Author: oxfordbrookesuni

Amaretti

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Toadstool tops.  Two.  Cracked as nana’s old
knee sore.  And you launched one: thumb-spun
higher than a dollar – your mouth – that catpink
ridge-beam waiting; barely budged your chin to
grind it like a roof tile; offered the other, pathetic
as a button on your outstretched palm.  And I
snatched it quick as a whisker, bit, felt my tongue
melt caverns deep inside, release its acrid-sweet
almond adultness –
                                  which I dribbled out in spite
of the almost-shake of your loaf, the high arches
of your brows.  Then you tunnelled the wrapper
between fingers to roll a joke, a giant’s
cigarillo from air’s tobacco; stood it
end first on ma’s stainless tea tray, flicked
your flint lighter to chase the tip with flame
which seeped downwards, filled my head
with burning –
                                  until, at the last,
it wobbled, transfigured, a ganglion
of desire there, rose up into our cathedralled
Italian stairwell: willed wisp of your making
who stood, an edifice of father frowning
his gargoyled wonder into mine, our wish
held up by ash, all trembling, climbing
into hallowed space.

by Mario Petrucci

from Flowers of Sulphur (2007)

Flowers of Sulphur crackles with metaphorical energy.  Over a decade in the making, this remarkable new book confirms Petrucci’s reputation for exploring the gamut of human experience.  It demonstrates, once again, his rare capacity to bridge the gap between science and poetry with power and authenticity. ‘As with the best poets, thinking and feeling are, for Petrucci, a single act’ (George Szirtes). Indeed, just as we now know that light is both corpuscular and wave-like in nature, so Flowers of Sulphur is able to embody many, often seemingly paradoxical, qualities.  These poems ring with complexity and clarity: like our quantum world, this award-winning collection reinvents itself moment to moment so as to unsettle, move and inspire us.

Mario Petrucci is an ecologist, physicist and war poet. He is also the only poet to have been in residence at the Imperial War Museum. His book-length sequence on Chernobyl won the Daily Telegraph / Arvon International Poetry Competition in 2002. A Natural Sciences graduate, Mario works as an educator and a radio/TV broadcaster. Poems from Heavy Water are featured in Poetry Review, The London Magazine, Acumen, Agenda, on BBC Radio and at The Royal Festival Hall. Flowers of Sulphur has won an Arts Council of England Writers’ Award and the London Arts New London Writers Award, but also collects together many individual prize-winning poems, including successes in the Bridport, the London Writers Competition, and Frogmore and the National Poetry Competition.

Founded in 1967, Enitharmon Press publishes fine quality literary editions. While specialising in poetry, we also publish fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, and an extensive list of 

To the Boy Elis

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Elis, when the blackbird calls in darkest wood,
This is your destruction.
Your lips drink the cool of the blue rock-spring.

When your brow softly bleeds, forsake
Ancient legends
And dark readings of the flight of birds.

But you walk with soft steps into the night
Where purple grapes hang thickly
And you move your arms more gracefully in the blue.

A thorn-bush sounds
Where your moonlike eyes are.
O how long, Elis, have you been deceased.

Your body is a hyacinth
Into which a monk dips his waxen fingers.
Our silence is a black cave

From which at times a gentle beast emerges
And slowly lowers heavy eyelids.
Black dew drips onto your forehead,

The last gold of decayed stars.

by Georg Trakl, translated by Margitt Lehbert

from The Poems of Georg Trakl
Anvil, 2007
Translation copyright © Margitt Lehbert 2007

Margitt Lehbert’s deft and attentive translations of Trakl’s poems and her introduction to The Poems of Georg Trakl are a fine guide to a poet now regarded as among the most original of the twentieth century. Surreal, expressionist and starkly beautiful, his poems responded to his own pain and to the traumas of the First World War with work of unique depth and power. Although he is a complex and difficult poet in many respects, he translates well into a complex and difficult English.

Born in Salzburg, Austria, he lived from 1887 to 1914, mainly in Vienna. He died after a drug overdose in a military hospital in Krakow, Poland. Margitt Lehbert has translated Elizabeth Bishop, Carol Ann Duffy and Les Murray for German publishers, and Sarah Kirsch into English for Anvil. She lives in southern Sweden where she runs a small press, Edition Rugerup.

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern.

Yesterday When I Was Young

~ oxfordbrookesuni

in memory of Dusty Springfield 

Mimosas, dear, forcing lemony scent
into a cold reactionary March wind,
I bought them on the day you died
to raise a yellow torch in memory
of how your voice addressed our needs
in every shade of love that’s blue
and shared with us its aching entreaty
to find a little sunshine after rain,
a sanctuary from bruises dealt
invisibly across the soul.
Today, your death-day, you are on the air
posthumously, your husky R&B
slow-burners building in their rise and fall
smokily pitched delivery.
Your life returns with every anguished catch
in phrasing, you the bouffant blonde,
the patron saint of mascara

wreathed in a boa, lending signature
to how the song hinged on a frantic sob
to make the pain definitive…
I keep on hearing retros of your voice
as though you’re still singing familiar hits
six hours after your death. Big purple clouds
arrive, dispensing hints of flashy showers.
You’ve gone away, like someone takes the train
with no-one knowing, no address,
no destination, no reporting back
about pure music on the other side.
We listen to you in Freedom, First Out,
and hold you near this way and celebrate
a torchy diva’s dramas, feel the hurt
in your vocal authority,
and hope you’re healed in passing, wish you where
the light in its entirety shines through.

by Jeremy Reed

from This Is How You Disappear (2007)

This Is How You Disappear is Jeremy Reed’s most autobiographical book to date, and one in which he celebrates the dead and missing friends who were the formative and enduring influences on his life as a poet.  Using the elegy to imaginatively recreate the often extraordinary individual characteristics of his subjects, Reed’s personal book of the dead is one that burns with his customary dynamic for dazzling imagery, glows with compassion for the suffering, and sparkles with a visual retrieval of detail so acute it hurts. With the title taken from the first line of a Scott Walker song, ‘Rawhide’, This Is How You Disappear is elegiac poetry at its most brilliant.

Jeremy Reed was born in Jersey, Channel Islands, and read for his PhD at the University of Essex. He is widely acknowledged as the most imaginatively gifted British poet of his generation, praised by Seamus Heaney for his ‘rich and careful writing’ and by David Lodge for his ‘remarkable lyric gift’. His Selected Poems were published by Penguin in 1987. Subsequent collections have been Nineties (Cape, 1990), Dicing for Pearls (1990), Pop Stars (1994), Sweet Sister Lyric (1996), Saint Billie (2001) and Duck and Sally Inside (2004), all from Enitharmon Press.  He has also published Heartbreak Hotel (Orion, 2002), a verse biography of Elvis Presley.

Founded in 1967, Enitharmon Press publishes fine quality literary editions. While specialising in poetry, we also publish fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, and an extensive list of artists’ books.

16 transit of venus. (2)

~ oxfordbrookesuni

protean shape unshaping, my desire,
that turns in me like starlings whorling dusk,
or like high cloud that burns belated fire
as in the dark damp blooms release their musk,
go figure; press on leaves that suppler print
of yours than breath, write in declining sheets
of long grass trailing lines, and urge, and hint,
and ring the round that being rung, repeats;
but coil in shadows, love, and never touch
that finest of her hairs, the lightest drop
welled at her eye, whose globe is made too much
a world, for your discovery to stop;
hold; linger at her lip, and at her ear
by turns, returned, that make to disappear.

by Andrew Zurcher

from coming home by andrew zurcher (Landfill, 2006)
Copyright © Andrew Zurcher

Andrew Zurcher is a Fellow in English at Queens’ College, Cambridge and the author of Spenser’s Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern England (D.S. Brewer, 2007). His poems have previously appeared in Bad Press Serials.

coming home is a sequence of 56 mostly Shakespearean sonnets. Here, in the second of three poems titled ‘transit of venus’ – a rare astronomical event, when the planet passes between the Sun and the Earth – the poet considers the difference between desire as a force of nature (the ‘turns’ of the vivid opening) and love as an understanding of transience (the ‘turns’ of the enigmatic ending). Venus, we are reminded, was also the Roman goddess of love, eternal provoker of transitory desire.

Landfill Press was founded in Norwich in 2004 as a publisher of contemporary poetic sequences.

Muriel

~ oxfordbrookesuni

We are sorting her chest of drawers—
This for me, This for you, This was so much hers—
‘I’ll never have a friend like that again.’
We are meeting the jaunty lawyer
And signing his forms and discussing the weather.
‘I’ll never have a friend like that again.’

She used to play cards at this table,
Now it’s covered with cake-crumbs after the funeral.
‘I’ll never have a friend like that again.’
We wash cups in the broken sink
And it’s time to go and she rings me. ‘I think
I’ll never have a friend like that again.’

And now it’s winter and snow,
She’s no light, she’s no heat, she is ill, did I know
She’ll never have a friend like that again?
She spent Christmas with cousins, she died there.
I cannot remember her face, but I hear
‘I’ll never have a friend like that again.’

by Ruth Silcock

from Biographies etc.
Anvil, 2006
Copyright © Ruth Silcock 2006

This is from Ruth Silcock’s third collection. She brings a sharp yet compassionate eye for the oddities of human behaviour to her poems about the extraordinary lives and deaths of ‘ordinary’ people: children, senior citizens in residential homes, doctors, orphans, nurses, grannies, social workers at a dance. A lifetime’s accumulated wisdom, and the experience gained during her career as a social worker, enrich these cheerful poems that frequently address uncheerful subjects such as ageing and death.

Born in Manchester in 1926, Ruth Silcock studied at Girton College, Cambridge before devoting herself to social work. She has written several children’s books. Anvil has published her previous collections, Mrs. Carmichael (1987) and A Wonderful View of the Sea (1996).

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern.

Female Nude, circa 1916

~ oxfordbrookesuni

North of the Somme, the birds stop
Singing, sensing silence is the anthem
Fit for no-man’s-land, for foetal
Bodies drowned in mud, draped
Like weekend washing across lines
Of viper wire.  Spent shells

Nest in craters, nothing blue
And speckled waiting for a tapping break
But everywhere the litter of limbs
And bayonets red with stranger’s blood.
In frontline trenches, lovesick
Soldiers pencil notes as time

Ticks towards the whistles
For over-the-top commands, about
The time a police commissioner
On the Rue Taitbout is
Tearing down Modigliani nudes,
Affronted by full frontal pubic hair.

by Tim Cunningham

from Unequal Thirds (Peterloo, 2006)

Tim Cunningham’s poem “Female Nude, circa 1916” comes from his second collection Unequal Thirds (Peterloo, 2006).  His first collection was Don Marcelino’s Daughter (Peterloo, 2001) which was favourably reviewed in the TLS by Peter Reading.  Adrian Mitchell has written “Tim Cunningham’s poems are as various and fascinating as the animals in Noah’s Ark.  He has a most musical ear, a keen eye and an open heart.”  Tim Cunningham was born in Limerick in 1942 and has lived in Limerick, Tipperary, Dublin, the U.S.A. and London.  At present he lives in Billericay.

Peterloo Poets was founded by Harry Chambers, still the Publishing Director, in 1976. Its masthead is “poetry of quality by new or neglected poets”. Peterloo publishes between 8 and 10 volumes of poetry a year, runs an annual poetry competition – the 2008 competition will be the 24th – and, since 1999, an annual International Poetry Festival.

“From time to time it has seemed to me that the Peterloo Poets series is a haven of poetic sanity in a world of modish obfuscation.”
Michael Glover, British Book News

(Untitled)

~ oxfordbrookesuni

When the sun’s rays appeared
that day
in my head they shook up
the seasons, all four
and I found the way, my love
in the midst of May
into your arms once more.

We had taken the same train
to the same station
but I don’t know why
today it’s from behind the window
that I see you pass by.

Your train winds, unwinds
infernally
will you ever stop one day
to stand on the same side
                                              as me?

by Rachida Madani

From: The Other Half of History: Francophone African Women’s Poetry.
Edited by Georgina Collins.

Rachida Madani was born in Tangiers, Morocco in 1951 and still lives there today. After working as a teacher for thirty years, she decided to dedicate her time to writing. Rachida has published several collections of poetry, including Blessures au Vent and a novel entitled L’Histoire Peut Attendre.

Georgina Collins is a PhD researcher at Warwick University, focusing on francophone African women’s poetry. Prior to a career in global marketing, she travelled the world as a journalist with BFBS Forces radio.

The Heaventree Press is an independent poetry press based in Coventry. For more information on Heaventree and to buy The Other Half of History: Francophone African Women’s Poetry, please visit the Heaventree Press website.

Lieserl Einstein

~ oxfordbrookesuni

That summer waiting to hear about my GCSEs
I worked in an ice-cream kiosk on the beachfront
and met a boy expecting to study maths in London
who had a way of putting Mr Whippy in cones,
and away from the children dripping lollies along
the promenade, I let his fingers do sums on my skin.

Come September I was counting back the weeks,
trying to predict when the multiplication we had been
working on would be noticed, and I could understand
what my new physics teacher meant about the cat
in the box that’s just been poisoned which you can’t
be sure is dead until you lift the lid and take a look.

Throughout October there was morning sickness and
the cat was running around the house to the screams
of my mother, who called me a slut loud enough
for Mrs Evans and her hard hearing, while my father,
too stunned to remind his wife about the neighbours,
tore up my postcard of Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

Now it’s September again and I’m back at my desk,
my mother at home with her own second chance,
another summer gone, a new law of motion learnt,
comparing hair and eyes, the way we sometimes cry,
and the boy from the kiosk comes home when he can
and demonstrates that he also has a way with bottles.

Tonight, when you finally slept, I read about Einstein
and how even he with his head for figures could make
the classic miscalculation and get his girlfriend pregnant;
but they gave their daughter away, a wrong answer.
We will work this out. You are simply someone new
among our number that we need to take account of.

by Lorraine Mariner

from I am twenty people!: A Third Anthology from The Poetry School, edited by Mimi Khalvati & Stephen Knight (2007)

The third of an ongoing series of anthologies, I am twenty people! celebrates The Poetry School’s tenth anniversary in style. Adventurous, unorthodox, playfully serious and seriously playful, these new poets explore their different worlds with confidence and panache. Nothing, it seems, is off limits, neither political engagement nor experimental audacity. From the intimate lyric to the historical narrative, the poetry gathered in I am twenty people! is more than simply a promise of future achievement.  Offering, from each of its twenty poets, selections from a mature body of work that will surely lead to outstanding first collections, here is an anthology that stands in its own right as a hallmark of the best of new writing in Britain today.

ALICE ALLEN · LINDA BLACK · JEMMA BORG  · CAROLE BROMLEY · CLAIRE CROWTHER · PATRICK EARLY · LUCY HAMILTON · LOUISA HOOPER · VALERIE JOSEPHS · JENNY LEWIS · MARY MACRAE · LORRAINE MARINER · BARBARA MARSH · KAREN MCCARTHY · DAVID PENN · DERRICK PORTER · SHAZEA QURAISHI · KATHRYN SIMMONDS · SARADHA SOOBRAYEN · KAY SYRAD

Founded in 1967, Enitharmon Press publishes fine quality literary editions. While specialising in poetry, we also publish fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, and an extensive list of artists’ books.

The Astronaut’s Return

~ oxfordbrookesuni

She looks familiar; yes, she is my wife.
Her hair is longer; it’s been months.
I don’t think she expected to see me again.
She doesn’t talk as much as I remember
and when she does she’s speaking to a child.

I notice how her body moves beneath her clothes
and when she’s naked, in the bath or in bed;
how independent it is, in spite of her.
When she sees me looking she turns away.
When I touch her skin she flinches.

The clothes she says are mine no longer fit.
Eat, she says, please eat, and I love you.
I soothe her as best I can. I tell her that
I’m learning to come back.  But my eyes,
still wide open, sparkle like topaz when I sleep.

by Gregory Leadbetter

Gregory Leadbetter was born in Stourbridge in 1975. He practised as an environmental lawyer for several years before transferring his main interests to writing. Since then he has written for the BBC radio drama series Silver Street, and his poems have been published widely. He is currently completing a PhD on Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A pamphlet of his poems, The Body in the Well, is published with HappenStance Press.

Heaventree New Poets, now in its fourth volume, is a series collecting the best new poetry. The collections aspire to Heaventree’s philosophy of providing high quality new modern literature at a relatively low cost. Volume 4 featured Gregory Leadbetter alongside Patrick Gilmore and Jonathan Morley, three poets noted for their bold content and technical precision. To purchase a copy of Heaventree Poets, Volume 4 please visit the Heaventree Press website.

Gags

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Up from the descending semis,
Sean’s nan had the forest
in her mouth, bracken
plumbing her tongue.

The strait’s liquids
had changed a child’s sibil-
ance to ancient
occlusive stops.

We called her Gags.
My butty said he could
understand the babble.
I’m not sure.

She was a leaf-
thing, curled in her chair,
waiting for a second
turn to take her off.

by Richard Marggraf Turley

From The Fossil-Box (Cinnamon, 2007).

“I grew up in the Forest of Dean. ‘Gags’ was written as the final section in a longer poem called ‘Vorrest’, which explores the idea of Dean as part of my ‘impending past’. Gags was the nan of my childhood best butty (forest dialect); to our eyes she seemed as old and strange as the forest itself.”

Richard Marggraf Turley won First Prize in the Keats-Shelley Prize, 2007. His poems have appeared in journals and magazines. Richard was born in the Forest of Dean and moved to Wales when he was seven. Richard’s co-authored volume, Whiteout, appeared with Parthian in 2006. His first solo collection, The Fossil-Box, was published by Cinnamon in 2007. He is also the author of two books on the Romantic poets. Recent radio interviews include an appearance on Radio 3’s The Verb, presented by Ian McMillan.

Cinnamon Press is a young, fast-growing small press based in North Wales and publishing writers from Wales, the UK and internationally, as well as the poetry journal Envoi. The list is mainly poetry, but also includes some fiction and cross-genre books.