Category: Arc Publications

The Humanist

~ oxfordbrookesuni

She stands at the sink
runs the cold tap over
wrists raw with eczema,
moving her hands
like a child cradling a doll,
wrist bones kissing,
sore skin drinking in relief.
She cups her hands,
lets water pool over
the blisters in her palms
that match the blisters
on the tops of her feet.
Her ‘stigmata’, she jokes.
though she has no
corresponding wound
in her side. No faith.

by Degna Stone

‘The Humanist’ is copyright © Degna Stone, 2022, and is reprinted here from Proof of Life on Earth (Nine Arches Press, 2022) by permission of Nine Arches Press. You can read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

You live and then you die. That’s the only certainty there is, right? Using love as its guide, Proof of Life on Earth, the debut poetry collection by Degna Stone, looks at all the stops between our arrival and our departure. These poems examine matters of the heart (both the metaphorical and medical kind), of race and discrimination, of the body, mind and self – each in forensic detail, attentive and curious of what moves, shapes, and makes us alive.

In between are the landmarks which populate the rich terrain of this collection; not only of our lives through youth to adulthood, but of history, of the long shadows of empire, and of landscapes themselves – especially those of the northeast of England, evocative, rugged and monumental. Stone’s deft and scalpel-sharp poetry explores human existence shaped by mortality and experience, and asks what it means to do more than survive – to live in defiance, openness and awareness.

Originally from the Midlands, Degna Stone is a poet and poetry editor based in north east England. They are co-founder and former Managing Editor of  Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine, and a Contributing Editor at The Rialto. They received a major Northern Writers Award for poetry in 2015. Proof of Life on Earth (Nine Arches Press, 2022) is their debut poetry collection.

You can find more about Degna on their website.

Praise for Proof of Life on Earth

“What a joy, at last, to hold Degna Stone’s debut. They are a spellbinding poet: passionate, political and precise. Their poems lay bare the human heart and what it means to love and be loved in a world full of trouble. Unafraid of the ragged seams of life, they hold us, all our sorrows and failings, with the deepest compassion, urging us to be bold, take the risk and make the world better.” – Liz Berry

“Degna Stone’s measured words, structure and style offers their first full collection as a philosophy on life. It evokes fear as they grapple with the near death of their husband, although simultaneously provides a meditative spirit as they root themselves in wild, beautiful English landscapes as a coping mechanism. Yet there are poems which surprise us, too, knee-jerking us into sharing their harsh realities of life. With Proof of Life on Earth, Degna Stone slides smoothly into a deserved position as one of the polished poetic voices to emerge this year.” – Dr. Kadija Sesay

“Proof of Life on Earth takes the weight of a woman’s heart and balances on the scales of life and death.” – Nick Makoha

Nine Arches Press was founded in 2008 and emerged from an awareness of the national literary landscape and a desire to provide a platform for new and emerging poets. Our titles have been widely acclaimed and shortlisted for national prizes including the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize, the Forward Prizes, TS Eliot Poetry Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, the Michael Murphy Prize, the Jhalak Prize, and the Polari Prize. Nine Arches has published over 120 poetry publications, and 29 issues of Under the Radar magazine, and provides a year-round programme of workshops, events, as well as priding themselves as publisher that uniquely provides writer development and mentoring. Nine Arches Press is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, and its Director / Editor is Jane Commane. Read more about the press on the Nine Arches website, 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.

Cox’s Bazar

~ oxfordbrookesuni

You plant the jackfruit’s anonymous, nubbled face and wait in the
boiling sand for something to happen.

A goat’s eye flashes gold. A girl swings on the tubewell for a cup of
water.

You plant peas to grow in the monsoon and put on your best shirt.
Yellow for optimism.

What is missing about the blank page is denied. Decimated, you
would like to cohere.

Inside an airless, windowless hut, you try to re-write Stevens: Ten
Ways of Looking at a Passport. ‘I have never seen a passport, how
does it begin?’

Toothmarks in the linebreak. You want to put the art back into heart.

When your brother ran towards the Tatmadaw, crying ‘Jayzu, Jayzu’,
you turned and ran. Jahaj of air. Jail, lock and key.

Without ‘art’, it’s just ‘he’, meaning brother. Come here, brother, but
he isn’t listening.

Your mother bribes the army guard to write a letter, asks about the
non-trial. Will the guard deliver? Hope’s lottery. There is no policy
on answering the letters or the law. The page a windbreak. To write
is to petition.

The ‘I’ severs you in the photograph, so we repose. Someone else
must always be next to you. You cannot work alone.

Cyclonic clangour of rain. Sword-water in the Naf. The helicopter pumps
into Bangladeshi airspace and fires on anyone swimming away.

The poem bare as a pulse, a knife. Siblings in graves.

The poem bare as a knife, a pulse.

Your father remains stuck at the border. ‘Genocide Zone.’ Nobody
is reporting from there, so nothing is said.

The child draws pictures of a burning house. Singing out of history
in makeshift schools.

You plant and write. Plant and write. What else is there to do? Peas
on you roof grow beside the ashfire. You knot back the twine and
forecast clouds.

You write: ‘blot out’, ‘jail of air’ and the words mean the same in
the morning. Myanmar waits for the incendiary. The Saudis send
money for guns. When you ‘like’ the post about ARSA, your cousin
gets a note under his hut.

‘Ze zaga añra félai ay zaígoí’. ‘There are places we leave’ you say.
‘There are places we never leave. Home is a dream inside a nightmare.’

The first line of your first poem begins: ‘I am afraid of someone I don’t
know’.

Last night your mother peeled back the tarpaulin and asked: ‘what
are you doing, my son, why can you not sleep? Sleep!’ And you
replied: ‘Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson’.

Ignore the honking of the UNHCR truck, check the download speed
for ‘100 Poets in English’ (to learn poetry, to learn English) Reload.

Already they are looking to blame the same someone. The Chinese
highway needs to be paid.

Looking at you. Between Paan branches brittled by soil erosion.

Why is it you live in the middle of the largest refugee camp in the
world and they’re calling it ‘a lost treasure’, a ‘forgotten’ national park?

They ask you to plant trees to ‘save the environment’. Yes, you think.
A few more trees to hide the smell of the latrine.

How do you write about ‘environment’? You try for the present, the
sensory, but your eyes sting, your ears hum and the smell is flesh
and smoke.

‘I want to write about family, but I have no family.’

The idea of the eternal traveller does not hold. To think of poetry as
orphic. To unthink memory: to unriver the severed head.

As if the world were a wound flapping its bandages.

As if the world were a wound. As if…

You wake up and poke your pen through the ash.

English ale. ‘Dada eta ki gari?’ High speed trains. This is where I am going.

An envelope stuffed with Taka. A bookmark. To hold nothing, to
hold your place in the book.

by James Byrne

‘Cox’s Bazar’ is copyright © James Byrne, 2022, and is reprinted here from Places you Leave (Arc Publications, 2022) by permission of Arc Publications. You can read more about the book on the Arc Publications website.

Beginning inside the largest refugee camp in the world (Cox’s Bazar) and ending up with Lorca in Granada, Places You Leave explores questions of travel, place / displacement, self / otherness, race, feminism, national and global politics. Through poems, poetic sequences and the lyric essay, Byrne considers a ‘poethics’ of place and speaks back to the complex nature of human experience. In his most hybrid work to date, including original collages from seven different countries, Byrne advocates for activist but peaceful ways in which language might challenge existing social structures and the dynamics of power.

James Byrne is a poet, editor and translator. His most recent poetry collections are The Caprices (Arc Publications, 2019), Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, 2015) and White Coins (Arc Publications, 2015). Other publications include Blood/Sugar (Arc, 2009), WITHDRAWALS, Soapboxes (both KFS, 2019 and 2014) and Myths of the Savage Tribe (a co-authored text with Sandeep Parmar, Oystercatcher, 2014).

Byrne received an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where he was given a Stein Fellowship (‘Extraordinary International Scholar’). He was the Poet in Residence at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. He currently lives near Liverpool where he is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University.

Byrne is renowned for his commitment to international poetries and poetics. He is the International Editor for Arc Publications and was editor of The Wolf, which he co-founded, from 2002-2017. In 2012, with ko ko thett, Byrne co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012). In 2017, with Robert Sheppard, he edited Atlantic Drift, a book of transatlantic poetry and poetics (Arc, EHUP). In 2019, he co-edited, with Shehzar Doja, I am a Rohingya, the first anthology of Rohingya poetry in English. Byrne’s poems have been translated into several languages and his Selected Poems (Poemas Escogidos) was published in Spanish in 2019 by Buenos Aires Poetry (translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez).

Arc Publications publishes contemporary poetry from new and established writers from the UK and abroad, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English and the work of overseas poets in translation. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians.

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.

Extra

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I

Listen, you are and you aren’t.
Yes, to make the action believable
moment by moment; otherwise no.
Today: expectation – part joy
part disbelief. Don’t overdo it. The feeling
barely surfaces, but we see it.
Don’t blink. There should be
infinity in your gaze.

II

The weather, Plato, whatever
it takes to look like friends
having coffee. And no big gestures –
you hardly figure till the sobbing
makes you turn, brings you in.
Then puzzles, embarrassed; but
pain too, recognition. Indirectly you
heighten the drama.

  III

So you’re leaning to look
back a last time. Not sad or happy,
more uncertain. That’s it – ongoing
uncertainty. Compose your face
with dark and light, to reflect the story.
The final shot is what stays. Like those
Russian horses in the rain by the river.
If words help, keep them to yourself.

by Jennie Feldman

‘Extra’ is copyright © Jennie Feldman, 2022, and is reprinted here from No Cherry Time (Arc Publications, 2022) by permission of Arc Publications. You can read more about the book on the Arc Publications website.

Jennie Feldman was born in South Africa, brought up in London, and graduated in Modern Languages (French) at Oxford. After a career in radio broadcasting, as well as teaching and editing, she became a freelance writer and translator.

Until recently she spent much of her time in Jerusalem; there she was a volunteer with the Israeli NGO Humans Without Borders, which transports chronically ill Palestinian children from the West Bank to hospital appointments in Israel. (She has written on this, and on other Palestine-related subjects, in the Times Literary Supplement.) She is now based in Oxford.

No Cherry Time is Jennie Feldman’s third collection of poems. Her first, The Lost Notebook (2005) was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex Prize, and her second, Swift, came out in 2012. Both were published by Anvil Press Poetry (now Anvil / Carcanet), as were three books of translations: Jacques Réda, Treading Lightly: Selected Poems 1961-1975 (2005); Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets 1938-2008 (2009), co-authored with Stephen Romer, which was awarded a special commendation by the judges of the 2011 Popescu Poetry Prize; and Jacques Réda, The Mirabelle Pickers (2012).

Jennie Feldman’s most recent publication is Chardin and Rembrandt by Marcel Proust (David Zwirner Books, 2016). Her poems have appeared in various journals, among them Agenda, London Magazine, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poetry Review, Stand, and the Times Literary Supplement.

In its geographical sweep – from Israel-Palestine (“Where a hillside’s being shaken /out of the dream”) westward across Europe – No Cherry Time reflects a personal tale of estrangement, departure and quest. Fine-tuned to the natural world, sustained by its fragile continuities, the poems play out a restive music. As the focus comes to settle on Greece, it is above all the Mediterranean (“Sea Between the Lands”) that buoys the imaginative spirit, blurring East and West.

Arc Publications publishes contemporary poetry from new and established writers from the UK and abroad, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English and the work of overseas poets in translation. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians.

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.

It won’t be a normal year

~ oxfordbrookesuni

March 2020

I recognise something of myself
in the panicking woman by the sheds
who counsels us to only plant
low-maintenance things this year
and a few quick crops for pleasure.

She almost acts out dashing in
under cover of dark to harvest.
They’re thinking of shutting down the plots
or saying we can only do an hour.
People take the piss, treating it like parks.

There’s a keening edge in her voice.
Her man looks down, stirring the gentle ash
left at the end of their little bonfire.
You can tell they’ve been through years together –
not years like this but still.

She works a while at weeding
and when we go to say goodbye she says
Sorry – I know it’s the way I cope,
to say the worst and hope for better.
Her sorry eyes. I do the same myself.

We’ve learnt, over the fifteen years,
which plants like the dry light soil.
We know the old guys who have been here forever.
Know how to keep the weeds at an ebb –
bindweed gone, couch grass in abeyance.

It’s the last day bonfires are allowed
before the season proper begins.
Birdsong. Buds on bare apple branches,
leaves opening out like hands. Rhubarb stretches
dragons’ wings. We take down the brassica nets.

We squint our eyes against the drifting smoke.
I almost say out loud, I can almost
see apocalypse. The future is acres
of bramble, nettle, the flourishing
of flag-waving luscious seeding grass.

by Ramona Herdman

‘It won’t be a normal year’ is copyright © Ramona Herdman, 2022, and is reprinted here from Glut (Nine Arches Press, 2022) by permission of Nine Arches. You can read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

Notes from Nine Arches:

Glut, by Norwich-based writer Ramona Herdman, is a darkly funny and open-hearted book about, as the poet describes, “how we live together and find meaning through the various rules and rituals that surround food, family, alcohol, work, nature, sex and love.”

In these candid and playful poems, appetites of all kinds are explored, from cocktails and cheeseboards, to sex and power. Herdman deftly presents the vulnerable underbelly of human experience, but with kindness and empathy. Poems in Glut look at relationships, interdependence, addiction, alcoholism, eating disorders, pain and chaos. Yet overarching all these is  vitality and a lust for life.

Victoria Kennefick, the TS Eliot Prize-nominated poet, observes: “It is appropriate that this miraculous collection ends on the word ‘love’ as the poems pulsate with that most essential of emotions: ‘Come home safe / Come home love.’ Glut is a true and rare gift.” You can read more about Glut on the Nine Arches website.

Ramona Herdman’s latest pamphlet, A warm and snouting thing (The Emma Press), was shortlisted in the poetry category of East Anglican Book Awards. Her previous pamphlet Bottle (HappenStance Press) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. One of her poems was chosen for the Poetry Archive’s WorldView 2021 and another won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize, 2017. Ramona lives in Norwich and is a committee member for Café Writers.

You can read more about Ramona’s work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

Nine Arches Press was founded in 2008 and emerged from an awareness of the national literary landscape and a desire to provide a platform for new and emerging poets. Our titles have been widely acclaimed and shortlisted for national prizes including the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize, the Forward Prizes, TS Eliot Poetry Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, the Michael Murphy Prize, the Jhalak Prize, and the Polari Prize. Nine Arches has published over 120 poetry publications, and 29 issues of Under the Radar magazine, and provides a year-round programme of workshops, events, as well as priding themselves as publisher that uniquely provides writer development and mentoring. Nine Arches Press is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, and its Director / Editor is Jane Commane. Read more about the press on the Nine Arches website, 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.

Poems from the Oxford Brookes Science Bazaar

~ drniallmunro
Science Bazaar Beyond logo.

In October 2022 and February 2023, the Poetry Centre ran a stall at the Oxford Brookes Science Bazaar. We invited young visitors to hunt for toy minibeasts and then to write poems inspired by their visit to the Bazaar or by science in general. We hope you enjoy reading them – thank you so much to everyone who contributed a poem!

Special thanks to our Poetry Centre Interns: Maleeha, Bethany, Rhiannon, Rosa, Anna, and Lily, who did a wonderful job of encouraging the poets and running the event. We look forward to more poems at the next Science Bazaar on 3 February 2024 – join us then if you can! To find out more about the Poetry Centre, visit our website or find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

The poems

creepy crawly
insect, nice slow
loris
dancing butterflies!

by Amber

Pinboard with poems related to science and nature.

They call me a ladybug,
but I wonder why,
It’s not like you can’t see my wings
when I fly,
the red and black spots in
between, the cicadas laugh
at me, sometimes scream.

Land on the surface, don’t be long,
the kids will come and
I’ll be gone, they call me
ladybug with the boggled eyes,
yet treat me like
the common fly.

by Evan

Super-sonic crawling
caterpillar moving fast and
Slow. Wriggle, squirm, 
crawl and run. Seethe
Caterpillar roam under
the stones, furry
and hideous for
some.

by Naomi

Spiders crawl, leap, plunge
and hurtle.
Fire-eyed, hideous creatures
trapping others in cages of web.
Energetic animals roam
around looking for their
Dinner, clamber over rocks,
grass and mud. Super-
sonic, terrific monsters,
moving through the earth
adventurers they are. I want
you to know I am very
proud

by Naomi

A mini-beast's line of thoughts by Frieda.

A mini-beast’s line of thoughts

An explosion of logic occurred
inside the mini-beast’s head,
and from that moment on,
the wild bugs thought no more
about minuscule things
like doughnuts or some such
nonsense.
All they could think about
were things, big things such as
cages, to a chasm,
to things like life
and the small creature
almost blew up with thoughts.

by Frieda

Fantastic Bugs

I have three new friends.
I found them in my back garden.
They are Bumpy the Woodlouse,
Stretchy the Worm and
Swirly the Snail.
They live their secretive life
crawling in damp soil.
But at night they clamber out
their den to have a galactic
disco party.
They go down the Helter Skelter
and eat soggy doughnuts!
Some people think my new
friends are hideous,
but I think they are terrific!
I’ll put them in the tall, tall grass
in the bug hotel made for them.

by Laura

Thank you, Nature by Laura.


Thank you, Nature

Thank you for the fresh and misty mornings.
Thank you for the sparkling droplets on the grass.
Thank you for the warmth of the Sun on my shoulders.
Thank you for the burning long sunsets.
Thank you for the glittery velvet nights.
Thank you for the multicoloured syrup-scented summers.
Thank you for the weedy foamy sea waves.
Thank you for the muddy earthy woods.
Thank you for the striking crashing thunderstorms.
Thank you for the crispy dazzling snowflakes.
Thank you for the damp soft moss sprinkled with snowdrops.
Thank you for all the things Nature gives us
And I hope it stays like this forever!!

by Laura

Wild

Some are big
some are small
but we are all
wild.

by Ray

One is big one is
Small. One is short
one is tall.
One is blue one is
red. One has pink
spots on its head.

by Olivia

One is big, one is
small, one is short
and one is tall.
Every animal
around this world
has different sizes
for ever and ever.

by Imogen

Three toy minibeasts.

S is for unusual species
C is for chemical reactions
I is for igneous rock from volcanoes
E is for evolution of the world
N is for nature all around us
C is for creative scientific language
E is for environmentally-friendly recycling

By Lacey and Niall

The fossil was icy and the forest was
Energetic. The trees were naturally grown.

by Sophie

A ladybug minibeast next to some fire extinguishers.

It was startling when I found
the ladybird in an extinguisher

by Rose

Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don’t make sense
Refrigerator

by Anon

I think it is nice to hunt for animals around a building. You can experiment your hide and seek skills whilst educating the terrific looking bugs.

by Zack

The wild

When the bees sting,
I think of every living thing, like wild life.
The worms turn into squiggles,
and do wriggle,
but there is more wildlife around.

Crickets leap and leap and leap,
one day I would like a peep.

Owls are not in sight,
but do sleep over night.

Wildlife is beautiful.

by Melek

A toy ladybug on a desk with some words.

Beakers, test tubes and chemicals, oh my,
but not that kind of pie,
chemistry, biology, all the kinds of science are quite bizarre,
but nonetheless fans of science we all are.

by Zoe

With science you have technology
without science there would be
no homes with science we have
tractors, cars, homes, boats, TV
and artillery without science
we would not have won WWI or WWII
so science is important for
animals, children and everyone.

by Leighton

Apples grow from apple trees
because they are healthy
They grow from seeds

by Laurie

It is shocking to find
how many animals
crawl and leap.
This stall at the bazaar is completely
doughnuts.

by Amber

What am I?

Spotty
delicate wings
six legged minibeast
aphid-eating, roaming, hurtling
beetle

by Rees

Photograph of Poetry Centre Interns at the Oxford Brookes Science Bazaar.

Post-fire Forest

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Shadows of shadows without canopy,
phalanxes of carbonized trunks and
snags, their inner momentum shorted-out.
They surround us in early morning
like plutonic pillars, like mute clairvoyants
leading a Sursum Corda, like the excrescence
of some long slaughter. All that moves
is mist lifting, too indistinct to be called
ghostly, from scorched filamental
layers of rain-moistened earth. What
remains of the forest takes place
in the exclamatory mode. Cindered
utterances in a tongue from which
everything trivial has been volatilized,
everything trivial to fire. In a notch,
between near hills stubbled
with black paroxysm, we spot
a familiar sun, liquid glass globed
at the blowpipe’s tip. If this landscape
is dreaming, it must dream itself awake.

You have, everyone notes, a rare talent
for happiness. I wonder how
to value that, walking through wreckage.
On the second day, a black-backed
woodpecker answers your call, but we
search until twilight without finding it.


by Forrest Gander


Two brief notices: we recently launched our international poetry competition, which is judged this year by Caroline Bird. And we’re looking forward to an upcoming poetry event in Oxford with John Hegley and a ‘heartbreak poetry slam’ – join us by getting your tickets from the Old Fire Station website. You can find out more about our work in our latest newsletter or on social media – we’re @brookespoetry.

‘Post-fire Forest’ is copyright © Forrest Gander, 2022, and is reprinted here from Your Nearness (Arc Publications, 2022) by permission of Arc. It was first published in The New Yorker in April 2021, where you can also hear Forrest Gander read it. You can read more about the book on the Arc website.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Forrest Gander’s book Your Nearness explores the relationship between the natural and the human worlds, focussed especially on the state of California, where he lives. As the poet John Burnside has written, ‘Forrest Gander knows that the poet’s first duty is “to see what’s there and not already patterned by familiarity” – and in Your Nearness he brings to that task a combination of vision, generosity of spirit and humility in the face of wonder that singles him out as one of the finest, and most vigilant, poets working in English today.’

You can read more about the book on the Arc website, where you can also buy a copy.

Forrest Gander, a writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was born in the Mojave Desert, grew up in Virginia, and taught at Harvard University before becoming the AK Seaver Professor at Brown University.

His work has long been associated with environmental concerns. Among Gander’s most recent books are Be With, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, the novel The Trace, and Core Samples from the World. Gander’s translations include Alice Iris Red Horse: Poems by Gozo Yoshimasu and Then Come Back: the Lost Poems of Pablo Neruda.

He has a history of collaborating with artists such as Ann Hamilton, Sally Mann, Graciela Iturbide and Vic Chesnutt. Recipient of grants from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Howard, Whiting and United States Artists foundations, Gander lives in northern California.

You can find out more about Forrest Gander’s work on his website.

Founded in 1969, Arc Publications publishes contemporary poetry from new and established writers from the UK and abroad, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English, and the work of overseas poets in translation. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. To learn more about Arc and to see its range of titles, visit the publisher’s website. You can also find Arc 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.

Eye of the Times

~ oxfordbrookesuni

This is the eye of the times:
it looks out slant
under a seven-colour brow.
Its lid is bathed in flames,
its tear is steam.

The blind star flies at it
and melts on the hotter lash:
the world grows warm,
and the dead
break bud, and blossom.

Auge der Zeit

Dies ist das Auge der Zeit:
es blickt scheel
unter siebenfarbener Braue.
Sein Lid wird von Feuern gewaschen,
seine Träne ist Dampf.

Der blinde Stern fliegt es an
und zerschmilzt an der heißeren Wimper:
es wird warm in der Welt,
und die Toten
knospen und blühen.

Paul Celan, translated by Jean Boase-Beier


This translation is copyright © Jean Boase-Beier, 2021, and is reprinted here from Eye of the Times (Arc Publications, 2021) by permission of Arc. You can read more about the book on the Arc website.

Notes from Jean Boase-Beier and Arc Publications:

Notable in this poem, from the early 1950s, is the use of Jewish symbols – fire, star, eye, the number seven – many of which became personal symbols for Celan. In his poems eyes suggest life, point of view and engagement, but often also the Jewish folk belief in the Evil Eye. And because, in German, dice have eyes rather than dots, eyes also suggest chance.

There have been many translations of Celan, each reflecting a different angle of approach to what is generally agreed to be his very complex poetry. Celan was known to have a special interest in language, in the way words work and the way in which they can be misused and can misrepresent – this is why he so often revised his poetry. Jean Boase-Beier’s particular approach to translating Celan focuses on his use of words, and her illuminating introduction and her notes contextualizing each of the poems in this chapbook are invaluable in helping the reader to their own interpretation. You can watch Celan’s translator, Jean Boase-Beier, discussing the collection with Philip Wilson in a video available on the Arc YouTube channel.

Paul Celan, who was born Paul Antschel, is widely considered to be one of the foremost European poets of the twentieth century. Born in 1920 into a German-speaking Jewish family in Czernowitz, at that time a multicultural city in Romania, he spent a short time studying Medicine in France before the start of the Second World War forced him to return. Back in Czernowitz, he began to write and translate poems, while studying French and Russian, but persecution of the Jews led to the deportation of his parents to a concentration camp, where his father died and his mother was shot. This sudden loss was to lead to severe trauma from which Celan never recovered. After the war he went to Paris, where he worked as a university lecturer in German, and won many awards for his poetry. In spite of his success, he was increasingly troubled by uncertainty, lack of self-belief, and mental disturbance. He drowned himself in the Seine in 1970.

The translator, Jean Boase-Beier, is Professor Emerita of Literature and Translation at the University of East Anglia, where she founded and ran the MA in Literary Translation. Besides her translations of Rose Ausländer , she has translated poetry by Volker von Törne and Ernst Meister, which also appeared with Arc Publications. Jean has written extensively on translation, especially the translation of poetry. Her latest book for Arc is Poetry of the Holocaust: An Anthology (edited with Marian de Vooght, 2019). Find out more about Jean’s work on the Arc website.

Founded in 1969, Arc Publications publishes contemporary poetry from new and established writers from the UK and abroad, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English, and the work of overseas poets in translation. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. To learn more about Arc and to see its range of titles, visit the publisher’s website. You can also find Arc 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.

Green-tinted Roses

~ oxfordbrookesuni ~ Leave a comment

I saw in an ice-white
garden the winter light
had coloured
the yellow rose and its stalk
don’t say
it’s a marvellous strain
leaving me nothing
to marvel at
it grew to
some height on its own
by the side of a road
yet nobody
dared
clip its wings
It came to me
like a lover
holding her breath.

by Esther Dischereit

Grünstichige Rosen

sah ich in einem eisweißen Garten
stehen das Winterlicht
hatte die gelbe Rose
mit ihrem Stengel gefärbt
sag nicht
es ist eine wundersame Sorte
damit ich nichts mehr
zu staunen hätte
sie wuchs in
einer Höhe als eine einzige
am Rand einer Straße
und doch wagte es
niemand sie an den Flügeln
zu stutzen
Sie kam mir entgegen
wie eine Geliebte
und hielt inne.

This poem is copyright © Esther Dischereit, 2020, translated by Iain Galbraith, and is reprinted here from Sometimes a Single Leaf: Selected Poems (Arc Publications, 2020) by permission of Arc. You can read more about the book on the Arc website.

Whether in poetry, fiction, radio drama or sound installations, Esther Dischereit’s work represents a unique departure in recent European writing: a distinctive, off-beat syntax of German-Jewish intimacy with the fractured consciousness and deeply rutted cultural landscape of today’s Germany. Sometimes a Single Leaf, mirroring the development of Esther Dischereit’s poetry across three decades, includes selections from three of her books as well as a sampling of more recent, uncollected poems. It is her first book of poetry in English translation and was the Poetry Book Society’s Recommended Translation for Winter 2019.

Read more about the book and buy a copy on the Arc website.

‘Born in Germany in 1952 to a Jewish mother who had survived the Holocaust in hiding, Esther Dischereit grew up in a haunted society, where the crimes of the recent past were effectively suppressed despite their omnipresent traces. These poems, drawn from published collections spanning the years 1996 to 2007 as well as from more recent work, give voice to disorientation and pain, as well as endurance and resolve, in the unwelcome work of calling history to account, of witnessing to the ghostly “once-weres,” invisible to her contemporaries. A fine preface by the translator Iain Galbraith provides biographical context and introduces rich avenues of interpretation. Galbraith’s translations render very compellingly the sparse lines and subtle rhythms of Dischereit’s free-verse poems.’ (Karin Schutjer, World Literature Today, Summer 2020.)

Founded in 1969, Arc Publications publishes contemporary poetry from new and established writers from the UK and abroad, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English, and the work of overseas poets in translation. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. To learn more about Arc and to see its range of titles, visit the publisher’s website. You can also find Arc 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

Untold Histories

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The poem is not flammable.
Fire is not a poem.
They gravitate towards each other in separate histories
that, once told, are no longer free.
They sail like shreds of clouds across a paper sky:
amber rosewood fig
 

Nieopowiedziane Historie

Wiersz nie jest łatwopalny.
Ogień nie jest wierszem.
Ciążą ku sobie w osobnych historiach,
które, raz opowiedziane, nigdy nie są wolne,
przepływają jak strzępy obłoków po papierowym niebie:
bursztyn rozeta figowiec

by Jacek Gutorow, trans. by Piotr Florczyk

This poem is copyright © Jacek Gutorow, 2021, translated by Piotr Florczyk, and is reprinted here from Invisible (Arc Publications, 2021) by permission of Arc. You can read more about the book on the Arc website.

Notes from Mark Ford, who has written an introduction to Gutorow’s book, Invisible: 

‘Invisible is a teasing title for a collection of poetry. [Wallace] Stevens, with whose work Jacek Gutorow has a deep and sustained engagement, suggested in ‘The Creations of Sound’, that poems should “make the visible a little hard / To see”. […] Both Gutorow and Stevens develop a poetic medium that maintains an oscillating dialectic between the seen and the unseen. The invisible operates not as an occlusion of reality, but as an aura saturating what is described; images are gently prised from the contexts of time and place and invested with a mysterious in-between life…’

Invisible was selected by the Poetry Book Society as its Translation Choice for Autumn 2021. You can buy a copy on the Arc website.

Jacek Gutorow was born near Opole (Poland) in 1970. He has published eight volumes of poetry, six collections of critical essays, a monograph on Wallace Stevens and a fake diary. His translations include Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Charles Tomlinson, Mark Ford and Simon Armitage. He teaches American literature at the University of Opole and edits Explorations. A Journal of Language and Literature. You can read more about Jacek’s work on the European Writers website and via Culture.pl (in Polish, unless you make use of Google Translate or other online translation!).

Founded in 1969, Arc Publications publishes contemporary poetry from new and established writers from the UK and abroad, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English, and the work of overseas poets in translation. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. To learn more about Arc and to see its range of titles, visit the publisher’s website. You can also find Arc 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.

Lines given with a Penwiper

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I have compassion on the carpeting,
   And on your back I have compassion too.
The splendid Brussels web is suffering
   In the dimmed lustre of each glowing hue;
And you the everlasting altering
   Of your position with strange aches must rue.
Behold, I come the carpet to preserve,
And save your spine from a continual curve.

by Christina Rossett

Listen to the Poetry Centre’s Dr Dinah Roe read and discuss this poem.

This week’s poem by Christina Rossetti marks the beginning of ‘The Fiery Antidote’: our semester-long celebration both of Rossetti and of our colleague Dr Dinah Roe’s research about her and the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art and writing. 

We invite you to join us! Our first event is an online discussion group this Thursday (28 October) from 12-12.45pm when we’ll be looking at Rossetti’s poem ‘Shut Out’. You can sign up for the group and find out more about our events via this link. Everyone is very welcome to attend – all you need to do beforehand is read the poem, which you can find here.

Also this week we launch a new Poetry Centre initiative: monthly Instagram poetry prompts! Curated by Poetry Centre Interns Maleeha and Rhiannon, they are designed to spark inspiration. Write a poem in response to one or more of these prompts, which you can find on our Instagram page from 12pm today (Monday), and e-mail them to us (oxfordbrookespoetry@gmail.com) by the end of the week. We’ll select the best and post them on Instagram next week!

‘Lines given with a Penwiper’ was composed on 20 November 1847, when Rossetti was a teenager and caring for her father. It was not published during Rossetti’s lifetime and is in the public domain. You can hear Dinah read the poem and discuss it here.

Born in London in 1830, Christina Rossetti was one of four children (her siblings included the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti). Some of her earliest poems were printed privately, but she also published in the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ. (You can find out more about the Pre-Raphaelites in Dinah’s essay on the British Library website and hear her discuss them in this video about a recent Ashmolean Museum exhibition.)

One of Rossetti’s most famous poems is ‘Goblin Market’, a long fairy tale-like piece that was first published in Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862, the collection which made her name (despite critiques from figures like John Ruskin, who called the poet’s ‘irregular measures’ a ‘calamity of modern poetry’). You can read a commentary about ‘Goblin Market’ by Dinah on the British Library website.

Often inspired by her Christian faith, Rossetti’s subsequent work (in collections such as A Pageant and Other Poems and Verses) established her as a leading Victorian poet and also a poet for children (Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book).

After her death from cancer in 1894, her brother William Michael Rossetti collected many of her poems in The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti in 1904, but her complete poems were not published until Rebecca Crump published The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti (Louisiana State University Press, 1979-1990). Dinah is currently editing a new three-volume edition of The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti (Longman Annotated English Poets), due for publication in 2025.

Find out more about Dinah’s research on ‘The Fiery Antidote’ page.