Parliament Hill Lido

May 4, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The clockwork of my father’s body wakes him at 6am,
pulls him by the eyelids out of bed toward the swim,

even in December dawn-drunk lunatics gather on goose-pimpled tiles,
the moon still floating, a lonely body in the sky.

The slap of water rearranges his synapses and as his feet kick
the ripple, his veins turn a serrated blue.

When I tell people about my father and his weirdness
I don’t mention how he speaks less if not for swimming

or those mornings when he returns
hair still wet, the blood bright in his cheeks,

how we cross on the doorstep both trying
to stay in our lane, our bodies in sharper focus.

by Lewis Buxton

We’re excited to announce a new online course from Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre designed for anyone who wants to develop their poetry and publish it more widely. Fire Up Your Poetry Practice takes place this June and features outstanding, award-winning tutors like Isabelle Baafi, Kostya Tsolakis, Les Robinson, Susie Campbell, and Mary Jean Chan. Find out more about the course on our website. Please note that the full course option and the session on 15 June are now fully booked up, but you can still book for other individual sessions. See the website for more details.

Notes from Nine Arches Press:

Boy in Various Poses, a debut collection of poems from Lewis Buxton, explores all the different types of boy you can be – tender, awful, thoughtful, vulnerable. Here, a maelstrom of mental health, male bodies, and sexuality is laid bare with wit and curiosity, and the complexity and multiplicity of gender itself is revealed.

The boy in question is often shapeshifting, slippery, unreliable, close yet never quite in focus, moving too fast to pause and take a breath – yet Buxton studies these boys, their bodies and behaviours, with a disarming intimacy and precision. These poems are provocative, nuanced and often laugh-out-loud funny, shining with a naked, shameless brilliance. Find out more about the collection on the Nine Arches website, where you can also pre-order a copy of the book.

Lewis Buxton was born in 1993 and is a poet, performer and arts producer. His poems have appeared in The Rialto, Magma, Ambit and Oxford Poetry. In 2018 he received the UEA Literary Festival Bursary and was named one of The Poetry School and Nine Arches Press’ Primers Volume Four poets. He is Director of the poetry project TOAST and teaches writing in schools and libraries around the country. He currently lives in Norfolk. Boy in Various Poses is his first collection. You can find out more about Lewis’s work from his website and follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2017, All My Mad Mothers by Jacqueline Saphra was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Our titles have also been shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize, and in 2016 David Clarke’s debut poems, Arc, was longlisted for the Polari Prize. To date we have published over one hundred poetry publications. Read more about the press here and follow Nine Arches on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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.

a black cloth over your face isn’t the same as night

April 26, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I used up the summer controlling people
[in a video game]. I made him handsome
and tall and I made her patent the peanut
-size sheath that keeps umbrellas open that keeps
them from collapse. She got picked up for work in
a mint green Datsun each morning and one day
I made him drop his soft wallet in the street
and I made her DING DING hurtle after him
like a sneeze. I watched their nailless fingers touch
and then I intervened because god! think of
a pursuit less fruitful than affinity!
I made them go about their days. He married
a dentist and she died young and he ran down
his years evading the diagnoses of
bruxism and she died young. Neither handed
the damp debasement of a life spent wanting.
Their lives were lilac aldehyde there was no
asbestos slung behind their walls. Now Autumn

is here and I need a life soft-edged with heart
motif a small girl’s ring-bound notebook. I need
insight. It oozes from the corners navy
damp DING DING You’re a product of your choices
you’re a totem pole you’re hunger on top of
caprice on top of the grazed cheeks of debauched
nights spent folded your face in the gravel like
an animal. I decide to fix things I
streamline my practices. I wear a yellow
mini dress in an always temperate clime.
My house is pristine now and if not I’ll eat
or fuck or swim to lessen the scores of it
all. I’ll buy a dog and then I’ll teach that dog
to die and when it does my children will be
prepared for everything in the world and then
– when my life is panacea smooth – a new
person will enter the game through the back door
DING DING yes it is attainment and we’ll dance.
We’ll dance to the open fire on the stove
top to the graceless wordless music to all
the things I mistook for the sky and we’ll dance
to the entombed cockatoo moans of my dog
– buried neat beneath the geranium bush.

by Susannah Dickey

The latest Poetry Centre podcast is now live! Poet celeste doaks talks about her wonderful chapbook American Herstory (Backbone Press, 2019), which explores Michelle Obama’s time in the White House and her choice of artwork for the White House walls! Listen via our website or the usual podcast providers.

‘a black cloth over your face isn’t the same as night’ is copyright © Susannah Dickey, 2020 and is reprinted here from bloodthirsty for marriage (Bad Betty Press, 2020) by permission of Bad Betty Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Bad Betty website.

Notes from Bad Betty Press:

There is an arresting and profound specificity to Susannah Dickey’s astute tragicomedy, in which the sky is ‘the colour of a cous cous salad’, gods rub shoulders with video game characters and everyone is enslaved to desire.

Corrupting the classically male, reportedly frivolous hendecasyllabic form, Dickey forges a register that feels both ancient and millennial. At the centre of this work beats a star-bright pain, seen through the poems’ breezy vacillations and squandered love, crushed to a shimmer. You can find out more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Bad Betty website.

Susannah Dickey is the author of three pamphlets, bloodthirsty for marriage (Bad Betty Press, 2020), I had some very slight concerns and genuine human values (The Lifeboat). Her first novel, Tennis Lessons, was published in July 2020 by Doubleday. You can follow Susannah on Twitter.

Bad Betty Press is an independent publisher of new poetry, founded in 2017 by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall. We love writing that is bad (in the Foxy Brown sense) and beautiful (‘a Betty’ in 90s slang). We love the strange, raw and risk-taking. We believe strongly in art’s capacity to challenge its own definition, to curve away from the norm, making space for more and varied voices. Find out more about our books on our website and follow Bad Betty on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

barmouth

April 19, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

mawddach estuary is a glittermouth.
sand breaches both land and sea, half-waves.
coming from two islands supposedly in enmity, i relate.
javanese keep our knives at our backs,
sumatrans at our fronts; is middle ground
a chest prepared for both to pierce.
is seawater planetary blood overflowing.

would make sense then, what they say will happen,
water’s haemorrhage into habitation. the threatened bajau
have had us all beat, as ocean-based peoples.
i close my eyes and imagine a bajau boy
who knows how to hold his breath until
the body quietly demands inhalation, who could survive
floods, heat, and isolation in white spaces
simply by going for the swims that are birthright,
each gulf a bay of earth-wound spilling welkin-tint
blood, a harbour in which to grieve and return.

by Khairani Barokka

News from the Centre: we’re delighted to say that tomorrow (Tuesday 20 April), this week’s poet, Khairani Barokka, will be giving a talk (via Zoom) at an English and Modern Languages Research Seminar at Oxford Brookes. Her talk is entitled ‘What We Owe the Dead: Multisensorial Materialities, Poem-Ethics, and Digital Surveillance’. The event is free for anyone to attend, and if you’d like the full Zoom details, visit the Poetry Centre Twitter account or contact Niall Munro (niall.munro@brookes.ac.uk).

‘barmouth’ is copyright © Khairani Barokka, 2021 and is reprinted here from Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches Press, 2021) by permission of Nine Arches Press. You can watch Khairani Barokka read poems from her collection on the Nine Arches YouTube channel, where you can also find a recording of the launch of her new collection.

Notes from Khairani Barokka and Nine Arches Press:

In the poem, Bajau refers to sea-oriented peoples in Southeast Asia. As with other sea-based indigenous communities, their way of life is continually threatened by environmentally and socially destructive processes.

Khairani Barokka’s second poetry collection, Ultimatum Orangutan, is an intricate exploration of colonialism and environmental injustice: her acute, interlaced language draws clear connections between colonial exploitation of fellow humans, landscapes, animals, and ecosystems. Amidst the horrifying damage that has resulted for peoples as interlinked with places, there is firm resistance. Resonant and deeply attentive, the lyricism of these poems is juxtaposed with the traumatic circumstances from which they emerge. Through these defiant, potent verses, the body—particularly the disabled body—is centred as an ecosystem in its own right. Barokka’s poems are every bit as alarming, urgent and luminous as is necessary in the age of climate catastrophe as outgrowth of colonial violence.

You can watch Khairani Barokka read poems from her collection on the Nine Arches YouTube channel, where you can also find a recording of the launch of her new collection.

Khairani Barokka is a writer and artist from Jakarta, based in London. Her work has been presented widely, in over 15 countries, and work from her Annah, Infinite series of performance installations has been an Artforum Must-See. Among Okka’s honours, she was a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow, and Modern Poetry in Translation’s Inaugural Poet-in-Residence. She is currently Associate Artist at the National Centre for Writing and Research Fellow at UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute. Okka’s books include Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis; Vietnamese translation, AJAR Press) and Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (as co-editor; Nine Arches), and debut collection Rope (Nine Arches). Find out more about Okka’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

The winter inside my mother

April 16, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Winter was never nailed down, would slip
from my mother like an expletive that had
her reverting to forty below, trawling wastes
of blizzard-bent woods. Evenings, stretched
out on our sofa, she’d place her toes, lunatic
with cold, to burn in my lap. And I pictured her
in stinging drifts, hoar-scald on her face, nearly
a corpse yet scavenging berries for a child
growled to life in the gaping white.
Always the Hibernian in her.
To worship snowfall. To cover her tracks.
And if I could say she ever found her way back
intact, it was only to bequeath the ice-melt stain
in the bureau drawer, with snapshot of her party trick –
to stand out on the road, join a line of leafless maples
and simply go bare.

by Katie Griffiths

‘The winter inside my mother’ is copyright © Katie Griffiths, 2021 and is reprinted here from The Attitudes (Nine Arches Press, 2021) by permission of Nine Arches Press. You can sign up for the launch of The Attitudes on 22 April via Eventbrite.

Notes from Nine Arches Press:

Katie Griffiths’ debut poetry collection, The Attitudes, is a search for trust and faith – in the body, in the mind, in all those things we seek to hold on to but cannot. Here, we intimately encounter mortality and tread the balance between visceral wisdom and the intellect, between fragile, fallible bodies, and the mind’s hold over them, between the bright spaces and the haunted ones.

In poems that are bold, effervescent, frequently playful, Griffiths approaches serious subjects – eating disorders, ageing, grieving – with a precise and inventive lyricism. The Attitudes compiles multitudes, with layer upon layer of counterpoints, juxtaposing and exploring the unresolvable, all the while seeking to move towards a place of deeper reflection and stillness away from the noise and distraction of the daily business of being alive. An astute and accomplished book which transforms. Read more about the book on the Nine Arches website and sign up for the launch of The Attitudes on 22 April via Eventbrite.

Katie Griffiths grew up in Ottawa, Canada, in a family originally from Northern Ireland. In 2019 she was awarded second prize in the National Poetry Competition with ‘Do not indulge indigo’ and had the pleasure of reading her own Spanish translation of the poem at the Cosmopoética festival in Cordoba, Spain. Her pamphlet My Shrink is Pregnant (illustrated by Anna Steinberg) was a winner in the Live Canon pamphlet competition. In 2016 she was published in Primers Volume One by Nine Arches Press. A member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen and Red Door Poets, Katie is also singer-songwriter in the band A Woman in Goggles. You can find out more about Katie’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

10th April 2020

April 6, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Dad has mowed the lawn two days in a row.
It explains our lives now – the pushing along

of a machine, blades with nothing to cut –
acting our lives out just to be purposeful.

I got dressed up for a zoom conference
and cried at a kind letter which landed on the doormat.

I need two witnesses who aren’t beneficiaries
to finalise my will. My lawyer suggests

I ask my neighbours to watch through the window,
because even with expected deaths the Government

aren’t changing the rules. The GP rang this afternoon
trying to talk about a DNR order. I refused,

instead told him about starlings murmurating
and all the living I have left to do.

by Hannah Hodgson

News from the Poetry Centre: our latest podcast is now available! Tune in to hear Scottish Gaelic poet Niall O’Gallagher read and discuss three poems – in Gaelic & English – and talk about issues of translation, traditional forms, and the Gaelic community in Glasgow/Ghlaschu. You can find the podcast on our website and also on the usual podcast providers – just search for ‘Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre Podcast’ – and do let us know what you think! We’re on social media @brookespoetry and you can e-mail us via the website.

‘10th April 2020’ is copyright © Hannah Hodgson, 2021. It is reprinted from Where I’d Watch Plastic Trees Not Grow (Verve Poetry Press, 2021) by permission of Verve Poetry Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and order a copy on the Verve website. Verve is offering a special bundle of all four of its recent pamphlets at a reduced price (all of which have been featured as Weekly Poems in recent instalments), and you can find out more about that offer on the Verve site.

Notes from Verve Poetry Press:

Hannah has taken her regular hospitalisations due to serious illness and made it into astonishing poetry in her pamphlet Where I’d Watch Plastic Trees Not Grow. Her world of the hospital is sometimes like a zoo, sometimes like a gallery and sometimes a crowded town square. The wards contain tigers and crows, butterflies – doctors become poets, the dead turn into an art installation, while outside, the trees are plastic – as unchanging as Hannah’s shielding days that ‘drag like a foot.’ But between the pulled curtains of these words the details of real-life amongst the terminally ill are depicted in full colour. A daughter ‘cries neatly in a corner’ while her mourning father spins ‘his wedding band around his finger.’ Nurses fill ‘carrier bags marked ‘patient’s property’,’ while ‘the industrial plastic’ crinkles as a body is lifted from bed to trolley in its bag. The poet’s eye feels unblinking at times – unable but also unwilling to blink. How could it when it has so much to show? These poems are heavy with import, but they are light with the liveliness of art that is beautifully rendered. Read more about the pamphlet on the Verve website.

Hannah Hodgson is a poet living with life-limiting illness. Her work has been published by the Poetry Society, Teen Vogue and Poetry Salzburg , amongst others. She is the recipient of a 2020 Northern Writers Award for Poetry. Her first poetry pamphlet Dear Body was published by Wayleave Press in 2018. You can read more about Hannah’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Verve Poetry Press is a Birmingham-based publisher dedicated to promoting and showcasing Birmingham and Midlands poetic talent in colourful and exciting ways – as you would expect from a press that has grown out of the giddy and flamboyant, annual four days of poetry and spoken word that is Verve Poetry Festival, Birmingham. Added to this is a colourful and prize-winning pamphlet series featuring poets who have previously performed at our sister festival and a debut performance poetry series, which has seen us working with the brightest rising stars on the UK spoken word scene. We also assert our right to publish any poetry we feel needs and deserves to find print wherever we find it. Verve was awarded the Saboteur Award for Most Innovative Publisher in 2019 and the Michael Marks Publisher’s Award 2019. Find out more about Verve Poetry Press on the publisher’s website and follow the press on Twitter and Instagram.

Clouds of Doubt

March 30, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Mother’s mouth was a story-telling flower,
painted in her favourite bougainvillea
lipstick, conjuring clouds of doubt
about where she was born.

Sometimes she’d say it was Cuernavaca,
‘the city of eternal spring’,
on the slopes of her beloved volcanoes
and the Chichinatzin mountains,

where dad would stop to buy her orchids.
Other times, she’d say we came from Mixtecs.
But she looked down on ‘indios’ and ‘prietos’,
only pointing out her skin colour

to boast how she turned chocolate in the sun.
While she resented my questions,
what else could I do? As a child,
I felt the weight she carried,

how she seemed trapped in her game
of concealing and revealing,
then sighs, quick laughter, silence.
My ancestors lie like budbursts in these tales.

by Marina Sánchez

Notes on the poem: Indios: native Indians from one of the many indigenous tribes in Mexico; Prietos: slang for someone who has dark skin.

News from the Poetry Centre: our latest podcast is now available! Tune in to hear Scottish Gaelic poet Niall O’Gallagher read and discuss three poems – in Gaelic & English – and talk about issues of translation, traditional forms, and the Gaelic community in Glasgow/Ghlaschu. You can find the podcast on our website and also on the usual podcast providers – just search for ‘Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre Podcast’ – and do let us know what you think! We’re on social media @brookespoetry and you can e-mail us via the website.

This week’s poem is taken from Marina Sánchez’s new pamphlet Mexica Mix, and you can sign up for the launch of the pamphlet tomorrow, 31 March, when Marina will be reading alongside three other poets who also have new pamphlets out with Verve: Hannah Hodgson, Jamie Hale, and Natalie Whittaker. We have shared poetry by Jamie and Natalie over the past few weeks and we’ll be featuring a poem by Hannah next week. Verve is offering a special bundle of all four of its recent pamphlets at a reduced price, and you can find out more about that offer on the Verve site,

‘Clouds of Doubt’ is copyright © Marina Sánchez, 2021. It is reprinted from Mexica Mix (Verve Poetry Press, 2021) by permission of Verve Poetry Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and order a copy on the Verve website.

Notes from Verve Poetry Press:

In her new pamphlet, Mexica Mix, Marina Sánchez, one of the most distinctive poets from the UK’s Latinx community, explores her experiences of living in Mexico, Spain and the UK. Through the arc of Family, Icons and Earth, she writes a profound, rich and well-crafted sequence of poems grappling with displacement, bilingual identity and mixed heritage, challenging cultural icons and affirming her relationship with the planet, rooted in her Indigenous Mexican ancestry. By turns lyrical, urgent, sensual and subversive, her powerful use of vivid imagery and language both voice the personal and engage the collective. You can learn more about the pamphlet on the Verve website.

Marina Sánchez is a Latinx mix of Indigenous Mexican/Spanish/British living in London. She is an award-winning poet and translator, widely published in literary journals. Her poems have been placed in many national and international competitions and then anthologised. Her debut pamphlet Dragon Child (Acumen, 2014), was Book of the Month in the poetry kit website and was featured in the British Library’s The Hidden Surprises of Poetry Pamphlets Event (2019). Some of her poems are included in Un Nuevo Sol (Flipped Eye, 2019), the first UK Latinx anthology. To find out more about Marina’s work, visit her poetry p f pages.

Time and space

March 24, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Roadside bombs under a sectioned sky,
the earth is the same, it is only borders, limits
that are perceptibly or imperceptibly changed.

That face that looks at me from the mirror’s surface
is changing year after year beyond recognition and is
recognised none the less.

I cannot wake up and see
myself as a child, only
where I find myself at this moment.

The language we speak is not quite
the same as before,
sound and meaning have shifted,

like a restless ocean,
like the architecture of clouds
in continuous transformation.

Time, it is called, but I sense space.
That the past exists osmotically here,
that all are present, the living and the dead.

Life is a continuous state of emergency,
nothing comes back, everything
comes back different.

Behind my eyes are souls from before,
just as present as you and I
forever here and now.
by Pia Tafdrup

Translated by David McDuff

‘Time and space’ is © Pia Tafdrup, 2021 and is translated by David McDuff. It is reprinted with permission fromThe Taste of Steel and The Smell of Snow (Bloodaxe Books, 2021). Find out more about the collection on the Bloodaxe site, where you can read further sample poems. You can also watch the excellent recent launch (a joint event with Maria Stepanova and Sasha Dugdale) on the Bloodaxe YouTube channel.

Pia Tafdrup is one of Denmark’s leading poets. She has published over 20 books in Danish since her first collection appeared in 1981, and her work has been translated into many languages. She received the 1999 Nordic Council Literature Prize – Scandinavia’s most prestigious literary award – for Queen’s Gate, which was published in David McDuff’s English translation by Bloodaxe in 2001. Also in 2001, she was appointed a Knight of the Order of Dannebrog, and in 2006 she received the Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy. Find out more about Pia’s work on her website.

The Taste of Steel and The Smell of Snow are the first two collections in Pia Tafdrup’s new series of books focussing on the human senses. While taste and smell dominate, the poems are equally about the way of the world and the losses that people sustain during the course of their lives – the disappearance of friends and family members, but also the erosion of control of one’s own existence. The themes of ecology, war and conflict are never far away, and there is a constant recognition of the circular nature of life, the interplay of the generations.

You can find out more about the book on the Bloodaxe website and watch the recent launch (a joint event with Maria Stepanova and Sasha Dugdale) on the Bloodaxe YouTube channel.

Pia Tafdrup’s previous series of themed collections was The Salamander Quartet (2002–2012). Written over ten years, its ﬁrst two parts were The Whales in Paris and Tarkovsky’s Horses, translated by David McDuff and published by Bloodaxe in 2010 asTarkovsky’s Horses and other poems. This was followed in 2015 by Salamander Sun and other poems, McDuff’s translation of The Migrant Bird’s Compass and Salamander Sun, the third and fourth parts of the quartet.

Bloodaxe Books was founded in Newcastle by Neil Astley in 1978 and has revolutionised poetry publishing in Britain over four decades. Internationally renowned for quality in literature and excellence in book design, our authors and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry, from the T.S. Eliot Prize and Pulitzer to the Nobel Prize. And books like the Staying Alive series have broken new ground by opening up contemporary poetry to many thousands of new readers. Find out more about Bloodaxe on the publisher’s website and follow the press on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

viii

March 18, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

the war had ended and we, the survivors
all rotten-toed and trench-tired went home safe
to the Kansas base and we had survived the war
survived the sinking mud and shells and

just when we thought the war had ended safe
and heading back home from Kansas sick, a cough
of relief we said we spread across the states
to the arms of our families coughing a bit

but just a bit we said and not that bad and then
we were dying they were dying dying and nobody
knew the flu had dogged our footsteps home
all those hungry ghosts still out there entrenched

and they say that we were the victors in coffins
and urns they say that we were the victors

by Jamie Hale

This week’s poem is taken from Jamie Hale’s new pamphlet Shield, and you can sign up for the launch of the pamphlet on 31 March, when Jamie will be reading alongside three other Verve poets who also have new pamphlets out with Verve: Hannah Hodgson, Marina Sánchez, and Natalie Whittaker, whose work we shared last week. We’ll be featuring work by Hannah and Marina as upcoming Weekly Poems.

‘viii’ is copyright © Jamie Hale, 2021. It is reprinted from Shield (Verve Poetry Press, 2021) by permission of Verve Poetry Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and order a copy on the Verve website.

Notes from Verve Poetry Press:

As the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, Jamie was told by their GP that, due to their underlying health condition, they would not be a priority for critical care treatment.

Using the compressed form of a sonnet, Jamie wrote and re-wrote the experience of facing their own mortality, sometimes in their own voice, sometimes from the perspectives of others – a nurse working during the pandemic or the first carriers of the Spanish Flu – capturing the crisis from all angles. This work became a pamphlet, Shield, 21 sonnets following Jamie through the grief of facing death while newly married, and into a place of resilience, resistance, and a commitment to creation against mortality.

Jamie Hale is an artist, curator, poet, writer, playwright, actor, and director. They create poetry, comedy, scriptwriting, and drama for page, stage, and screen. They have performed their work at the Barbican, Invisible Fest, Tate Modern, the Southbank Centre and with Graeae, and have written for publications including the Guardian and Magma. Their pandemic poetry pamphlet, Shield, was published in January 2021. They are also an expert in disability and health and social care policy: They are CEO of Pathfinders Neuromuscular Alliance, chair of Lewisham Disabled People’s Commission, and are studying for a Master’s degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics of Health at UCL.

Find out more about Jamie’s work on their website or follow them on Twitter.

tree

March 10, 2021March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

on the path to the station
there’s a tree      that marks the seasons
look baby       blossom
look baby       leaves
look baby       autumn
next year I’ll show you autumn and it will be so beautiful
the world is      so beautiful
I will show you

one day I wake up and it’s November
bare branches are faulty umbilical cords
failing to implant the sky

tree

medical students perch around the room
drawn to our rare        and bitter fruit

the consultant sketches     winter branches
in biro blue        to explain what connects

me to you      what’s not getting through

by Natalie Whittaker

This week we are very pleased to share two poems by Natalie Whittaker from her second pamphlet, Tree, which is being published by Verve Poetry Press on 15 March. These two pieces appear at either end of Natalie’s new pamphlet. As some readers will know, we published Natalie’s first pamphlet, Shadow Dogs, in 2018 through our ignitionpress, and it’s great to see Natalie continuing her publication success with this latest, very moving and powerful collection.

Do sign up for the launch of Tree on 31 March, when Natalie will be reading alongside three other Verve poets who also have new pamphlets out with Verve: Hannah Hodgson, Marina Sánchez, and Jamie Hale. We’ll be featuring work by Hannah, Marina and Jamie as upcoming Weekly Poems.

‘Tree’ and ‘Tree’ are copyright © Natalie Whittaker, 2021. They are reprinted from Tree (Verve Poetry Press, 2021) by permission of Verve Poetry Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and pre-order a copy on the Verve website.

Notes from Verve Poetry Press:

In Tree, Natalie Whittaker is writing about her personal experience of stillbirth and the mental illness that can follow such a traumatic event. It is a subject that is still rarely addressed in poetry, writing or conversation. That she is able to do so here, in eighteen intricate, carefully crafted poems, in a way that is engaging, communicative, distressing and yet also beautiful, is a testament to her abilities as a poet, her strong grasp on the power of language and the power of her imagination.

With these powers, she brings a harrowing subject close up and enables the reader to truly feel, to see, to understand, to share. It is a brave and necessary work, wonderfully and heartbreakingly realised. Read more about the pamphlet on the Verve Poetry Press website.

Natalie Whittaker is a poet and secondary school teacher from South East London. Her debut pamphlet Shadow Dogs was published by ignitionpress in 2018. Natalie is one of the London Library’s emerging writers for 2020 / 2021. Her poems have been widely published in UK magazines and anthologies; she was commended in the Verve poetry competition 2020, and won second place in the Kent and Sussex poetry competition 2020. You can follow Natalie on Twitter and Instagram.

Verve Poetry Press is a Birmingham-based publisher dedicated to promoting and showcasing Birmingham and Midlands poetic talent in colourful and exciting ways – as you would expect from a press that has grown out of the giddy and flamboyant, annual four days of poetry and spoken word that is Verve Poetry Festival, Birmingham. Added to this is a colourful pamphlet series featuring poets who have previously performed at our sister festival – Natalie’s pamphlet is the latest addition to this prize-winning series – and a debut performance poetry series, which had seen us working with the brightest rising stars on the UK spoken word scene. We also assert our right to publish any poetry we feel needs and deserves to find print wherever we find it. Verve was awarded the Saboteur Award for Most Innovative Publisher in 2019 and the Michael Marks Publisher’s Award 2019. Find out more about Verve Poetry Press on the publisher’s website and follow the press on Twitter and Instagram.

COMPLAINING

March 3, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

After Terrance Hayes

If it wasn’t for your constant moaning,

I may have taken you seriously. You ask me if oiling

engines would have been more worthwhile. There is still so long

for you to go, and you’re stuck trying to be honest and plain

in your work, wondering if your lamp

is worth the match that failed to light it, mapping

your way through your mental list of excuses. Your peers are icons

not because they are valuable and you are a failing coin,

but because they are good at carrying on. Yet here you are, nailing

yourself to a spaghetti stick cross, impaling

your loins with a toothpick. Child, behave. Stop pretending your task is the mouth of a lion.

by Gabriel Àkámọ́

News from the Poetry Centre: one of our recent ignitionpress pamphlets, Ripe by Isabelle Baafi, was selected as the Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2021! You can read more about the pamphlet, hear Isabelle talk about it, and buy a copy on our website. Ripe was launched alongside two other pamphlets: Lung Iron by Daniel Fraser and Kostya Tsolakis’s Ephebos – they are also both available from our site.

‘COMPLAINING’ is copyright © Gabriel Àkámọ́, 2020 and is reprinted here from At the Speed of Dark (Bad Betty Press, 2020) by permission of Bad Betty Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Bad Betty website.

Notes from Bad Betty Press:

In At the Speed of Dark, Gabriel Àkámọ́ pits the mind’s chiaroscuro against the many shades of grey that make up our reality. These questioning poems hold empiricism and faith, gravity and progress in the balance. Formally expansive, they play on the equivocation of white space, its ‘faux-quirky false irony’. Like an epiphany lost on waking, they entreat us to slow down, ‘reclaiming time, clawing back at the clearness of sky.’ Read more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Bad Betty website.

Gabriel Àkámọ́ is a Nigerian-British poet, actor, facilitator, and creative producer. He has worked with organisations including Rich Mix, Roundhouse and WIRED Next Generation, been commissioned by institutions such as the Southbank Centre, St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Royal Academy of Arts, and been a speaker at Gresham College. Festival performances include Lovebox and Bestival, and Festival Kometa in Riga, Latvia. He is a proud Barbican Young Poet alumnus, National Youth Theatre alumnus, and a former Roundhouse Resident Artist (2016-17) with Spit the Atom Poetry Collective. You can read more about Gabriel’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter and Instagram.