Author: oxfordbrookesuni

City of forbidden shrines

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I was almost born in the lunar month of padded clothing
             in the solar term of almost summer
in the season of ringing cicadas
             in the city of forbidden shrines

almost spent a girlhood watching sandstorms
             tearing through the almost golden sunlight
I almost scraped dust off my knees each day for fifteen years
             almost painted paper tigers each year to burn

I could almost hold all the meanings of 家 in my mouth
             without swallowing: [home, family, domestic
a measure word for every almost-place I’ve ever been]
             like the swimming pool turning almost blue
or the mausoleum of almost ten thousand oranges 

here I would have never breathed an ocean
             never held mountains in my hands
                         except in almost-dreams
in which long white clouds drift
                         almost close enough to touch


by Nina Mingya Powles

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition for 2020 is closing for entries soon! Our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson, and as always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visitour website.

‘City of forbidden shrines’ is copyright © Nina Mingya Powles, 2020. It was originally published (in a slightly different form) in Literary Shanghai, and is reprinted here from Magnolia, 木蘭(Nine Arches Press, 2020) by permission of Nine Arches Press. Read more about the book here, and watch the book launch on the Nine Arches YouTube channel.

Notes from Nine Arches Press:

Magnolia, 木蘭, Nina Mingya Powles’ first full collection, dwells within the tender, shifting borderland between languages, and between poetic forms, to examine the shape and texture of memories, of myths, and of a mixed-race girlhood. Abundant with multiplicities, these poems find profound, distinctive joy in sensory nourishment – in the sharing of food, in the recounting of memoirs, or vividly within nature. This is a poetry deeply attuned to the possibilities within layers of written, spoken and inherited words. A journal of sound, colour, rain and light, these poems also wield their own precise and radical power to name and reclaim, draw afresh their own bold lines. Learn more about the book and buy a copy here.

Nina Mingya Powles is a poet and zinemaker from Aotearoa New Zealand, currently living in London. She is the author of a food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (The Emma Press, 2020), and several poetry pamphlet collections including Luminescent (Seraph Press, 2017) and Girls of the Drift (Seraph Press, 2014). In 2018 she was one of three winners of the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize, and in 2019 won the Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. She is the founding editor of Bitter Melon苦瓜, a risograph press that publishes limited-edition poetry pamphlets by Asian writers. Find out more about Nina’s work on  her website and follow her  on Twitter.

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 ninety 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.

Security Alert

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Before you read this
I have to ask you some questions:
Could you tell me if you are any of the following:
migrant, immigrant, refugee, asylum seeker, émigré,
clandestine, sans papiers, foreigner,
or a son or daughter of any of the above
or if you LOOK like as if you could be any of the above?
In which case please
state your name, date of birth
height, weight, inside leg measurement, blood group, hospital records,
skin colour, income,
preferred sandwich type.

Are you in receipt of any loans or any imported meat products?
Do you intend to stay in this country longer than two minutes?
Do you intend to study anything that is not maths?
Do you have a wife, husband or both?
Please sing the national anthem when I say the word ‘Queen’
And answer the following questions:
why is Britain great?
why is everywhere else not so great?
what is the Anglo Saxon word for great?
do you wear red, white and blue underwear?

Please step this way.
To see if you have answered all these questions truthfully,
we need to do a rectal examination.
 

by Michael Rosen

There are just a few weeks left to enter our International Poetry Competition! We’re delighted to say that our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson. As always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners in each receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visit our website.

Our latest podcast, with American poet Maya C. Popa, is now live! You can find it on our website and via the usual podcast providers – just search for brookespoetry. Maya discusses her exciting new collection, American Faith (Sarabande Books, 2019), and you can find the poems she reads and talks about on our Podcasts page.

‘Security Alert’ is copyright © Michael Rosen, 2017. It is reprinted from Listening to a Pogrom on the Radio (Smokestack Books, 2017) by permission of Smokestack Books.

Notes from Smokestack Books:

‘Poetry can stick up for the weak’ according to Michael Rosen, or it can ‘mock the mighty’; it can ‘glorify our rulers or it can dissect them. You choose.’ In these powerful new poems Rosen is clear about his own choices. Listening to a Pogrom on the Radio is a book about anti-Semitism, racism, fascism and war, Trump, Le Pen, and the Tory assaults on the NHS and education – the stupid and the sinister, the ridiculous and the revolting. In his first collection for grown-ups since Don’t Mention the Children (2015), Michael Rosen confirms his reputation as the heir to Jacques Prévert, Ivor Cutler and Adrian Mitchell. Few poets writing today can move so effortlessly between childishness and childlike seriousness, or dare to ask, like the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, why the silly emperor is not wearing any clothes. Read more about the book and buy a copy on the  Smokestack website.

Michael Rosen was born in North London in 1946. After university he worked for the BBC on Play School and Schools TV. He has written and edited over 140 books, including Mind Your Own Business, Wouldn’t You Like to Know, Mustard, Custard, Grumble Belly and Gravy, You Tell Me, No Breathing in Class and Quick Let’s Get Out of Here. You Can’t Catch Me! won the Signal Poetry Award. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, won the Smarties Prize. He currently presents Radio Four’s long-running Word of Mouth. His most recent books include The Disappearance of Emile Zola, The Author, Workers’ Tales, Reading Rebellion and So They Call You Pisher! He was Children’s Laureate from 2007-2009 and is Professor of Children’s Literature at Goldsmith’s, University of London. Find out more about Michael’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.

Smokestack is an independent publisher of radical and unconventional poetry run by Andy Croft. Smokestack aims to keep open a space for what is left of the English radical poetic tradition in the twenty-first century. Smokestack champions poets who are unfashionable, radical, left-field and working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority. Smokestack is interested in the World as well as the Word; believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society; argues that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry. Smokestack’s list includes books by John Berger, Michael Rosen, Katrina Porteous, Ian McMillan, Steve Ely, Bertolt Brecht (Germany), Gustavo Pereira (Venezuela), Heinrich Heine (Germany), Andras Mezei (Hungary), Yiannis Ritsos (Greece) and Victor Jara (Chile). David Cain’s Truth Street, an epic-poem that is part oral history and part documentary theatre, draws on eye-witness testimonies of the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium Disaster and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019. You can find Smokestack on Facebook and on Twitter.  

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.

Intermittent Fasting

~ oxfordbrookesuni

You remember I held your pinkie
as we watched from the curtain?
Father’s hands tight in prayer
around mother’s soft neck. You remember
we thought he’d wring her like a chicken?                                                           

Your wedding day—Mother sat next to the empty
reservation, her quivering hands
giving you away. White knuckles
clutched the programme with bad print.
Remember as you danced
out of our father’s name,
mum collapsed—beautiful workhorse
with his broken world on her back. 


by Summer Young

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition for 2020 is open for entries! We’re delighted to say that our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson. As always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners in both categories receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visit our website .

‘Intermittent Fasting’ is copyright © Summer Young, 2020. It is reprinted from Sylvanian Family (Bad Betty Press, 2020) by permission of Bad Betty Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and buy it here.

Summer Young is a poet from Norwich. She completed a BA in Creative Writing at The University of Winchester, and now lives in London where she co-runs Lemon Curd Magazine. Her work has appeared in Vortex Literary Journal, Asterism Literary Journal, and Lemon Curd Magazine. You can follow Summer on Twitter.

Sylvanian Family is Summer Young’s first pamphlet. Reading it is like folding yourself into a deceptively miniature world, a cat’s eye view of a dystopian Wonderland. Here, shoe prints are rabbit snares, a mother is a mountain, the trellis-like family home encompasses a complex ecosystem of cockroaches and fireflies, mice and sea urchins. In this arresting debut, Young invokes the visceral candor of Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, and confronts trauma with a fierce and virtuosic wit. Read more about the pamphlet on the Bad Betty website.

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 here and follow Bad Betty 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.

My mother’s aria

~ oxfordbrookesuni

My mother went into labour holding a sledge hammer
in a house with no floorboards or hot water.

My mother went to a hospital with black iron gates
6 weeks early in snow in December.
My dad took cheese sandwiches;
Wear your hair down he said.

I was backwards moving forwards
leaving my shoulder behind – my mother roared
while outside the snow got deep.

We are sorry for your loss, we will take care of your wife.
But my mother roared
and the doctor arrived from the Opera

wearing a cape to reach into my mother
and pull me out broken
to my mother’s singing.

We will look after your wife, they told my dad,
as the doctor in his cape left to catch the last aria.


by Hannah Jane Walker

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition for 2020 is open for entries! We’re delighted to say that our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson. As always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visit our website.

‘My mother’s aria is copyright © Hannah Jane Walker, 2020. It is reprinted from Primers Volume Five (Nine Arches Press, 2020) by permission of Nine Arches Press. Read more about the book here, and watch the book launch on the Nine Arches YouTube channel.

Hannah Jane Walker is a writer from Essex. She makes work that uses poetry as a way of talking, in theatres, public spaces and for radio, working with BBC Radio 4, the British Council, and Apples and Snakes. With collaborator Chris Thorpe, she has created interactive shows exploring questions which seem too simple to ask, winning a Fringe First and touring the world. Her plays are published by Oberon and her performance poetry by Nasty Little Press, whilst she has published poems in anthologies by Forest Fringe and Penned in the Margins. She often works with vulnerable groups, collaborating to create artworks. She is an Associate Artist for Cambridge Junction and National Centre for Writing. You can find out more about Hannah Jane on her website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In 2019, Nine Arches Press launched their nationwide Primers scheme for a fifth time, in search of exciting new voices in poetry, with Jacqueline Saphra and Jane Commane as selecting editors. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, three poets emerged as clear choices: Krystelle Bamford, Claire Cox, and Hannah Jane Walker.

Primers Volume Five now brings together a showcase from each of the three poets. At the core of these poems are the milestones and critical moments of our lives and, vitally, the ties that bind us to those we love: from childhood and daughterhood, through motherhood in all its array of emotions and experiences, and to beloved brothers and fathers. From the tides of grief to surfing the wave of birth, these often courageous and candid poems are distinctive in their engagement with fear, loss and self-discovery, and how they emerge afresh, bold and illuminating. An essential, insightful collection of new work from some of poetry’s most talented emerging voices. Read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

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 ninety 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.

My Brother as a Mezzotint

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Eager to admire your scans’ monochrome tones
you lean forward in your wheelchair
study the luminous screen:
eclipsing your spinal cord, two dark moons;
the titanium caging your neck, pure black;
grey meat spills from your iliac’s white wing.
The locum’s chest is slim, boy-like,
his tired eyes rimmed by glasses
and concern, he answers our questions
with open hands. Not your own oncologist
he’s unsure why his prognosis seems new.
Returning down the corridor you say I’m glad
it was you who was with me,  reach across
to flatter an old woman on her tiger-stripe throw
as we pass wheel to wheel, then you charm
from the receptionist, so young and so plump,
the secret of her hidden tattoo.


by Claire Cox

The Poetry Centre’s military veterans’ poetry workshop is being featured all this week on the British Forces Broadcasting Service’s radio station. Tune in online at 11.30 BST each weekday. You can also find out more about the workshop and the anthology that resulted from it on the BFBS website.

The Poetry Centre has launched its International Poetry Competition for 2020! We’re delighted to say that our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson. As always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visit our website. 

‘My Brother as a Mezzotint’ is copyright © Claire Cox, 2020. It is reprinted from Primers Volume Five (Nine Arches Press, 2020) by permission of Nine Arches Press. Read more about the book here, and join Nine Arches and the poets for the online book launch TONIGHT (Monday 3 August), which will be live-cast to the Nine Arches YouTube channel at 7.30pm.

Born in Hong Kong, Claire Cox has an MA in Creative Writing from Oxford Brookes University, where she was awarded the Blackwell’s Prize for best student. She is currently a funded part-time, practice-based research student at Royal Holloway, University of London, studying poetry and disaster. She is also co-founder and Associate Editor of ignitionpress. Her poems have appeared in Magma, Envoi, The Butcher’s Dog, Lighthouse and Ink, Sweat & Tears.

In 2019, Nine Arches Press launched their nationwide Primers scheme for a fifth time, in search of exciting new voices in poetry, with Jacqueline Saphra and Jane Commane as selecting editors. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, three poets emerged as clear choices: Krystelle Bamford, Claire Cox, and Hannah Jane Walker.

Primers Volume Five now brings together a showcase from each of the three poets. At the core of these poems are the milestones and critical moments of our lives and, vitally, the ties that bind us to those we love: from childhood and daughterhood, through motherhood in all its array of emotions and experiences, and to beloved brothers and fathers. From the tides of grief to surfing the wave of birth, these often courageous and candid poems are distinctive in their engagement with fear, loss and self-discovery, and how they emerge afresh, bold and illuminating. An essential, insightful collection of new work from some of poetry’s most talented emerging voices. Read more about the book on the Nine Arches website, and join Nine Arches and the poets for the online book launch on Monday 3 August, which will be live-cast to the Nine Arches YouTube channel at 7.30pm.

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 ninety 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.

Two Lies: the deer

~ oxfordbrookesuni

creep as only deer can
they don’t consider it creeping though –
we parade on their backs
high gloss   patina-on-death
like palanquins for heartbreak
but I suspect their hearts hold only
tubers sinew bone and teeth 

                         on the last day
                         you didn’t know me anymore
                         from under the morphine’s heavy brocade

so the deer (unmoved) move   are moved
through patterns of light and sound
by some deer-shaped force within;
or they’re still as the character for deer
always bending its fine head
to the ground forever

                         or maybe
                         you knew but couldn’t say
                         mixing as you were
                         with light and sound
                         your words moving away

no the deer in lacquered heels creep
crowned in grief through bracken halls
they creep towards us
under dimmet’s low eaves
embroidered with sorrow
they’re creeping for us 

                         and yes
                         it’s me hold me close
                         hold me higher still
                         I’m coming I’m home
                         I’ll see you soon


by Krystelle Bamford

Our latest podcast features Jennifer Wong, who talks to Niall Munro about her exciting new collection Letters Home 回家. Jennifer reads and talks about three poems, and explores topics such as the Chinese family, her use of Cantonese and English languages in the poems, her formal choices, and the challenges of writing about the recent Hong Kong protests. You can listen to the podcast here, and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

The Poetry Centre has launched its International Poetry Competition for 2020! We’re delighted to say that our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson. As always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visit our website. 

‘Two Lies: the deer’ is copyright © Krystelle Bamford, 2020. It is reprinted from Primers Volume Five (Nine Arches Press, 2020) by permission of Nine Arches Press. Read more about the book here, and join Nine Arches and the poets for the online book launch on Monday 3 August, which will be live-cast to the Nine Arches YouTube channel at 7.30pm. We’ll be sharing poems from the other two poets featured in the latest volume of Primers over the next fortnight.

Krystelle Bamford’s poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Under the Radar, and a number of anthologies. She was awarded a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. Raised in the US, she now lives in Scotland where she has worked at Canongate Books, completed a Creative Writing MLitt at the University of St Andrews, and gave birth to two wee, radge kids. You can read more about Krystelle’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

In 2019, Nine Arches Press launched their nationwide Primers scheme for a fifth time, in search of exciting new voices in poetry, with Jacqueline Saphra and Jane Commane as selecting editors. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, three poets emerged as clear choices: Krystelle Bamford, Claire Cox, and Hannah Jane Walker.

Primers Volume Five now brings together a showcase from each of the three poets. At the core of these poems are the milestones and critical moments of our lives and, vitally, the ties that bind us to those we love: from childhood and daughterhood, through motherhood in all its array of emotions and experiences, and to beloved brothers and fathers. From the tides of grief to surfing the wave of birth, these often courageous and candid poems are distinctive in their engagement with fear, loss and self-discovery, and how they emerge afresh, bold and illuminating. An essential, insightful collection of new work from some of poetry’s most talented emerging voices. Read more about the book on the Nine Arches website, and join Nine Arches and the poets for the online book launch on Monday 3 August, which will be live-cast to the Nine Arches YouTube channel at 7.30pm.

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 ninety 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.

of butterflies

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Zhuang Zi said              
the man does not know 

if he dreams of a butterfly 
or is it the butterfly dreams 

of a man. It is unclear 
who awakens first   or from where. 

Neither do I  
know      after all these years 

if I am a Chinese girl who 
wanted to go home 

or a woman from Hong Kong 
who will stay in England. 

It’s British summer time 
in my living room 

but my watch in the drawer 
moves seven hours ahead. 

The past: is the door still open? 
The future: am I a filial daughter, 

living so far away from my parents? 
Wearing her marmalade camouflage, 

the butterfly of unknowing 
pollinates in one world              and another.


by Jennifer Wong

Our latest podcast features this week’s poet, Jennifer Wong, who talks to Niall Munro about her exciting new collection Letters Home 回家. Jennifer reads and talks about three poems, including ‘of butterflies’, and explores topics such as the Chinese family, her use of Cantonese and English languages in the poems, her formal choices, and the challenges of writing about the recent Hong Kong protests. You can listen to the podcast here, and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

The Poetry Centre has launched its International Poetry Competition for 2020! We’re delighted to say that our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson. As always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visit our website . 

‘of butterflies’ is copyright © Jennifer Wong, 2020. It is reprinted from Letters Home 回家  (Nine Arches Press, 2020) by permission of Nine Arches Press. Read more about the book here.

Jennifer Wong was born and brought up in Hong Kong. She now lives in the UK and works as a writer, translator and teacher. She has published three collections: Goldfish (2013), Diary of a Miu Miu Salesgirl – a pamphlet with Bitter Melon Poetry (2019), and most recently Letters Home 回家 , published by Nine Arches Press in 2020, which was selected as a Wild Card Choice by the Poetry Book Society. Jennifer is an Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University and also teaches at The Poetry School and City Lit in London. You can find out more about Jennifer’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Letters Home 回家, Jennifer Wong’s vivid third collection of poems, unravels the complexities of being between nations, languages and cultures. Travelling across multiple borders of history and place, these poems examine what it means to be returning home, and whether it is a return to a location, a country or to a shared dream or language. The poet Hannah Lowe has called it ‘a remarkable collection, which makes a new and bold contribution to the genre of diaspora literature.’ Find out more and order a copy via the Nine Arches website. 

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 ninety 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.

Ear of Wheat

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Ear of wheat arches
over the pitfalls of the dark
listening keenly to voices
gone by, to calls
drifting from afar, 

ear of wheat bends
silent with weight
in front and back
silent with our weight of hours
with no before
with no after
and all around nothing
but the curt jitters and shivers in sun,

ear of wheat tosses in wind
sweating in calm
in narrow straits
teeming with yet far-reaching length and width,
golden ear laden
listening
up to the highest prominence
and, unaware,
through the petals of the night
the only friend of man
plowing through the evening,
of woman carrying the morning in her arms. 


by Reja-e Busailah

The Poetry Centre has launched its International Poetry Competition for 2020! We’re delighted to say that our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson. As always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners in each receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visit our website.

‘Ear of Wheat’ is copyright © Reja-e Busailah, 2019. It is reprinted from Poems of a Palestinian Boyhood (Smokestack Books, 2019) by permission of Smokestack Books.

Notes from Smokestack Books:

In his ninetieth year, Reja-e Busailah looks back in Poems of a Palestinian Boyhood on growing up in a small Palestinian town in the 1930s until the turbulent upheaval of 1948, when over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes by the Israelis, and the author was forced to join the Death March from Lydda. Although blind since infancy, Busailah recalls with stunning detail a boyhood shaped by disability, education, family and friends, British soldiers and Zionist settlers. Poems of a Palestinian Boyhood is an extraordinary book: unapologetic, unflinching, raw and beautiful. You can find out more about the book on the Smokestack website and read a review of the collection on the website of World Literature Today. 

Reja-e Busailah was born in Jerusalem in 1929. He was educated in Hebron and at the Al-’Amiriyyah School in Yafa. He studied English at Cairo University and received a PhD in English literature at New York University. For thirty years he taught English at Indiana University. In 1953 he helped found a school for the blind in Kuwait. From 1967 to 1991 he directed the Palestinian children’s charity, Project Loving Care. His books include The Ordeal: Poems of Anguish, Resistance, and Hope (with Dennis Brutus, Ved Vatuk and Tawkiq Zayyad) and We are Human Too: Poems on the Palestinian Condition and In the Land of My Birth (winner of the 2018 Palestinian Book Award for memoir). He lives with his wife in Kokomo, Indiana. Watch Reja-e Busailah read some of his poems on his YouTube channel and find him on Facebook.

Smokestack is an independent publisher of radical and unconventional poetry run by Andy Croft. Smokestack aims to keep open a space for what is left of the English radical poetic tradition in the twenty-first century. Smokestack champions poets who are unfashionable, radical, left-field and working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority. Smokestack is interested in the World as well as the Word; believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society; argues that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry. Smokestack’s list includes books by John Berger, Michael Rosen, Katrina Porteous, Ian McMillan, Steve Ely, Bertolt Brecht (Germany), Gustavo Pereira (Venezuela), Heinrich Heine (Germany), Andras Mezei (Hungary), Yiannis Ritsos (Greece) and Victor Jara (Chile). David Cain’s Truth Street, an epic-poem that is part oral history and part documentary theatre, draws on eye-witness testimonies of the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium Disaster and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019. You can find Smokestack on Facebook and on Twitter.

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.

For which we have no names

~ oxfordbrookesuni

She works one day a week
in a building which also houses
a Centre for Synaptic Plasticity,
and each time she sees the sign
she wants to go in and say,
Take my brain, bend it,
it’s not behaving. She has 

of late, and for no reason,
been atrabilious, a word
she learned recently
which sums up her state
perfectly: a mix
of irritability and melancholy.
Scientists have suggested 

we can’t feel emotions
we have no names for. This,
she thinks, is impossible
to prove. How do we know
what anyone means when they say anger,
when they say jealousy, when they say love?
She walks past the sign again, longing
to be wired up, explained. Who am I,
she’d say. Tell me my name.


by Tania Hershman

The Poetry Centre has launched its International Poetry Competition for 2020! We’re delighted to say that our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson. As always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visitour website. 


‘For which we have no names’ is copyright © Tania Hershman, 2017. It is reprinted from Terms and Conditions (Nine Arches Press, 2017) by permission of Nine Arches Press. You can read more about the book here. 

Tania Hershman’s debut poetry collection, Terms and Conditions, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2017 and urges us to consider all the possibilities and read life’s small print before signing on the dotted line. These beautifully measured poems bring their stoical approach to the uncertain business of our daily lives – and ask us to consider what could happen if we were to bend or break the rules, step outside the boundaries and challenge the narrative. In feats of imagination and leaps of probability, falling simply becomes flying, a baby collects the data and scrolls through everything it sees, and there are daring acts of vanishing and recreation. Be wary, for even the evidence here often leads us astray. And in between this, Hershman’s precise poetry elegantly balances the known, unknown and unknowable matter of existence, love and happiness, weighing the atoms of each, finding just the exact words that will draw up the perfect contract of ideas. You can read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

Tania Hershman‘s poetry pamphlet, How High Did She Fly, was joint winner of Live Canon’s 2019 Poetry Pamphlet Competition and was published in November 2019, whilst her hybrid particle-physics-inspired book and what if we were all allowed to disappear was published by Guillemot Press in March 2020. Tania is also the author of the poetry collection Terms and Conditions, a poetry chapbook and three short story collections, and co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion (Bloomsbury, 2014). She is co-creator of @OnThisDayShe, curator of short story hub ShortStops and has a PhD in creative writing inspired by particle physics. Hear her read her work on Soundcloud, find out more about her work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

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 ninety 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.

Cherwell valley nightscape –14 April 2020

~ oxfordbrookesuni


No contrails blur the stars.
The Oxford road is free of cars.

Train wheels ring on distant rails.
Somewhere near a hunting owl screeches for a mate.

The Milky Way’s a champagne spume
unchallenged by an absent moon.

I borrow a breath of this shining air.
The vastness swallows what I offer in return.

by Carl Tomlinson

The Poetry Centre has launched its International Poetry Competition for 2020! We’re delighted to say that our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson. As always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. For more details and to enter, visit our website. 

The Centre also recently released a new online publication: the e-anthology ‘My teeth don’t chew on shrapnel’: an anthology of poetry by military veterans. This anthology features exciting, moving, and provocative work by US and UK veterans who were participants in workshops held by the Poetry Centre in 2019-20 and also includes writing about veterans (including an essay by WWI expert Jane Potter) and some writing prompts by Susie Campbell for anyone interested in developing their own writing. The anthology is free to download from the Poetry Centre website and we would very much welcome your feedback! E-mail us or fill out the short form on the site.

‘Cherwell valley nightscape – 14 April 2020’ is copyright © Carl Tomlinson, 2020. It is reprinted from The Scriptstuff Lockdown Anthology (Scriptstuff Entertainment, 2020) by permission. You can read more about the anthology here.

This week’s poem by Oxfordshire poet Carl Tomlinson comes from The Scriptstuff Lockdown Anthology, published by Leamington-based arts organisation Scriptstuff Entertainment. The anthology, edited by Scriptstuff Poetry founder Mike Took, includes contributions from 45 local poets both amateur and professional, each of whom has written about the impact of the pandemic on their lives, families, health and future and each of whom has previously supported or performed at a Scriptstuff Poetry event. Scriptstuff Poetry has been running several regular and one-off poetry events across the Midlands for a number of years and also organises the annual Leamington Poetry Festival. 

Proceeds from the sale of the anthology will support the rising costs of Scriptstuff’s ongoing activities, including poetry outreach initiatives into new communities and keeping the entire Leamington Poetry Festival free for everyone to attend. Find out more about the anthology and Scriptstuff’s work on the website and follow the organization on Facebook and Twitter to see if there is an event near you!

Carl Tomlinson is a poet, an independent business advisor, and a coach. He is a Chartered Accountant with a BA in Spanish and French Language and Literature. He completed his MA in Coaching and Mentoring Practice at Oxford Brookes University in 2019 during which his dissertation explored the nature of the Romantic Imagination and its applicability to coaching. He has been a regular attendee at the Scriptstuff Poetry night in Banbury, where he became such a popular contributor that in April 2019 he was the headline guest. In late 2019, Carl won the Shout Out for the Oxford Covered Market competition and you can watch Carl read his winning poem, ‘Market Forces’, 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.