Author: oxfordbrookesuni

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~ oxfordbrookesuni

I am sure I shouldn’t hate myself for feeling guilty! what can I do! Let me say it was a struggle to give up punctuation but we all have to make sacrifices not everybody has such a lot of punctuation these days better not have any just to be quite fair but there are some things I can’t quite give up it’s wicked I know it’s the apostrophes that get me I could never resist a well-placed apostrophe dinky things when you come to think about it wriggling there like the fish and the hook all in one sometimes I wake up with such a craving for a semicolon they say those are the worst bring you to a halt sooner than anything else and abolish your vitals like a dissolving fire so I just remind myself you’ve got to talk to people at work today no punctuation at all till after six p.m. then you can put your feet up and snuggle on the sofa in an Argos fleece throw with a mug of hot chocolate and a dash or so as a little pressie to yourself and watch The Bill is it wrong to wish sometimes I wish I were back in Europe it was grand that summer over there I would get up with a real thirst hold off till about ten in the morning then sit in that café in the cool with a tall glass of fizzing vitamins and brilliant punctuation there were real people from Europe at that café and you know what they had been at it since breakfast as far as I could tell big dignified people happy as children with crystal and stoneware brackets and suspensions properly placed you could see how they liked it they thought the rules were fun though I am sure they must have had their sacrifices somewhere just like us yet the funny old things weren’t self-conscious at all go figure.

Yes!

by Vahni Capildeo

from Person Animal Figure by Vahni Capildeo
Copyright © Vahni Capildeo

Person Animal Figure is a long poem in three voices, represented by three different kinds of prose poetry. Here, the voice which seems to represent ‘Person’ reflects upon her own unpunctuated thoughts as she sets them down, characteristically drifting off into memories of comfort and pleasure. The ‘Yes!’ that ends the paragraph is perhaps an acknowledgment of a literary ancestor for this shrewd vulgarian: Molly Bloom, whose stream-of-consciousness concludes James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Vahni Capildeo was born in 1973, in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. She came to England in 1991. Her first book, No Traveller Returns, was published by Salt in 2003.

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

The Third Way

~ oxfordbrookesuni

We set out early, riding through the day
on the broad summer roads of Logres,
yet further out from Camelot
the paths grew narrower, & woodland nearer.
Approaching the borders of the other land,
one of us – or sometimes more – would start,
glimpsing some dream-creature among dim trees,
very close now; no more familiar wolf & boar,
but faun or centaur would appear for a moment,
then flick away into the undergrowth, leaving us
uneasily wondering whether to doubt
or to speak. It was difficult here to see birds,
and they seemed changed, and knowing.
We came with falling night
to the place where three ways meet,
the Road against Reason,
the Road without Mercy,
the Road without a Name.

And the third way brought us here,
to the Waste City;
demons that obeyed the enchanter Virgilius,
giants, or worse, must have built the nodding walls,
the vaulted palace and huge towers
whose ruin is our silent home;
we cannot read its inscriptions
or decipher its mosaics;
the images of Emperor & City are distorted
as by a witch’s mirror or pack of cards;
we find no living soul here
but ourselves, who cannot leave.

by Sally Purcell

from Collected Poems
Anvil, 2002
Copyright © Hilary Purcell 2002

Sally Purcell is an unusual poet and it is not easy to choose a single representative poem by her. She published four main collections of poetry and prepared the last of them just before her final illness at the age of 54. This poem, like so many of hers, draws on folklore and mediaeval sources. Her poems have a dramatic tension, are fluid in rhythm and diction, and alive with a sense of the numinous. Anvil published her Collected Poems, edited by Peter Jay and with an introduction by Marina Warner, in 2002.

Sally Purcell was born in Bromsgrove, Worcs in 1944. She studied French and Provençal at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and continued to live and work in Oxford (as typist, barmaid, researcher and, above all, writer) until her death in 1998.

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

Frozen

~ oxfordbrookesuni

We pooled out into a field at dawn,
a scattering of angry men
and me, fierce at the heart of them,
my back still wet with blood,
shining from the whip. I was calm,
like water. The pressure of it
frozen. Men, my men. I had those
marks on my bare legs
from damp grass, my bodice
was open, they could see
my breasts. But I was their sister,
their goddess, their queen;
my lightning grief was theirs,
my thunder anger rolled
across the milky fields, a star
for them to follow – on foot
or broken, on their knees.

by Jane Holland

This poem is taken from Jane Holland’s second collection, Boudicca & Co., a provocative  and vibrant exploration of women and their roles in society. The perennial themes of motherhood, love and sex jostle for space here with elegies, poetry written for performance, and Celtic-inspired mythological pieces. Richly allusive, these poems create networks between each other, tell stories, make music and ask unexpected questions of the reader.  

A collection with a powerful sense of place, Boudicca & Co. is located mainly within the British Isles, though not always in the present day. Often retrospective in mood, these poems deal with the poet’s own difficult past and with historical Britain, reinventing Celtic and Medieval stories and myths in particular. Yet there is also a Britain here that never existed, a landscape of the imagination, where a restless questioning spirituality tries to make sense of the gaps between expectation and reality. 

Sensual and politically engaged, Boudicca & Co. drives narrative poetry in new feminist directions, creating a host of female characters with strong individual voices and complex agendas. The title poem is a long ambitious sequence in the voice of Boudicca, disenfranchised Queen of the Iceni who leads the Ancient Britons in rebellion against the Roman settlers. It follows Boudicca’s transition from wife and mother to warrior queen, prepared to kill in the pursuit of freedom, blindly ruthless in her desire for revenge. The sequence explores the themes of national identity, personal betrayal and civil war with dark anarchic humour and an uncompromising starkness not for the faint-hearted.

Jane Holland is an English poet, novelist, editor and former professional snooker player, born in Essex in 1966. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1996. Her first collection, The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman, was published by Bloodaxe in 1997. A first novel, Kissing the Pink, followed from Sceptre in 1999. One of the top poetry performers in the Midlands, she lives in Warwickshire with her husband and five children. She was named Warwick Poet Laureate in 2007.

For further information, go to Salt Publishing.

Please note: we’ll be taking a break over Easter – the Weekly Poem service will resume at the beginning of April.

Falling Asleep with Henry James

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The wrongly placed (as it had seemed to him)
Apostrophe got up upon its several
Tiny feet, strode purposefully across

The margin and began a traverse
Of the ridges of his index fingernail.
In the meantime, Miles had passed his arm

Around his little sister and was reading
To her as they walked together, up and down,
In the garden.   No doubt an English

Garden with flowerbeds ─ nothing to match
The Villa Rincon and its high, cool terraces,
The grey-green leaves of the olive trees

Set off by the wrinkling blue of the sea.
Page fifty-six was where his marker was.
The children had evidently gone inside.

But not the pair of ladies, who were deep
In agitated conversation.   Fifty-eight.
The cicadas had stopped, leaving behind

One of those silent moments when the world
Seems to have gathered itself together
And be crouching.  The younger of the ladies

Was threatening to leave.   A pine cone dropped,
And he had the uneasy feeling there was
Someone else looking out from underneath

His eyelids and leaning their elbows
(Could it be Quint?) on the sills of his skull.
And in that instant nothing seemed to him

More natural than that these things, as he
Had read somewhere, should be those other things
Which clearly they were absolutely not.

by Neil Curry

from Other Rooms: New & Selected Poems (2007)

There is a powerfully dramatic and narrative quality to the new poems which preface Neil Curry’s Other Rooms, and we hear in them a wide variety of voices speaking to us from different times and different places, but speaking to us of things which nevertheless concern us deeply today.  Whatever form Curry adopts is handled with flexibility and skill, and wherever the poems are set there is a geographical and linguistic exactness which makes them as compelling as his acclaimed translations of the classics.    

Neil Curry was born in Newcastle upon Tyne and now lives in Ulverston in the Lake District. His verse translations of Euripides, published by Methuen and Cambridge University Press, and in the USA by Doubleday, have been performed in many countries. Enitharmon has published his four earlier collections:  Ships in Bottles (1988), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Walking to Santiago (1992), The Bending of the Bow (1993) and The Road to the Gunpowder House (2003).

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 poem is nothing”

~ oxfordbrookesuni

i

the poem is nothing
if not an anvil

scolding spikes of tangerine get
hammered into various shapes on its surface

maybe a wild black horse or
a scrap of the moon or a girl
sitting on the rim of a fountain
about to fall in or not
about to fall in & ruin her good summer dress
or a set of steel teeth with a winding mechanism
big enough to chew the entire city up
munch munch off it goes

glaring sparks rainbow through the air
they could start fires but the poem
stays cool black motionless & there
you can’t shift it now

ii

the poem is nothing if not an anvil
it whistles down the coyote gets it

by Simon Turner

Simon Turner has been writing poetry for ten years and this poem comes from his collection, You Are Here, recently published by Heaventree. He lives and works in Warwickshire. Alongside other West Midlands poets, Matt Nunn and Milorad Krystanovich, Simon Turner’s work is part of a larger-scale movement in innovative contemporary poetry in the region, supported by Heaventree.

The Heaventree Press is an independent poetry press based in Coventry. For more information on Heaventree and to buy You Are Here, please visit the Heaventree Press website.

Flax

~ oxfordbrookesuni

There are two kinds of flax – the first
has blue flowers.

I picked some this morning,
oversleeping

in a shimmering Lincolnshire field.

Simple clothing and sheets –
that keep temperatures low.

The other flax – a bluer blue
(my reference works don’t have enough pictures).

I picked some this morning,
treking back from that radiant Lincolnshire.

This flax endures, bluesy at the roadside.
It cheers a place up, kept to a small vase.

(Varnish – a layer
to seal this spoken
painting, your painting.)

by Richard Price

from Earliest Spring Yet by Richard Price (Landfill, 2006)
Copyright © Richard Price

Richard Price is Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library. His widely-acclaimed first collection, Lucky Day (2005), was nominated for the Whitbread and Forward poetry prizes. His new collection, Greenfields, was published by Carcanet earlier this year.

‘Flax’ is from the title sequence of Earliest Spring Yet. Its lyricism hovers between sleep and waking. Like the rest of the poems in the book, it is a love poem, but an oblique one. The speaker seems to be living two lives, symbolised by the poem’s two flowers: one in a lonely dream of fields, and one in the real world of roadsides. The ‘blues’ of both are presented in conclusion to a private addressee as a ‘spoken / painting’, a picture of the speaker’s heart.

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

The Potter’s Field

~ oxfordbrookesuni

or A Wanderer’s Song

Since I am a stranger, since I am a guest,
Bury me in the Potter’s Field, that which is called
The field of blood. Here is calculated
The utility of a kiss on a bearded
Cheek, by night, beneath the olives,
In the smoky light of torch and legend.
He who lies there will lie forever
Between the hanged and the crucified
And moulder in frightful balance.
Bury me in the Potter’s Field,
Because it was bought, in the words of the book,
To bury strangers in. Wayfarers, rovers
Lay claim to it: those who seek
Peace in movement, security in rootlessness,
Are otherwise suspicious, and usually keep
Their silence, if not always about the same;
Their shadows are dusty from the road
And a little denser than most—
So bury me with my shadow:
The weeds will grow blacker in the Potter’s Field.

by Ivan V. Lalic, translated by Francis R. Jones

from The Passionate Measure
Anvil, 1989
Copyright © Ivan V Lalic 1989
Translation copyright © Francis R Jones 1989

Translated poetry is sometimes regarded as a second-hand or inferior form of poetry, but in the hands of an imaginative translator as close to the poet and the poetry as is Francis Jones, one feels that the poems might well have been written originally in English. And Lalic himself, a Serbian with idiomatic English who translated a lot of English poetry into Serbian, thought that Jones’s translations were a perfect mirror of his poems.

This poem is from what is possibly Lalic’s finest collection, published in Jones’s translation in 1989. It needs no comment and is a good example of Lalic’s marvellous work. He was born in 1931 and died in 1996. Anvil hopes to publish his Collected Poems in English in 2008.

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

In Praise of Aunts

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I conjure Aunts, sly laughers,
Aunts not of the blood
but of the spirit; invite
from their cold cots for scones and tea
Aunts who could cheat
and fib for fun, playing Old Maid
in silent riot, keeping a card
up a knickerleg; Aunts who would never
hurt a child to do it good;

Aunts without men, good sports,
bachelor Aunts eternally retired
who liked dogs, who could whistle,
Aunts with pockets, pocketsful
of small timely treats,
and not wincing at stickiness
nor at blood as they strode
through the war, through the wards,
voluntary servant goddesses.

You women long at peace,
rooted in sycamore scrub
beneath St. Peter’s topsyturvy stones
without memorial: I will praise
your names, your dented hats and bulging shoes,
who pedalled across my dream
last night with shining spokes and hubs
and cracked halloos and glimpse of knees,
old children in your upright childless bones.

by M.R. Peacocke

from In Praise of Aunts (Peterloo, 2008)

M.R. (Meg) Peacocke’s poem “In Praise of Aunts”  is the title poem of her new collection (Peterloo, 2008).  Her previous volumes are: Marginal Land (Peterloo, 1988), Selves (Peterloo, 1995) and Speaking of the Dead (Peterloo, 2003).  All her volumes have received exceptionally favourable national review coverage.  Reviewing her first volume for London Magazine, Stephen Knight wrote “Like Larkin, Peacocke has that all-too-rare gift of knowing how to make a memorable poem”, and reviewing her second volume for Stand, John Lucas wrote of her “truly inventive elegance, wit, and immaculately-controlled feeling” and described Selves as “a gem of a collection”.  Her third collection received full-page coverage in Guardian Saturday Review. 

Meg Peacocke was born in 1930 and grew up in South Devon.  She read English at Oxford and after teaching, travelling, marriage and bringing up a family of four, a training in counselling and work in a children’s cancer unit she moved to a small hill farm in Cumbria where she still lives.

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

Lamb

~ oxfordbrookesuni

We left him sleeping peaceful in the night
but they have tied him down, bony wrists
wrapped in a sheepskin cuff, lashed tightly to the rail.

He was fierce after we left, they say:
shouting, tearing at the drip. Hard to believe it
of this gentle man, but this morning,

unbound for the time we’re there, he cavils,
clawing at the needle in his arm, moaning
and stubborn, baring his teeth at us

when we refuse. I stroke his fettered hand,
his paper forehead, murmur comfort,
courage, anything. He shakes me off, tossing

his head, red-eyed, an angry ram. Ha!
I must remember who I am: his child,
just a child, why do I question him?

So I hold my tongue, but stay. Lift up the cup,
with its candy-striped concertina straw,
to his splintered lip and he, in resignation, sucks.

Yes, we make a meagre congregation, father,
disobedient. The flesh, indeed, is weak.
Still, remembered echoes of his sermons come:

a promised child, the tangled ram, the sheep-clothed son;
last-minute rescues, legacies, and lies.
The promised and the chosen, certain hopes.

How, from these stories, are we to be wise?
His word was clear and sure before, but now
his raging, rambling, shakes this listener’s heart.

And yet, to be here, of some small use,
is a kind of peace. Three spoons of food,
oil for his hands, his feet. Then at last,
at last, returning to gentleness, he sleeps.

by Isobel Dixon

This poem is taken from the painful sequence ‘Meet My Father’, gathered in A Fold in the Map, which forms a searching exploration of grief at a father’s final painful journey into death.

A Fold in the Map is a nod to Jan Morris’s Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere, where the traveller’s state of in-between-ness is explored. Robert Frost said “a poem begins as a lump in the throat, a home-sickness, a love-sickness” and in these poems of love and longing for home, family, and other loved ones, Isobel Dixon draws on a rich store of natural imagery, illuminating the ordinary at times with a touch of wry humour. Her vivid poems will speak memorably to travellers, lovers and all those who mourn.

Isobel Dixon was born in Umtata, South Africa, grew up in the Karoo region and studied in Stellenbosch, and then in Edinburgh, before the world of publishing lured her to work in London. She now lives in Cambridge. Her poetry has been widely published in South Africa, where she won the Sanlam Prize and the Olive Schreiner Prize for her collection Weather Eye. Internationally, her work has been published in The Paris Review, Wasafiri, Avocado, The Guardian, London Magazine, and The Tall Lighthouse Review, among others, and has been translated into Dutch and Turkish. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, including several of the British Council New Writing volumes, and she read on the first Oxfam Life Lines CD. She does regular readings around the country, often with a group of London-based poets, and has also participated in two group pamphlets Unfold and Ask for It by Name.

For further information, and to read more of Dixon’s poems, go to Salt Publishing.

A Bowlful of Tongues

~ oxfordbrookesuni

As we are swallowed by the city’s
lips, open like a kiss,
we all find something to shout about,

the jib of the rain sheared pure
from the backs of pullover clouds
by the falling nuts and bolts
of swearing sprayed by sentimental truckers.

A booing flight of volleyed songbirds
drop shadows all across villa park, croaky throated
with joining in that famous folksong sung
by the proud Tilton singers,
who have proved, that if you keep right on,
eventually, paradise will be yours.

If you happen too quick you’ll remember
to forget the grief that greets as you look back
at the big bloke you’ll never meet until
it’s too late, confronting those who’ve lost
the plot banged against the bumper in front.

Spaghetti steams with a hiss pop cackle of radios
on the blink and a tape of the Status Quo unspooling
like the roads straightening beyond Birmingham calling
in our accent crafted from bitter and graft.

When you bleed out from the Heart towards wherever
it is you feel comfortably zipped,
through suburbs coupled up to share a name
and Somewhere towns someone, somehow,
must love,
but not us,

by Matt Nunn

Matt Nunn was born in West Bromwich in 1971. This poem comes from Happy Cos I’m Blue, his second collection. He is a freelance writer and poetry workshop leader and lives in Birmingham. ‘A Bowlful of Tongues’ was commissioned by BBC Radio to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the opening of Spaghetti Junction.

The Heaventree Press is an independent poetry press based in Coventry. For more information on Heaventree and to buy Happy Cos I’m Blue, please visit the Heaventree Press website.