Stagshaw Fair

November 22, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

If there’s a spectre in the air, it’s hard
to find in the mizzle smudging the line
between land and sky and the Blackface herd
that scatters as I swing past the footpath sign.

I know this place, these roads, like my own bones
and also love its secrets. I’ve walked
the fair, the north, inside myself. Its stones
are fallen walls, markers where the way forked.

A constellation of returning birds
offers itself as puzzle more than omen.
Where do we think we live? I sift the words
in layers. Who with? Gorse. Redwing. Roman.

Whether we go to the fair, or we don’t,
won’t we all come home pockets full of ghosts?

by Linda France

‘Stagshaw Fair’ is taken from You are Her (2010), published by Arc Publications.

Notes courtesy of Arc:

Linda France was born in Wallsend, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and for the past 16 years has lived close to Hadrian’s Wall, near Corbridge in Northumberland. She works as a poet (she has published 11 collections of poetry), tutor, mentor and editor, often collaborating with visual artists, particularly in the field of Public Art. Since 1990 her poetry has won many awards and prizes as well as being carved into stone and wood, cast in metal, etched in glass, stitched onto fabric and printed on enamel. Her recurring themes are landscape and history, flora and fauna, love and identity.

Linda France found the title for her new collection, You are Her, on a fading information board at Hadrian’s Wall, not far from where she lives. Locating and disorientating at the same time, it set the co-ordinates for a body of work on boundaries and identity, damage and absence. At the heart of the book is a section looking at Nature and Cultivation through the life and work of Capability Brown, who was born in Northumberland in 1716. A horse-riding accident in 1995 fractured France’s spine and cracked her pelvis. This injury, although on the surface healed, re-emerged in the form of flashbacks and chronic pain ten years later when several of her friends died in close succession. Many of the poems in You are Her chart the passage of grief and resolution, a cycle of re-orientation. You can find out more Linda France here, and and read further selections from the book here.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc 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. Find out more about Arc by visiting the publisher’s website, where there are discounts available on Arc books.

Far Along in the Story

May 31, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The boy walked on with a flock of cranes
following him calling as they came
from the horizon behind him
sometimes he thought he could recognize
a voice in all that calling but he
could not hear what they were calling
and when he looked back he could not tell
one of them from another in their
rising and falling but he went on
trying to remember something in
their calls until he stumbled and came
to himself with the day before him
wide open and the stones of the path
lying still and each tree in its own leaves
the cranes were gone from the sky and at
that moment he remembered who he was
only he had forgotten his name

by W.S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin has been the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Bollingen Award. He has also received fellowships from the Rockefeller and the Guggenheim foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of many books of poetry and prose. He and his wife Paula live in Hawaii, where he has lived for more than thirty years. You can learn more about Merwin here and here.

Merwin’s most recent collection, Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), from which this poem is taken, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. “I have only what I remember,” Merwin admits, and his memories are focused and profound — Pennsylvania miners and neighborhood streetcars, a conversation with a boyhood teacher or deceased parent, the distinct qualities of autumnal light and gentle rain, well-cultivated loves, and “our long evenings and astonishment.” From the universe’s contradictions, Merwin calls upon the unexpected to illuminate existence. Read more from the collection here.

Copper Canyon Press is a non-profit publisher that believes poetry is vital to language and living. For thirty-five years, the Press has fostered the work of emerging, established, and world-renowned poets for an expanding audience. To find out more about Copper Canyon and its publications, click here.

Please note that this is the last of the weekly poems for this academic year. We do hope that you have enjoyed this year’s selections, and thank you for your continued support of the Poetry Centre through your subscription to the weekly poem service. The service will recommence in September. Have a very pleasant summer!

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.

Caput Mortuum

May 24, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

An apple orchard, meadows and a river,
a raft at a mooring where children are swimming,
an ancient ash, the sawmill and the bridge,
and at the heart the home of all our colours –

tin pales of white lead paste, and silver mica
from China, and zinc oxide from Peru,
Carrara dust, pozzuoli, burnt sienna,
red ochre, aniline, Verona green,

dammar resin, madder lake, campeachy,
bone black, indigo and dragon’s blood,
Dutch pink and gallnuts, dried black mallow flowers,
kamala, berberis root and walnut shells,

and dark in the stillness a man with a mortar and pestle,
cracking the lapis lazuli apart,
grinding the purest in the pulverisette,
a second grinding, then a sifting,

binding the powder with turpentine resin
and heated beeswax, letting it draw for a day,
then straining it in a linen bag
in a bucket of lukewarm water,

colour coming in a tide,
filling fifty pales, returning
to the first to pour the water off
and dry the sediment and sift again –

this, I think as I gaze beyond the river where the children swim,
beyond to where the sky consoles
with old familiar colours of our physics and our souls,
this in our stillness is our purest blue.

by Michael Hulse

Born in 1955, Michael Hulse grew up in England. After studying at St. Andrews, he lived for twenty-five years in Germany, working in universities, publishing and documentary television, before returning to England in 2002 to teach at the University of Warwick.

Hulse’s poetry has won him firsts in the UK’s National Poetry Competition and the Bridport Poetry Prize (twice), and Eric Gregory and Cholmondeley Awards from the Society of Authors. In the past he has co-edited the best-selling anthology The New Poetry, and in the Nineties was general editor of the Könemann literature classics series and of Arc international poets. He has also been the editor of the literary quarterlies Stand and Leviathan Quarterly, and currently edits The Warwick Review.

Hulse has translated more than sixty books from German, including works by Goethe, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, and the late W. G. Sebald.

His latest publications are a new book of poems, The Secret History (Arc), and a translation of Rilke’s novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Penguin Classics). Learn more about Michael Hulse here.

‘Caput Mortuum’ is taken from The Secret History, and you can read a selection of other poems from the collection here.

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, click here.

Love Song for Fidel Castro

April 26, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

They’ve started a tight salsa
when Elisa strolls on, hips round as a drum.

Her band whoops, edges up the percussion
and the bass whips her calves.

She looks at each woman, remembering
how she brought them together,

their babies now workers, mothers,
or fathers, grins at the years they display

in their breasts, waists and eyes,
one thousand, three hundred and three.

She nods to Aleida on congas holding rivers
in her palms and Mathilda, the oldest,

on rhythm guitar, playing just as she’s waited
in a chair by the door, night after night all her life.

Elisa turns to the room, finds the President’s table,
puts a mike to her mouth.

“For this man tonight, twenty lovers,” she jokes
and her eyes won’t leave as she sings

of sun in the citrus, Batista,
all the sweat and fists in the wind,

of a child in a cellar, paths through the cane,
the wings on every island’s shoulder blades.

She sings of the speeches scrolled in his pockets,
of Angola, Mandela, his friend.

She sings of Havana, how it still burns
on maps of the world,

of Martí’s white rose and an exile’s return
to the Island of Youth.

Then she picks up the claves and the crowd
shines the floor with its footwork,

as they dance the way heat breaks
the line of a road, each beat and bell of the salsa,

a gasp in the hand.

by Jackie Wills

Jackie Wills has been resident poet at, amongst other places, an airport, the Surrey countryside, and with marketing teams at Unilever. Powder Tower (Arc), her first full collection, was shortlisted for the 1995 T. S. Eliot prize and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her second collection, Party (Leviathan), was published in 2000. ‘Love Song for Fidel Castro’ comes from her latest collection, Commandments (Arc, 2007). You can find out more about the book here.

A former journalist, Wills now works as an editor and creative writing tutor. She lives in Brighton with her partner, the South African musician Risenga Makondo, and their two children. Jackie Wills writes a blog about her work, available here.

The Bread-Maker Speaks

March 8, 2010April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

after Brendan Kennelly

It is true that you comfort me
As I slit your flesh
When kneading is done,

Marking a cross
To create four quarters.
I am not brutal,

Your crushed kernels,
Have long awaited
The flow from jug to bowl,

Moisture not known since before
You were beheaded
In an August field.

Through milk, you remember rain,
What made you grow.
And I remember another kitchen,

The smell when soda
Was spooned, a pinch of salt,
Melted butter. Each time

My fingers glide
Beneath your thinly-floured
Mound, I learn again how days

And dreams fatten in warmth,
Wetness, barely dusted by
What contains them:

Routine acts, healing
In work, pleasure
In slit and cut.

From the fingers out,
I make shapes.
The oven’s belly groans.

by Mary O’Donnell

Mary O’Donnell was born in Monaghan, Ireland. She has been a teacher of English, German and Drama, worked with the development agency Concern, been a translator, and worked in journalism as The Sunday Tribune‘s Drama Critic. She has a particular interest in poetry in translation and wrote and presented the RTE Radio programme ‘Crossing the Lines’, a series which focused on European poetry and included readings from many European countries. O’Donnell has published five previous poetry collections, including The Place of Miracles (New Island, 2007), as well as three novels and two collections of short fiction. You can find out more about Mary O’Donnell here and here.

‘The Bread-Maker Speaks’ comes from her latest collection, The Ark Builders, a book in which she attends to the nature of love, loss and continuity, and provides an insight into the complex energies of a struggling global ecology. The rhythms of her own country, Ireland, are keenly observed as it lives out its modern role, partly in flux, partly still aware of ancient connections to land and language. You can find out more about the collection and read other poems from it here. ‘The Bread-Maker Speaks’ is partly a response to the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly’s own poem ‘Bread’, available to read here. The Poetry Centre will be featuring a more recent Kennelly poem in the next few weeks.

Century-end Prayer

January 11, 2010April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Let the arctic birds,
friendly with polar winds,
have an easy time of it, Lord,
for the next hundred years.
I don’t even know
if there are any arctic birds.
I am as ignorant
about bird-life near the Poles
as birds are about good and evil.
I wish my ignorance could also be
equated with innocence.

But my prayers are not hooked
to some mariner’s compass;
and when I start walking down
with my back to the Pole Star,
I lead my prayers by the hand.
And here in warm-rain country
let the rhinoceros
trundle through mire
and the next millennium
and the next.
May the beaver and the porcupine
burrow their way
to their underground haven
and may the elephant shed his tusks
so that we don’t shed his blood.

And a small skylight prayer, Lord:
may the sparrow know glass
from the crisp air outside.

by Keki N. Daruwalla

Keki N. Daruwalla is one of India’s leading English-language writers. Born in 1937 in Lahore, Daruwalla has published nine volumes of poetry. ‘Century-end Prayer’ comes from The Glass-Blower: Selected Poems, a book published by Arc in 2008 and which collects poems from all of the poet’s previous collections. Keki Daruwalla has won the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia. His Collected Poems: 1970-2005 appeared from Penguin India in 2006. He is also the author of three volumes of short stories, a novella, two collections of poetry for children and, more recently, the travelogue Riding the Himalayas (2006). Daruwalla is also well-known as a writer on international affairs, having served in both the Indian Police Service and in a number of positions within the civil service, including Special Assistant to the Prime Minister. He was part of the Commonwealth Observer Group for the Zimbabwe elections in 1980, and at the time of his retirement was Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee in India. For more information about Daruwalla, click here or here. You can listen to him reading his work here.

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 Three Cypress Trees

November 23, 2009April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Transparent and frail,
like the slumber of woodcutters,
serene, foreshadowing things to come,
the morning drizzle does not conceal
these three cypresses on the slope.

Their details belie their sameness,
their radiance confirms it.

I said:
I wouldn’t dare to keep looking at them,
there is a beauty that takes away our daring,
there are times when courage fades away.

The clouds rolling high above
change the form of the cypresses.

The birds flying towards other skies
change the resonance of the cypresses.

The tiled line behind them
fixes the greenness of the cypresses
and there are trees whose only fruit is greenness.

Yesterday, in my sudden cheerfulness,
I saw their immortality.

Today, in my sudden sorrow,
I saw the axe.

by Mourid Barghouti

Mourid Barghouti was born on 8 July 1944, in Deir Ghassana, near Ramallah, Palestine. He has published twelve books of poetry, the most recent being Muntasaf al-Layl / Midnight (Arc, 2008), the collection from which this poem is taken. His autobiographical narrative, Ra’aytu Ramallah / I Saw Ramallah (1997), published in several editions in Arabic, won the Naguib Mahfouz Award for Literature (1997), and was translated into several languages, with the English translation being published by the American University in Cairo Press, Random House, and Bloomsbury. In the year 2000, he was given the Palestine Award for Poetry. Mourid Barghouti has participated in numerous conferences and poetry readings and festivals in almost all the Arab countries, and in several European cities, and his work frequently appears in journals and magazines in both Arabic and in English translations. He has been in exile from Palestine since 1967, and lives in Cairo. To read more about Barghouti, and to see further examples of his work, visit this page.