Speeches at an Eightieth Birthday

June 16, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

If the dead could be summoned
to say what they thought of you,
they would be as reluctant
and evasive as in life.
No eloquence from a friend,
no measured words from a foe,
would counter your sense of faint
virtue, lacking solid proof.

But why expect of the dead
more than of the loud voices
in present praise and debate
of your accomplished manhood?
Fading under fine phrases,
you disappear in plain sight.

by Tony Connor

This Wednesday 18 June from 6-7pm at The Poetry Society, Betterton Street, London, Jenny Wong, PhD student at the Department of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes, presents a reading by Chinese poets Jiang Tao and Ming Di. The event is free to attend. Visit the Poetry Society website for more details.

‘Speeches at an Eightieth Birthday’ is copyright © Tony Connor, 2013. It is reprinted by permission of Anvil Press from The Empty Air, New Poems 2006-2012 (Anvil Press, 2013).

Notes from Anvil Press:

Tony Connor’s tenth collection is framed by military encounters. In the first poem a young man grapples with a malfunctioning machine-gun, while the author grapples with the poem he is making from this event, memory or fantasy. In the surrealistic sequence that ends the book, a strange army invades a country collapsing into societal and semantic dissolution. Connor’s abiding preoccupations continue into his eighties:his own life and the lives around him, passing time and its traps, poetry and its transfiguration of the commonplace. Yet all is not solemn as Connor extends his range into comic verse and dramatic dialogue. His new poems mix fantasy and reality in unexpected ways, always with the unobtrusive hand of a skilled craftsman. You can read further selections from the new book on the Anvil website, and more about Tony Connor from the Academy of American Poets site.

Since 1971 Tony Connor has lived partly in Middletown, Connecticut where he was a professor of English at Wesleyan University. He spends the summers in London. He left school at fourteen and worked in Manchester as a textile designer for many years.

Anvil Press, founded in 1968, is based in Greenwich, south-east London, in a building off Royal Hill that has been used at various points in its 150-year history as a dance-hall and a printing works. Anvil grew out of a poetry magazine which Peter Jay ran as a student in Oxford and retains its small company ethos. Visit Anvil’s website here, where you can sign up to their mailing list to find out about new publications and events.

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.

I Know

March 31, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You want to go away.
Because they kill all the rabbits here.
But you’re not a rabbit.
Try explaining that to them.

It’s the rabbits that make it impossible.
No, it’s you.
Why me?
Why the rabbits?

If charged by a savage rabbit,
act like you’re dead.
I know that, you know that,
but does the rabbit know it?

And then the sun stops shining.
After how long?
After four days.
Thank you, I thought for a moment you said three days.

Was that it or did it get dark?
What did you think I wanted?
The same story over and over.
I wouldn’t exchange you for anyone else.

by Nachoem M. Wijnberg, translated by David Colmer

The Poetry Centre recently recruited its first ever cohort of interns! Ten students, drawn from across the undergraduate year groups, have already begun work on a variety of projects. Much of their attention will be focussed upon this year’s National Poetry Day (2 October), for which they will be co-ordinating a series of events such as ‘pop-up poetry’ around the city of Oxford. There is more information about the interns on the Centre’s website.

One of the interns’ first events, the Brookes Poetry Slam, takes place this Wednesday 2 April, from 6.45 at Union Hall (in the new John Henry Brookes Building). All Brookes students are invited to take part, and everyone is invited to be part of the audience. It’s free! If you’d like to read, please contact Wolf Hounsome on brookesslam@gmail.com You can find more details on the Poetry Centre’s Facebook page.

Notes from Anvil Press:

This selection introduces a major poet who is also a business studies professor, a combination which may explain his vigorous questioning of human values in poetry which asks ‘What is worthwhile?’ His poems are characterized by simplicity and clarity, narrative and reasoning: he claims they ‘at least promise to be about the important things in everyone’s life.’ The book from which this poem is taken, Advance Payment, Selected Poems, was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation in 2013.

Nachoem M. Wijnberg, born in Amsterdam in 1961, has published fourteen volumes of poetry. A Law and Economics graduate, he became in 2005 the first Professor of Cultural Entrepreneurship and Management at the University of Amsterdam Business School. His poetry has won many prizes, including the Jan Campert Prize, the Ida Gerhardt Prize and the most prestigious Dutch prize for poetry, the VSB Poetry Prize. Nachoem Wijnberg will be appearing with Arjen Duniker and Anne Vegter, the current Poet Laureate for the Netherlands, at the Wenlock Poetry Festival on Sunday 27 April from 4.30-5.30pm. You can find out more about this event from the festival website.

David Colmer is an Australian writer and translator based in Holland. He was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize and PEN Medallion and is a two-time winner of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize. His translations include Martinus Nijhoff’s Awater and selections from Ramsey Nasr, Cees Nooteboom and Hugo Claus.

Anvil Press, founded in 1968, is based in Greenwich, south-east London, in a building off Royal Hill that has been used at various points in its 150-year history as a dance-hall and a printing works. Anvil grew out of a poetry magazine which Peter Jay ran as a student in Oxford and retains its small company ethos. Visit Anvil’s website here, where you can sign up to their mailing list to find out about new publications and events.

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.

On the Fell

February 10, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Winds have
so cut it it
can give
an edge
to wind

a sand
stone
boulder
sandblasted

to a blade a breathless bone
releasing these sharp grains of sand

by John Birtwhistle

Two reminders from the Poetry Centre: the Department of English and Modern Languages is offering one three year, full-time PhD studentship. For the successful candidate the home/EU fee will be paid by the Faculty and the student will receive an annual stipend of £7000 for three years beginning in 2014/15. The deadline for applications is Monday 10 March, and there are more details on the Department’s website. Please spread the word!

Don’t forget too that the Poetry Centre and the Ashmolean Museum have launched ‘Picture This!’, their Pre-Raphaelite poetry competition, open to all Sixth Formers studying in Oxford. More details can be found on the Ashmolean’s website.

Notes from Anvil Press:

This is John Birtwhistle‘s first collection of poems since Our Worst Suspicions (1985), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In the meantime much of his writing has gone into libretti, including The Plumber’s Gift, performed by English National Opera. He has not, however, been neglecting poetry – as can be seen from the energetic variety of form and tone displayed here. Birtwhistle accepts from modernism the duties of visual clarity, concision, and originality of phrase; but he unites this with a romantic commitment to feeling and to organic form. His subject matter is wide-ranging as ever, but shows a new intensity about the life cycle. You can read further selections from Eventualities on the Anvil website.

John Birtwhistle was a Writing Fellow at the University of Southampton before becoming a Lecturer in English at the University of York. He now lives in Sheffield with his wife, son, and daughter.

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.

Happy Days

September 2, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Happiness is a warm gun – JOHN LENNON

Mammy tells me “Just read your book.”
I’m sick of reading Captain Cook.
The rain has made a lake in our garden.
I hope some swans land there.
I feel sorry for John Tracy,
All alone in Thunderbird 5.
Do the Tracys have rows like us?
Who cooks dinners?
Who irons their uniforms?
Jeff could marry Lady Penelope.
Then they’d all be happy.

The cherry blossom trees
Are happy young bridesmaids:
They lean together in the breeze,
Petals flying from their braids.

When I quietly eat my Frosties
Aware of my character flaws
I hear the magpies’ congratulations
And the frying pan’s applause.

by Alan Moore

The Poetry Book Society recently announced its fantastic T.S. Eliot Prize Tour, a ten-venue national tour to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first T.S. Eliot Prize. The tour will visit Portsmouth on 17 September, then Winchester, Oldham, Halifax, Ludlow, Glasgow, Norwich, Liverpool, Durham, and finally Sheffield on 15 October. It includes a spectacular selection of the best poets writing today. Visit the PBS website for more details, and head to the venue nearest you this autumn!

Notes from Anvil Press:

In How Now! Alan Moore treats themes of love, evil, and personal loss with gentle humour and tough seriousness. He evokes memories of Ireland in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, capturing flashes of awareness from childhood, youth and adult years with masterful description of emotion and settings.

This absorbing work is his second collection of poems, following Opia, a Poetry Book Society Choice in 1986, which was described by Ciaran Carty as ‘a virtuoso first collection’. You can read ‘Summer’, another poem from his latest collection, on Anvil’s site.

Alan Moore was born in 1960 in Dublin, Ireland, where he lives and works. A graduate in English and Philosophy of University College, Dublin, he worked in the Office of the Revenue Commissioners and in legal publishing before setting up his own tax consultancy business. He is a crime novelist, teacher, business adviser and the author of several professional books.

Slow Rock

June 24, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

slow rock
being limestone
pines
for rain
pockets springy needles
is not the sea
forgotten
but sounding its breath
in an airy maze
where woodpeckers
up the tempo
& who’s that
red-capped, furtive
(other hand gripped
to his mobile)

perspective
shrinks him

shoals of bedrock
leaping mid-city
console our short-lived
urgencies
nothing
you can’t ride out
on these smooth backs
for a while
(the skyline livid)

by Jennie Feldman

Two announcements! This Friday 28 June 2013, Oxford is host to an exciting poetry event: ‘Irregular Folk Does Poetry’, which features the talents of a number of visiting and local poets, including Jack Underwood, Amy Blakemore, William Davies, and Charlotte Geater. The event will take place at the Perch on Binsey Lane in Oxford, and begins at 7.30pm.

And Oxford Brookes is currently displaying The Booker Prize, 1969-2008: an exhibition. Visit Oxford Brookes University’s Glass Tank exhibition space in the Abercrombie Building on Gipsy Lane between 17 June and 14 July to see this new exhibition, which is both an introduction to the fantastic material housed in the archive and a reflection upon Brookes’ role as custodian of the archive for a decade.

Notes from Anvil Press:

In Jennie Feldman’s second collection, Swift, the earth-shy bird of the title flies high above the territorial rivalries of its region. From the Middle East, Swift ranges across Europe to Scotland, always on the lookout for what coheres in the world and its telling encounters – with a Greek beekeeper, a cello maestro, lone figures on society’s margins, the Latin poet Lucretius in an East Jerusalem café. Buoyed by music as well as water, notably the Aegean Sea and the rare rains of the eastern Mediterranean, these poems combine delicacy and vigour in their pursuit of an elusive equilibrium.

Jennie Feldman was born in South Africa, grew up in London and graduated from Oxford, where she studied French. A Hawthornden Fellow, she lives in Jerusalem and Oxford. Her first collection, The Lost Notebook, was also published by Anvil, as were her translations from Jacques Réda, Treading Lightly: Selected Poems 1961-1975, and the bilingual anthology Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets 1938-2008, co-edited and translated with Stephen Romer and shortlisted for the Popescu Prize 2011. You can read another selection from Swift on Anvil’s website.

Petrol (section 3)

April 8, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Bloody Marys, Jaysus! Granddad was disgusted beside the range, Lucky standing on his lap, wet nose pointing high in the air when Agnes ran in from the bar, her brown velour arm wrapped around the plastic ball of the Coca-Cola ice bucket. It’s far from ice they were reared! Granddad said but Justin always made Bloody Marys for his favourites, slim dark women who wore their clothes like Jackie Kennedy. It was a big operation with all the stuff and the Tabasco sauce stirred with a long clanking spoon. Granddad ground his teeth as Agnes tore the tray from the side of the yellow-iced freezer, staggering on her high brown clogs in her modest A-line corduroy skirt. I, too, was thinking she was too good for this work. They don’t know what they want, Granddad said. Ice one minute, hot whiskeys the next. Those bloody women. The Bloody Mary drinkers. And his last comment when the ice cubes tumbled into the Coca-Cola bucket, every single woman that Justin ever took on suffered from her nerves.

by Martina Evans

An announcement of one Poetry Centre podcast and two readings! This week’s poet, Martina Evans, will be reading from her new collection, Petrol, with the Dutch poet Nachoem Wijnberg & his translator, David Colmer, this Friday 12 April. Nachoem and David will be reading from their latest collection Advance Payment (a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice for Spring 2013). The reading will take place on Friday from 6.30-8.30pm at the Duke of Wellington pub in London. A flyer for the event is available on the Poetry Centre’s Facebook page.

The latest Poetry Centre podcast, featuring Oxford poet Alan Buckley, is now available. Alan discusses his poem ‘Voicemail’ and considers the nature of poetic influence, the roles that breath and the body play in the creation of poetry, and the responsibilities which a poet has towards the subject of an elegy. Alan will also be reading this week in Oxford alongside last week’s poet, Claire Trévien, and Amy Key. That reading is on Thursday at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop on Thursday at 7.30pm. There are more details on our Facebook page and on Claire’s own website here.

Notes from Anvil Press:

Petrol is a prose poem disguised as a novella of adolescence in Co. Cork, Ireland. With its dizzy pace and perfect narrative timing it is a unique work and a remarkable departure for a writer whose poetry is widely appreciated for its humour and uncompromising depiction of rural Ireland. Writing about Martina Evans’s work, Christopher Reid has observed that ‘she shows an impressive command of what feels like the ideal narrative medium: individual moments and drive of narrative in perfect coordination, language alive and kicking.’

Martina Evans has published four collections of poetry and three novels. She was born in Cork, the youngest of ten children, and now lives in London.

Osteopath

March 4, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My back’s a lump of clay, becomes a spine
Beneath your fingers, little hard-nosed creatures
That sniff out tangled nerves and sidelong pain
Autonomously probing with a blind man’s
Feel for the beauty of a groove or contour,
Reminding me that I am skeleton.

Now on my back I see the skylight frame
A chasm of unboundedness, space blue.
A half-moon lit up like an x-ray
Tugs at my gravity. You’re earthing me
With pressure: you rotate, push and pull,
Make new the muscles, tendons, of my body,
Create the definition that I lacked
So I may rise like Adam, ribs intact.

by James Harpur

Notes from Anvil Press:

James Harpur‘s fifth collection, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, journeys into realms seen and unseen, ranging from the landscapes of Ireland to the visionary realms of the mystics. Through the finely textured music of his poems, he explores emotional and spiritual intimacies while keeping a sharp observant eye on the everyday world. Angels and Harvesters displays both human tenderness and an otherworldly wonder, as Harpur continues his quest to reconcile the complexities of the human condition with a deep-seated spiritual longing.

James Harpur has published four previous books of poetry and a translation of Boethius’s poems entitled Fortune’s Prisoner. He is poetry editor of the Temenos Academy Review and has won a number of prizes and awards, including the 2009 Michael Hartnett Award and the 1995 British National Poetry Competition. He has held residencies at the Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco, the Munster Literature Centre and Exeter Cathedral. He lives in Co. Cork.

Appletreewick

November 26, 2012April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Everywhere the water’s height
surprises, a great smooth swelling
over weirs, a sheer glass welling
above the banks as skeins of light
wind around themselves in mauves
and greys, the bearded islets broken
from the shores by the red churn
chafed with the white of rock-cleaved waves,
as if it had transformed the soft
rise of the ground to liquid, the scuff
of pasture rippling on the bones
of rock like shot silk, while the rafts
of farms, roped to their mooring stones
by walls, ride on a tide of turf.

by Julian Turner

Notes from Anvil Press:

Much of the material in Julian Turner‘s third collection works under malign influence, which comes most often from the hand of Man, but is also haunted by elements, spirits and other forces that seem beyond our control. This compelling book also celebrates human ingenuity and heroism in the face of such weighty opponents and laments our inclination to blame others for our misfortune and unhappiness.

Time and memory, the transitory nature of human remains from the earliest man-made monuments, how nature suffers from man-made depredations, the strange states of mind that arise from extreme experience – all of these contribute to this book’s rich and multi-layered insight into the human condition. You can learn more about his work from his own website.

Julian Turner’s previous books are Crossing the Outskirts – a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Forward Prize best first collection in 2002 – and Orphan Sites (2006). Planet-Struck was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for 2011. Julian Turner was born in Cheadle Hulme, near Manchester, in 1955 and was educated at New College, Oxford and Goldsmith’s, London. He lives with his partner in Otley, West Yorkshire.

Kouros

October 8, 2012April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Blow after vertical blow severed you from the rock-face
in the abandoned quarry

the impact shatters the crystals deep inside you

and renders you opaque, lying there like a stunned space warrior,

oversized, grey-speckled feet pointing seaward
above the rooftops, while your double, sprawled in a grove

on the other side of the island, is having his torso

tickled by overhanging branches. – Imperturbable

youth, who once strode forward smiling, hands clenched
at your sides, undeterred, provides a seat

for the span of an hour. I hadn’t realized the long descent

from the village-that-makes-verses on the mountain slope

would tire me so, leaning against your foursquare
frame, I doze, and wake, and doze again,

while the industrious ant, mistaking me for the figure

I’ve come to admire in its gritty silence, must about-face

as my right leg shudders and twitches involuntarily,
as if to say, behold the man.

by Gabriel Levin

This Thursday (11 October), Steven Matthews, the Director of Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre, will be launching his collection of poetry, Skying (Waterloo Press, 2012). The launch will take place at Blackwell’s Bookshop, Broad Street, Oxford, and will begin at 7pm. Steven will be reading from this new collection alongside Helen Farish, whose own recent collection, Nocturnes at Nohant: The Decade of Chopin and Sand, is published by Bloodaxe Books.

‘Kouros’ is copyright © Gabriel Levin, 2012. It is reprinted from To These Dark Steps (2012) by permission of Anvil Press.

Notes from Anvil Press:

Gabriel Levin’s fourth collection, To These Dark Steps, moves from the Mediterranean world that has engaged his imagination for the last thirty years, to the sombre title sequence written in the shadow of Israel’s bombardment and incursion into Gaza in 2008. These striking poems and their prose commentary (The Fathers are Watching) navigate between the depredations of war and the mind’s need to disengage itself from its surroundings. The final section of this articulate and compassionate book is a fifteen-sonnet cycle dispatched from the shores of an unnamed island, which could be everyman’s abode, in search of what might lie yonder.

Gabriel Levin was born in France, grew up in the United States, and has lived in Jerusalem since 1972. He has published three earlier collections of poetry and translations from Hebrew, French and Arabic. His translation from the medieval Hebrew of Yehuda Halevi, Poems from the Diwan, also appeared with Anvil (2002). His essays on the geographical and imaginative reach of the Levant have appeared in literary journals in England and the United States.

[Nineteen Sixty-Five] 1965

August 20, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The egg ferments, the one cell splits in two:
again, four: again, eight: sixteen: thirty-two.
Droplets of fat, like miniature dabs of butter,
nourish and sustain. Welcome, morula,
little mulberry… free-falling, spineless,
until, upon the uterine surface,

touchdown. Transparent, semi-opaque, solid,
the heart comes to fruition, big as a head.
Welcome, tiddler, mild water-scorpion.
Gills disappear, cartilage becomes bone.

Full term: seismic waves, electrical storms,
the twelve-hour haul of not being born,
between two worlds – induced. I make it late,
this bloody, headlong drop towards the light.

by A.B. Jackson

Notes from Anvil Press:

Born in Glasgow in 1965, Andrew Buchanan Jackson grew up in Bramhall, Cheshire, later receiving his secondary education in Cupar, Fife. He studied English Literature at Edinburgh University and now works in Glasgow.

One of ten poets chosen for Anvil New Poets 3 (2001), Jackson was singled out by John Greening in Poetry Review for his ‘demanding and ambitious work: direct, sharp in manner, with an intellectual edge, a valedictory quality.’ Fire Stations won Best First Collection in the 2003 Forward Poetry Prizes. Find out more about Fire Stations from the Anvil site, and more about A.B. Jackson from his website. You can read further selections from the book here. In 2011, Jackson published a pamphlet of twenty-one poems called Apocrypha.