolution,
my aunt’s husband leapt out of a third-story
window; at dawn I mistook the cries of
birds for rain. When the musicians pause,
Yellow Mountain pines sway near Bright
Summit Peak; a pig scuffles behind an enclosure;
someone blows his nose. Traces of the past
are wisps of mulberry smoke rising above
roof tiles; and before we, too, vanish, we hike
to where three trails converge: hundreds
of people are stopped ahead of us, hundreds
come up behind: we form a rivulet of people
funneling down through a chasm in the granite.

by Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze was born in New York City and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, he has conducted residencies at a number of different universities in the United States including Brown University, the University of Utah, and Washington University. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Book Award, and has received grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation. Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, Carol Moldaw, and daughter, Sarah. You can read a recent interview with Arthur Sze here.

A temple near the hypocenter of the atomic blast at Hiroshima was disintegrated, but its ginkgo tree survived to bud and bloom. In his ninth book of poetry, The Gingko Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), from which ‘Pig’s Heaven Inn’ comes, Arthur Sze extends this metaphor of survival and flowering to transform the world’s factual darkness into precarious splendour. He ingeniously integrates the world’s mundane and miraculous into a moving, visionary journey. More poems from this collection are available to read here.

Love Song for Fidel Castro

April 26, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

They’ve started a tight salsa
when Elisa strolls on, hips round as a drum.

Her band whoops, edges up the percussion
and the bass whips her calves.

She looks at each woman, remembering
how she brought them together,

their babies now workers, mothers,
or fathers, grins at the years they display

in their breasts, waists and eyes,
one thousand, three hundred and three.

She nods to Aleida on congas holding rivers
in her palms and Mathilda, the oldest,

on rhythm guitar, playing just as she’s waited
in a chair by the door, night after night all her life.

Elisa turns to the room, finds the President’s table,
puts a mike to her mouth.

“For this man tonight, twenty lovers,” she jokes
and her eyes won’t leave as she sings

of sun in the citrus, Batista,
all the sweat and fists in the wind,

of a child in a cellar, paths through the cane,
the wings on every island’s shoulder blades.

She sings of the speeches scrolled in his pockets,
of Angola, Mandela, his friend.

She sings of Havana, how it still burns
on maps of the world,

of Martí’s white rose and an exile’s return
to the Island of Youth.

Then she picks up the claves and the crowd
shines the floor with its footwork,

as they dance the way heat breaks
the line of a road, each beat and bell of the salsa,

a gasp in the hand.

by Jackie Wills

Jackie Wills has been resident poet at, amongst other places, an airport, the Surrey countryside, and with marketing teams at Unilever. Powder Tower (Arc), her first full collection, was shortlisted for the 1995 T. S. Eliot prize and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her second collection, Party (Leviathan), was published in 2000. ‘Love Song for Fidel Castro’ comes from her latest collection, Commandments (Arc, 2007). You can find out more about the book here.

A former journalist, Wills now works as an editor and creative writing tutor. She lives in Brighton with her partner, the South African musician Risenga Makondo, and their two children. Jackie Wills writes a blog about her work, available here.

Leaving Fingerprints

April 19, 2010April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I know this frosted landscape
better than it knows itself, its layers
a busy clock of history, still ticking.

Under my feet I feel the trail of the slug,
the snail, the earth’s deep squirm
around an anklet or an amulet, a broken cup.

Lost, the names of the ones
whose fingers made and used
and threw away these things,

written and rewritten in the calligraphy
of roots. The worm’s heave
and turn delivers messages up,

scribbled in folds of soil and mud, afterthoughts
that grow to trees, trunks with arms,
branches with fingers, twigs with nails,

scratches on air, tear
after tear on a white page.
These names have given their artefacts away

to be sparse as winter. Here I am, they say.
Here and here for you to see,
fingerprinted on the sky.

by Imtiaz Dharker

Imtiaz Dharker was born in Pakistan, grew up in Glasgow, and now divides her time between Bombay and London. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings. Leaving Fingerprints, the title poem of which is printed above, is her fourth book from Bloodaxe.

In these poems, the only thing that is never lost is the Bombay tiffin-box. All the other things which are missing or about to go missing speak to each other – a person, a place, a recipe, a language, a talisman. Whether or not they want to be identified or found, they still send each other messages, scattering a trail of clues, leaving fingerprints.

You can watch Imtiaz Dharker read two of her poems here, and find out more about her and her work here.

Setting Out from Great-Scatter Pass and Wandering Fifteen or Twenty Miles of Meandering Trail…*

April 12, 2010April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I rest three times every mile on this trail’s
ten thousand precarious twists and turns,

and when it loops back, I see friends vanish
into distant forests and hills, then reappear

beneath windblown rain high atop pines.
Water clamoring through stones becomes

silent conversation in the stream’s depths,
and across high peaks, winds wail and sigh.

Gazing out toward South Mountain’s sunlit
south face, sun white through far-off haze,

I see azure marshland all tranquil beauty
and dense forests that seem to drift at ease.

Forever hemmed in, I trust myself to wide-
open distance: it melts tangles clean away.

by Wang Wei, translated by David Hinton

* The full title of this poem by Wang Wei is ‘Setting Out from Great-Scatter Pass and Wandering Fifteen or Twenty Miles of Meandering Trail Through Deep Forests and Thick Bamboo, We Reach Brown-Ox Ridge and Gaze Out at Yellow-Bloom River’. It is taken from The Selected Poems of Wang Wei, translated by David Hinton (Anvil Press, 2009). You can find out more about the book here, and more about Wang Wei here.

Zen Buddhism became a sort of cult religion in the sixties and seventies, thanks to its espousal by such luminaries of the Beat movement as Gary Snyder, who himself translated some Wang Wei poems. Wang Wei was a master of the short, imagistic landscape poem that came to typify classical Chinese poetry. His practice of Zen Buddhism led him to develop a landscape poetry of resounding tranquillity, beautifully conveyed and introduced in Anvil’s book by David Hinton. Learn more about Hinton’s work and read more of his translations of Wang Wei here.

After translating the T’ang Dynasty contemporaries of Wang Wei (Po Chü-i, Li Po and Tu Fu) over the last fifteen or so years, David Hinton is thoroughly at ease in the intimate, almost conversational idiom of the great Chinese poetry of the 8th century AD. It is strange to think that around this time in England the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf was written: what a contrast between the sophisticated Chinese elegance and the rough-hewn Old English verse.

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.