Category: CBeditions

Natural Mechanical

~ oxfordbrookesuni

See this boy – this Rocky.

At three years: the back door opened.
Out he goes. Prompted. Prodded. Pushed.
Squat body. Crew-cut. Short trousers. Green vest.
Little fists clenched into little pink rocks.

     He’ll be a hardy wee bugger this one.

His father. Nailing the child’s bedroom window open.
Four inch gap. Forever. No curtain.

The third of three children; the Benjamin.
Following the second sister by five years.
No more to come after.

     He’s been up and running
     for half his whole life.

His mother. Allowing the wind to slam shut the door.

     Let him play out where my legs
     are least likely to find him.

     And if he doesn’t come back when called
The father again:
     then it’ll be the webbing belt.
his Victorian ideals coming fifty years too late.

And this boy – this Rocky – takes to it, quick.
An t-Eilean Sgitheanach. The Wingèd Isle. Isle of Skye. His.

And when they later call his name
over wind, over heath, over burn, over bog

he doesn’t hear, and he doesn’t come.

by J.O. Morgan

This excerpt from Natural Mechanical is copyright © J.O. Morgan, 2009. It is reprinted from Natural Mechanical by permission of CB editions.

Notes from CB editions:

The above extract from J.O. Morgan‘s book Natural Mechanical comprises the opening lines of a book-length verse memoir of the childhood of a man – known to the poet – who grew up on the Isle of Skye in the 1950s. Dyslexic, he sought out his own education from the fields and streams around him; the many episodes recounted include a solo trip to France with just a few coins in the pocket of his shorts. (A sequel, Long Cuts, was published in 2011.)

Natural Mechanical – by a poet who had never previously published – won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize. The book was widely praised both for the formal skill of its writing (Andrew Motion called it ‘a memoir written in language that is cannily involved with the ordinary miracles of childhood’), and for its appeal to a readership which might not usually engage with poetry: ‘If those who never touch poetry tried a few pages of this, they might become converts,’ said Rosemary Goring in The Herald.

CB editions publishes no more than six books a year, mainly poetry and short fiction and including work in translation. Since 2008 its poetry titles have twice won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and have twice been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize. In 2011 CBe put on Free Verse, a one-day book fair for poetry publishers to show their work and sell direct to the public; the event was repeated in September 2012 with over 50 publishers taking part. Find out more about the publisher from the website, where you can also sign up to the CB editions mailing list, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook to keep up-to-date with its activities.

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.

PS: Book of Eve

~ oxfordbrookesuni

about that snake: it was beautiful,
truly
        it was beautiful
coiled on the cheek
of rock in early sun.
A garden snake, harmless therefore.
Bronze, I recall, frieze
of diamonds or black
down its sides or back
like great-uncle Sandy’s
tartan socks.
One of life’s lords,
Granddad wrestled
topsoil on his acre
of paradise. Beyond cedars
ocean sparkled. Stairs
descended to the first bright
beach of the world. Tide rising
or falling. It glittered
its tongue at me
and I will never forget
how it took me in, then
sashayed off
into the rough
where the berries hung.

by Beverley Bie Brahic

‘PS: Book of Eve’ is copyright © Beverley Bie Brahic, 2012. It is reprinted from White Sheets by permission of CB editions.

Notes from CB editions:

Beverley Bie Brahic is a poet and translator who lives in Paris and Stanford, California. Her translations of selected poems by Francis Ponge (Unfinished Ode to Mud, 2008; shortlisted for the 2009 Popescu Prize for European poetry in translation) and by Apollinaire (The Little Auto, 2012) have also been published by CBe. About White Sheets – which was shortlisted for the 2012 Forward Prize – Eavan Boland has written: ‘This is a book of craft, music and a collected vision of life that provides pleasure on every page.’ See more details about the book, as well as Brahic’s other work, at this page on the CB editions website. On this page you can also read further selections from White Sheets – just click on the link to the pdf on the left-hand side of the page.

CB editions publishes no more than six books a year, mainly poetry and short fiction and including work in translation. Since 2008 its poetry titles have twice won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and have twice been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize. In 2011 CBe put on Free Verse, a one-day book fair for poetry publishers to show their work and sell direct to the public; the event was repeated in September 2012 with over 50 publishers taking part. Find out more about the publisher from the website, where you can also sign up to the CB editions mailing list, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook to keep up-to-date with its activities.

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.

Ishibe

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Night plummets as it does on the plain,
mist ambles through woods.
Only the tips of the mountain, grey
for a while, and the sea in the distance,
stretching its vast empty limbs.
Hiro stands and watches
the colour drain from the day.
Some will make it.
Some won’t.

Michi ni mayotte shimaimashita*

Then light from an inn trips into the street,
dancers let what comes
go. Others leave the little show,
walk towards the acid blue horizon.
She greets him with a cup of rice wine

It will be a radiant night.

You’re just one among many
who vanished.

 [* ‘I have lost my way’]

by Nancy Gaffield

‘Ishibe’ is copyright © Nancy Gaffield, 2011. It is reprinted from Tokaido Road by permission of CB editions.

Notes from CB editions:

Nancy Gaffield works as a senior lecturer at the University of Kent; she was born in the United States and lived in Japan for many years. Tokaido Road won the 2011 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize. Gaffield’s sequence of poems responds to Hiroshige’s woodcut prints (1833–4) depicting the landscapes and travellers of the Tokaido Road, which linked the Japanese eastern and western capitals of Edo and Kyoto. Submitting to the road and its relentless succession of departures and arrivals, the poems discover a freedom to move beyond the frames established by Hiroshige, not least in their voicing of regret and longing, grief and desire. You can find out more about Tokaido Road on CBe’s page, and view Hiroshige’s prints, ‘The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Road’, here.

CB editions publishes no more than six books a year, mainly poetry and short fiction and including work in translation. Since 2008 its poetry titles have twice won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and have twice been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize. In 2011 CBe put on Free Verse, a one-day book fair for poetry publishers to show their work and sell direct to the public; the event was repeated in September 2012 with over 50 publishers taking part. Find out more about the publisher from the website, where you can also sign up to the CB editions mailing list, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook to keep up-to-date with its activities.

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 Hidden Fighters

~ oxfordbrookesuni

We retraced our steps though the signs were bad.
At twilight a huge man stood in the road with an axe
and when he saw us he whimpered in terror and plunged into the undergrowth
though we were just two peasants, a child, and a deaf horse.
At night we found our moonlit road
obstructed by wheels: wheels of carts, phaetons,
coaches, surreys, toy horses, all frozen.
So we drifted along by the logging paths
that were sometimes just accident, angles of snow and windbreak.
Sunrise was black because we were so deep,
the rustle of the owls stopped,
we came upon a child’s swing dangling from a branch
and then another and another, a forest of swings.
We found a glass case covered with branches:
it contained an encyclopedia. Then we looked up
and saw the carcasses of butchered deer
lashed to the treetops and painted chalk white
like enormous clumps of snow and we knew
we were in the camp of the partisans
and the silence around us was not ours,
nor was it the silence of fear.

by D. Nurkse

Welcome to the first in a new series of Weekly Poems for the new academic year. It’s a pleasure to begin the series with a publisher new to the Weekly Poem, CB editions. Don’t forget that the Poetry Centre can be ‘liked’ on Facebook and followed on Twitter (@brookespoetry).

‘The Hidden Fighters’ is copyright © D. Nurkse, 1996, 2011. It is reprinted from Voices over Water by permission of CB editions.

D. Nurkse lives in Brooklyn, New York; he has published ten books of poetry and has also written on human rights issues. His parents fled Nazi Europe during World War Two. Voices over Water was shortlisted for the 2011 Forward Prize. The book records the emigration of a woman and her husband from Estonia to Canada in the early 20th century; in the fine detail of their experience it evokes the larger forces to which their lives are subject: war, the unyielding land, famine, silence, and the irreducible strangeness of the bond between them. You can read more about D. Nurkse on the CB editions website, where you can read reviews of his work and some further excerpts from his book.

CB editions publishes no more than six books a year, mainly poetry and short fiction and including work in translation. Since 2008 its poetry titles have twice won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and have twice been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize. In 2011 CBe put on Free Verse, a one-day book fair for poetry publishers to show their work and sell direct to the public; the event was repeated in September 2012 with over 50 publishers taking part. Find out more about the publisher from the website, where you can also sign up to the CB editions mailing list, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook to keep up-to-date with its activities.

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.