Come to Me

October 26, 2015April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I was bringing you a little cheese sandwich. It was two in the morning, everybody sleepy, shops closed but in the I Love You bar they gave me a little cheese sandwich.

I was in a taxi bringing you a little cheese sandwich ’cause you were lying there sad, perhaps even ill, and there was nothing good to eat in the house. Was real expensive, around one lat, but that’s OK.

So I was in the taxi with my little iluvu, all squished, practically cold. But for some reason I didn’t make it home. Somehow I ended up where all were merry and witty, and starving. So I drank, I sang, but I saved my little sandwich.

Must have been the third day when I could finally treat you to it, you were so angry, you ate the sandwich hardly looking at it. Had I had more courage, I would have said: but you know I love you, you know I admire you. Don’t make me say it again.

by Kārlis Vērdinš, translated by Ieva Lešinka

Tomorrow (Tuesday 27 October) at 7pm in the John Henry Brookes Building at Oxford Brookes, the prizegiving for the Poetry Centre’s Wellbeing Poetry Competition will take place. All are welcome. The event will also feature a reading from Dan Holloway, celebrated local poet, novelist, and publisher. You can read the winning poems now on the Centre’s website.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Kārlis Vērdiņš has published five books of poetry, which have been received with great critical acclaim and garnered top literary awards. He is a renowned poet, translator, and critic, living and working in Riga. Vērdiņš has an MA in Cultural Theory and a PhD in Philology. In addition to his innovative poetry, he has published many essays on literature as well as translations of European and American poets (including T.S. Eliot, Konstantin Biebl, Georg Trakl, Joseph Brodsky, Walt Whitman), and has also written libretti and song lyrics.

The poems in Come to Me show us what’s most noble in human relationships, alongside the basest fears and anxieties. Irony and sarcasm somehow never seem to obscure the warmth of Kārlis’s voice and his attention to intimate details. This book represents Kārlis at the peak of his poetic power: it is gripping, vivid and not a little romantic. Read more about the book on the Arc website.

Translator Ieva Lešinska-Gaber (Ieva Lešinska) studied English at the University of Riga. From 1978 to 1987 she lived and worked in the USA, studying at Ohio State University and the University of Colorado. She now lives in Riga, working as chief translator at the Bank of Latvia, and as a freelance journalist and translator. She has translated the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot and various American Beat Generation poets into Latvian, and has published numerous English translations of poems and prose by Latvian authors in periodicals and anthologies in the UK and the US.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.

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.

The Man From the Sea

September 28, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

they find him in a dinner suit of salt
and sand, his passport seaweed, an ensemble
of herring gulls behind him in the drizzle.

he says nothing, but lets the surging felt-
surf caper through the piano case
to grand surprise. The heavy epaulettes
of hands weigh on his shoulders: this
is his hour of fame, a time of tablets,

Autumn nights with nurses floating
like icebergs through the wards. In the clinic
garden the last leaves flutter
beneath the walls. From an old cabin,
where ivy rises, drifts the muted tinkle
of a piano. Some believe it is Chopin.

by Jan Wagner
translated by Iain Galbraith

On Friday 23 October, poets Sarah Corbett and Eleanor Rees will be visiting Oxford to read from their exciting new books in an event organized by the Poetry Centre. It will take place at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Jericho, and all are very welcome! More details can be found via Facebook.

‘The Man From the Sea’ is copyright © Jan Wagner, 2015. It is reprinted from Self-Portrait with a Swam of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015) by permission of Arc Publications

Notes from Arc Publications:

Jan Wagner studied English in Hamburg, Dublin and Berlin, where he has lived since 1995. A poet, essayist and translator of British and American poetry by Charles Simic, Simon Armitage, Matthew Sweeney, and Robin Robertson, he was also, until 2003, co-publisher of The Outside of the Element, a boxed loose-leaf periodical based on an idea by Marcel Duchamp. He has published six volumes of poetry and has received numerous awards, including the Mondsee Poetry Award (2004), the Ernst Meister Prize for Poetry (2005), the Wilhelm Lehmann Prize (2009) and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize (2011).

In Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees, Wagner is a vigilant, yet playful, chronicler of the quotidian, his meticulous handling of image and sound forging a worldly, almost luminous palpability. Intensely curious, constantly attentive to novel or unanticipated possibilities afforded by traditional forms, Wagner’s poems celebrate what he has called ‘our steaming, glowing, odorous, noisy world’.

You can read a review of the collection by one of the Poetry Centre’s own interns, Inigo Purcell, on the Poetry Centre website.

Iain Galbraith is a prolific translator of German and Austrian poetry, while his own poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. A winner of the prestigious John Dryden Translation Prize, and editor of five anthologies of poetry, his recent translated books include a selection of W.G. Sebald’s poetry, Across the Land and the Water (2011). He is also a widely performed translator of British and Irish drama into German.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.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.

Lemmeleht

September 14, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The moon was glowing
the forest darkening
the swing creaking
the pond shimmering

the lemmeleht
in the overgrown water
its blossom calls
a maiden

come from here
over the water
take me
and bear me

the lemmeleht
seemed to move
the pond did not
ripple

what will be given
in return
it knows how to make demands
the lemmeleht
the plant knows how to haggle
the dawn grass to reckon

the face of the maiden wilts
but the lemmeleht burns
side by side with a star
in the pond

the maiden pleads
the lemmeleht burns

promises to give
jewellery and silver beads
pendants and brooches
and from over the heart
a clasp
but the lemmeleht
stays silent
under its leaf
a frog
just croaks

she promises to give
her father’s plough
her brother’s horse
her sisters’s spinning wheel
her mother’s cows Maasik Lehik Lillik

and little Muu
and grandmother’s loom

the lemmeleht
doesn’t move
demands something else
it glows like day
it rings like a bell
the maiden pleads
and begs and

calls

no help to be found
anywhere

and quietly the lemmeleht says
                         promise me your home
                         your home promise me
                         nothing else
the lemmeleht stirred
the water rippled

and she promised her home

and the lemmeleht
was near her mouth
beneath her heart
and on her head
but her home was gone

the lake was left
the maiden
tore fescue from
her head
from beneath her heart
scraped the knowing plant
from her mouth
she struck the lemmeleht
the fescue didn’t argue any more
the lemmeleht lay still

her home was gone
the lake was left

a duck quacked
and a frog croaked

by Kauksi Ülle
translated by Ilmar Lehtpere and Mari Kalkun

News from the Centre: many thanks to everyone who entered our International Poetry Competition. The judging process has now begun, and our shortlist and winners will be announced in December!

On Monday 21 September from 4-5pm, Peter Hainsworth and David Robey will be discussing Dante in a free event at Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford. They will be giving a very short introduction to Dante and his work in the 750th anniversary year of his birth. Visit the website for more details.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Kauksi Ülle is a poet and cultural activist. She has become something of a symbolic figure, an icon of ethno-futurism, the focal point of an ebullient era with its own worldview, currents of literary life, identity issues, conflicts and impassioned debate. ‘Lemmeleht’ appears in the book Six Estonian Poets, in which the editor, Doris Kareva, presents us with the work of five highly individual poets of the younger generation together with that of the most influential figures of their parents’ generation. You can read more about the book on the Arc website.

IlmarLehtpere had a bilingual upbringing in Estonian and English. He is the translator of Kristiina Ehin’s The Drums of Silence (Oleander Press, Cambridge, 2007), which was awarded the Poetry Society Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation. His other translations of Kristiina Ehin’s work are Põletades pimedust -Burning the Darkness – An Dorchadas á Dhó (trilingual Estonian-English-Irish selected poems, Coiscéim, Dublin, 2009), A Priceless Nest(short stories, Oleander Press, Cambridge, 2009), Päevaseiskaja -South-Estonian Fairy Tales (Huma, Tallinn, 2009) and Noorkuuhommik- New Moon Morning (selected poems, Huma, Tallinn, 2007). He has also translated her play, A Life Without Feathers, and has already started working on her next collection of poems in English.

Read more about the work of the translators: Ilmar Lehtpere and Mari Kalkun.

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.

Barleyfield Wind

August 3, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Midsummer wind,
thought across the mind:

a running hare,
invisible, a hare-shape –
gone – leaving the field motionless, supple,
greeny yellow. Ripple,
current, eddies,
whirlpool, a pattern created
and in one movement unmade . . .
Quiet then quick,
a country undiscovered, mapped, unknown.
It is all imagination:
pooling – running – streaming – a long, slow surge.
Then, barely a touch,
the whiskered heads
brushed by a breath.
And all the time,
burnishing every grain,
the sun brings to fruition:
a dry, brittle gold.

by Jeremy Hooker

The deadline for submissions to the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Prize is 31 August. There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language, and First Prize in each category is £1000. The competition will be judged by Bernard O’Donoghue and Hannah Lowe, and you can enter by visiting this page. Please do pass on details to friends and colleagues.

Local poets may be interested to learn that Back Room Poets in Oxford are offering a masterclass with George Szirtes on the afternoon of August 15th at the Friends Meeting House. If you are interested in submitting a poem which George Szirtes might discuss, please contact aekocsis@googlemail.com for more details.

Please note that the Weekly Poem will be taking a month’s break. We’ll be back in early September.

‘Barleyfield Wind’ is copyright © Jeremy Hooker, 2015. It is reprinted from Scattered Light (Enitharmon Press, 2015) by permission of Enitharmon Press. Notes from Enitharmon Press:

Jeremy Hooker’s new collection, Scattered Light, shows him producing some of his finest work – a variety of short, ‘light’ poems, longer poems, and sequences such as ‘Saltgrass Lane’ and ‘Hurst Castle’ which revisit his childhood terrain on the Hampshire coastline. The poems show him extending his thinking about powerful crosscurrents that constitute the ‘sacred’, and deepening his exploration of history embodied in landscape. You can read more about the collection on the Enitharmon website.

Jeremy Hooker was born in 1941. Poet, critic, teacher and broadcaster, he is currently Professor of English at the University of Glamorgan. He has published ten collections of poetry. His other books include Imagining Wales: a View of Modern Welsh Writing in English, and studies of David Jones and John Cowper Powys. He has edited writings by Alun Lewis, Frances Bellerby, Richard Jefferies, and Wilfred Owen. Gillian Clarke has described his work as ‘a deceptively readable poetry that leaves phrases and images in the mind as the best poems should’, whilst Poetry Review called it ‘original and very ambitious’. Follow Jeremy’s work on his website, and hear him read from his poems on the Poetry Archive.

‘William Blake dreamed up the original Enitharmon as one of his inspiriting, good, female daemons, and his own spirit as a poet-artist, printer-publisher still lives in the press which bears the name of his creation. Enitharmon is a rare and wonderful phenomenon, a press where books are shaped into artefacts of lovely handiwork as well as communicators of words and worlds. The writers and the artists published here over the last forty-five years represent a truly historic gathering of individuals with an original vision and an original voice, but the energy is not retrospective: it is growing and new ideas enrich the list year by year. Like an ecologist who manages to restock the meadows with a nearly vanished species of wild flower or brings a rare pair of birds back to found a colony, this publisher has dedicatedly and brilliantly made a success of that sharply endangered species, the independent press.’ (Marina Warner.) You can sign up to the mailing list on the Enitharmon site to receive a newsletter with special offers, details of readings & events and new titles and Enitharmon’s Poem of the Month. You can also find Enitharmon on Facebook.

Author’s Prayer

July 27, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over,
for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.

If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge
of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through rooms without
touching the furniture.

Yes, I love. I can cross the streets asking ‘What year is it?’
I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.

by Ilya Kaminsky

A reminder that the deadline for the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Prize is 31 August. There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language, and First Prize in each category is £1000. The competition will be judged by Bernard O’Donoghue and Hannah Lowe, and you can enter by visiting this page.

This Wednesday at The Albion Beatnik in Oxford, our Brookes colleague Jane Spiro launches her poetry collection Playing for Time, published by Oversteps Books. She’ll be reading with another colleague, George Roberts, and Zelda Chappel at 7pm.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived in the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. Kaminsky has worked as a law clerk for San Francisco Legal Aid and the National Immigration Law Center. Currently, he teaches English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University.

Dancing in Odessa was published in the US by Tupelo Press in 2004 and won the Whiting Writer’s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine. You can read more about the book on the Arc website, and follow his work via his own website.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.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.

Thirteen, in a Gulag, 1950

July 13, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

We rode on, squashed together like harvested hay.
I lost my sister and my bearings the other side of the Urals,
tried to make soup in some mud hut,
rubbing frozen sorrel leaves
with mutton tallow, trying to
melt snow under my sheepskin,
seeing as no one had taught me the Kyrgyz songs
which magically light fires in wood and in stone.

Dance, spark, chase away the ice and putrid fever,
wake mother with your wormwood medicine.

by Wioletta Greg, translated by Marek Kazmierski

A reminder that the deadline for the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Prize is 31 August. There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language, and First Prize in each category is £1000. The competitionwill be judged by Bernard O’Donoghue and Hannah Lowe, and you can enter by visiting this page.

‘Thirteen, in a Gulag, 1950’ is copyright © Wioletta Greg, 2014 and translated by Marek Kazmierski. It is reprintedfrom Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance (Arc Publications, 2014) by permission of Arc Publications.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Wioletta Greg (b. 1974), poet, writer and translator from Southern Poland, has been active on the Polish literary scene since her first publication in the 1990s, and despite her move to the Isle of Wight at the beginning of the new millennium, has remained so. She has published several volumes of poetry, a collection of short prose poems and, most recently, a debut novel Guguły (2014), which has already been hailed as the ‘discovery of the year’ by critics and readers alike. Translated into English by Marek Kazmierski, her book Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance, from which this Weekly Poem comes, was shortlisted for the prestigious 2015 Griffin Prize. You can read more about the book on Arc’s website, and hear Wioletta read from her poems (in Polish) on the British Library website, with translations by Marek Kazmierski.

As part of the Poetry Centre’s Review Blog, student Brittany Krier reviewed the book, and you can read her thoughts on the Poetry Centre site.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.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.

Schoolchildren on Vía Augusta

June 8, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Like leaves of wind surprised in a sudden gust
they peel away from the dense huddle,
one child, two, then several, more,
they take flight and ruffle up the street,
blown towards each other, impelled into merging,
unravelling the group they were in,
seeking it out again, finding their place.
A magnet drives them apart and tugs them back,
it scatters them first toward the street,
then brings them together once more. It’s very strange
the way they fill out, make themselves be.
As though they don’t know who are they are unless pursued.
They chase each other, touching, colliding.
There’s no giving way, except in a challenge
that blocks them one by one.
There are two or three who have already crossed over,
two or three more who are starting to break away,
until, as if the motive were spreading,
the curl escapes, flies free, tucks itself in,
and they cross the street en masse. A breath
of air lingers, a gentleness that rocks,
that wraps itself round the stragglers, making them
see that they’re not there, they’re not there yet, that the group
is on the other side. All
as natural as a kindly wind,
without violence, like a pattern,
a compact group once more
finally, after movement, calm and still.

by Pedro Serrano, translated by Anna Crowe

As part of the MCS Arts Festival Oxford (20 June-5 July), the highly-acclaimed poet Roger McGough will be reading on 30 June. You can find more details on the festival site. On 27 June, the festival will also host a youth poetry slam, featuring a wide range of students from across Oxfordshire. More details about that are on this page.

Pedro Serrano has published five collections of poems. Among these are titles such as; El Miedo (Fear) (1986), Ignorancia (Ignorance) (1994), Turba (Peatlands) (2005) and Nueces (Walnuts) (2009). Many of his poems have been translated into English and have been published widely in the UK and abroad. His work has recently appeared on The Verb on BBC Radio Three, presented by Ian McMillan.

The poems in the first full-length collection to be published in the UK by the acclaimed Mexican poet Pedro Serrano, Peatlands, are taken from Desplazamientos, a volume which draws on all his collections since 1986. Chosen by both the poet and his accomplished translator, Anna Crowe, these poems are wide-ranging, passionate and linguistically thrilling.

Lastu

August 18, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Niitythän oli aivan ihania,
että niissä kukki päiväkukat sen minä muistan
että kerran tuolla kun oli sellainen peltoaukema
mutta mikäs kasvi se sellainen oli
minkä ympärillä ne perhoset
mikäs kasvi se siellä oli ja
sitten sitä metsää hakattiin ja sitten sitä ei enää ollu
mutta kun mä en muista sen nimee
ehkä mä muistan sen sitten
siitä mentiin sillan yli
ja silta vei joen yli ja siinä oli tuomi ja
tuomi sitten kaartui sen joen yli ja sananjalkoja
ja haiseva kurjenpolvi ja laakea kivi polulla
ja mä olen monta kertaa nähnyt unta siitä polusta
toisessa oli hirveesti muurahaisia
toinen oli sellainen ilman muurahaisia
toisessa oli paljon neulasia ja käpyjä mutta se toinen,
se oli hyvin lempee, siinä kasvo päivänkakkaraniitty
siinä vieressä ja siellä erämaassa oli sellainen torppa
isä lähti aina sunnuntaiaamuisin lintuja ampumaan
ja kastematoja oli meillä kotona ja
niitähän kerättiin kun oli pitkä siima, se on
semmoinen siima jossa oli paljon koukkuja
ja kerran tällainen siima
oli meidän vintillä kun oli paljon koiranpentuja
ja yks näistä pennuista sai sen siiman huuleensa.

The Shaving

The meadows used to be really wonderful,
with all daisies there, that I remember,
and there was this sort of clearing at one time
but what was that plant
the one the butterflies went for
what plant was that and
then the forest was chopped down and it was gone
but I just can’t dredge up the name
I might have it
we walked over a bridge from it
and the bridge crossed a river to a bird cherry and
the bird cherry bent over the river and ferns
and smelly cranesbill and a flat stone on the path
and I’ve had so many dreams about that path,
one had loads of ants
another had no ants
the first had lots of pine needles and cones but the other,
it was gentle, like, it had a daisy meadow
next to it and there was this cabin in the wilderness
Dad went out every Sunday morning to shoot birds
and we had earthworms at home and
we were always collecting them ‘cause we had a long fishing line,
the sort with lots of hooks
and once we had a line like that
in the attic when we had lots of puppies
and one of the puppies got its lip caught in the line.by Henriikka Tavi

Translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah

Two announcements: The Poetry Centre is inviting all members of the local community to join us in celebration of National Poetry Day on Thursday 2 October 2014 by performing poetry in our Pop-up Poetry event. If you would like to participate, please send us an e-mail at brookespopuppoetry@gmail.com including your name and a sample of the poetry you would like to read, by Friday 5 September 2014.

Details of the inaugural Winchester Poetry Festival have been released! Taking place between 12-14 September 2014, the festival is three days in length, features thirty poets, and hosts twenty-six events, including internationally-acclaimed and award-winning writers such as Patience Agbabi [Creative Writing Fellow here at Brookes], Ros Barber, David Constantine, Christopher Reid, Michael Longley, and Kate Firth. For more details, visit the Festival’s website, its Facebook page, or follow it on Twitter.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Hailing from Vehkalahti, now a part of Hamina, Henriikka Tavi’s (b.1978) first book, Esim. won the Helsingin Sanomat first book prize. She studied philosophy at the University of Helsinki and is a founding member of the co-op poetry publishing house Poesia. From 2006 until 2010 she also worked for the poetry magazine Tuli&Savu, serving as its chief editor from 2008 with Mikael Brygger.Published by Arc Publications in its New Voices from Europe and Beyond series, and edited by Teemu Manninen, Six Finnish Poets features the work of: Vesa Haapala, Janne Nummela, Matilda Södergran, Henriikka Tavi, Juhana Vähänen and Katariina Vuorinen. Their poems are translated by Lola Rogers, Emily and Fleur Jeremiah, and Helen R. Boultrum. These poets offer a refreshing mix of narrative, cinematic and experimental devices, ranging from science fiction to punk to whimsical subject matters. Several of the poets in this anthology collaborate with other artists and this engagement is evident as the poems speak to each other across the collection.

Why poetry?

June 23, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

To catch the cat’s
studied indifference,
her yawn and stretch in the sun.

To take what once was thought
and twice rejected
and refine it
until it is not what it was.

To recover the realm
between waking and sleep
where a dragon guards
the golden hoard

and a word marks the lizard’s dart
between is and
was.

Casual, effortless, elegant
to be the heron
climbing the air.

To give to the human order
a kinder face
a better shape.

To be and not
to be Hamlet beset
by slings and arrows.

To find a way back
to the bush stream
where small fish used to hang
in shafts of sunlight.

To get ahead of yourself
and accept the silence.

by CK Stead

As part of the MCS Arts Festival Oxford, Azfa Awad, Youth Ambassador for Poetry (a position co-sponsored by Oxford Brookes and Oxford City Council), will be reading in Oxford alongside the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, on Thursday 3 July from 7.30-9.30pm. For more details, visit the festival website.

Notes from Arc Publications:

CK Stead, poet, essayist and novelist, is only one of two writers to hold the Order of New Zealand. In The Yellow Buoy, Stead’s fifteenth collection of poetry, the writer journeys in time and space from Croatia and Colombia to Karekare and the Côte d’Azur; Catullus returns to receive plaudits, write to friends and read the world; and various other literary fellows appear in person, dream or conversation – Allen Curnow and Hugh Kawharu, Frank Sargeson and Barry Humphries, Robert Creeley and Katherine Mansfield.

You can read more about CK Stead on Arc’s page, where you can also read further samples of his work. Eight poems from Stead’s work, read by the poet himself, can also be heard on the Poetry Archive site.

what comes to mind is meadow

April 21, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

nasuwa się łąka, łąka łąk ta jedna na starość

przywykam do mijania twarzy

grobek w piasku, kwiatki krzyżyk „muszę zobaczyć kto
tam czy mewa ryba nic”, za falę będzie po nim

morza mam tyle ile przy nim stoję, nie pilnowane
rozpływa się w szare nie wiem

what comes to mind is meadow the meadow of meadows

the one for my old age

slowly I’m getting used to the passage of faces

a small grave in the sand a small cross and some flowers
‘I need to see who it is, seagull fish nothing’ in a wave
it’ll be gone

sea that much of it as I stand on its shore unattended it
spills slurs into the grey I don’t know

by Krystyna Miłobędzka, translated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese

Owing to essential maintenance work, the Poetry Centre website will not be available on Monday 21 and Tuesday 22 April, and so this week’s poem is being distributed early. Happy Easter to all our readers!

News from the Centre: for the first time since its establishment, Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre has established a formal link with another academic centre dedicated to the study of poetry. In March 2014 Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre entered into a partnership with the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies, which is based at Mater Dei Institute, Dublin City University, and is under the direction of Dr Michael Hinds. The link will raise the international profile of Brookes’ Poetry Centre, and facilitate collaborations based on existing and emerging research areas at both centres. Learn more about the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies at the Centre’s website.

‘what comes to mind is meadow’ by Krystyna Miłobędzka is copyright © Krystyna Miłobędzka, 2013, and translated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese. It is reprinted by permission of Arc Publications from the book Nothing More , which is introduced by Robert Minhinnick, and is part of Arc’s Visible Poets series, edited by Jean Boase-Beier (Arc Publications, 2013).

Notes from Arc Publications:

Krystyna Miłobędzka was born in Margonin, Poland, in 1932. She is an author of twelve books of poetry. Her ‘collected’ appeared in 2006 and in 2010. Recipient of numerous awards, she has been nominated for the NIKE Prize in 2006 and won the Silesius Award in 2009, and again in 2013 for Lifetime Achievement.

Nothing More crystallizes relationships between people from erotic engagements to the bond between mother and child. These are poems rooted in the earth and body, beginning in a physical experience that expands into philosophical questioning. They are not polite, they do not hide their imperfections. They reveal an immediacy of expression. Each text reveals itself seemingly uncontrolled, an unspecified thought: a sentence broken off, a sudden mental leap, an ellipsis, a slip of the tongue.

You can read further poems from Nothing More on Arc’s website, and a short essay by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese about her translations of Miłobędzka’s work on the Voltage Poetry blog.