The Necktie Quilt

May 6, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

After his death at eighty-three, which she believed was premature
and the fault of paramedics who’d ‘taken their time’ to arrive,
she set about thirty years of his neckties, the gifts of grateful clients
whose grubby affairs he’d settled in and out of court,
while she’d looked on, applauding his victories, folding away ties.

Now she selected only the silk ones, unpicked them with meticulous
care, pressed them under a damp cloth until every crease was smoothed,
arranged them on the dining room table: the bold paisleys, their backs
curled against regimental stripes, the gaudy florals, which had made him smile,
but were never worn, cheeky polka dots, a couple of sombre knits
she suspected were synthetic.

Day after day, the old Singer hummed and whirred as she tacked
the strips together, and when the backing was attached, the borders
feather-stitched by hand, she found a place for every scrap left over:
trim for a dresser scarf, appliqué for scatter cushions, a white curtain
tied back with a sash of hand-painted peacocks, an old dressing gown
with a new belt, flaunting wild geometrics.

Swathes of unexpected colour cropped up in unexpected places,
the fallen-fruit silks of mulberry, gold and plum, a splash of scarlet
in an inner sleeve, reminding her of the flash of a whore’s petticoat—
a certain woman she saw once, slipping out of his office.
When it was finished, she shook it out, flung it across her single bed.

by Wendy Klein

There are some exciting creative writing and poetry events happening in Oxford over the next two weeks. From 7-11 May, the Pegasus Theatre hosts Oxford Brookes’ Amazing Acts festival, which this year features, amongst other events, a creative writing showcase hosted by Philip Pullman; ‘Visions of the Future’: pieces of writing born from collaborations between the sciences and humanities; and ‘Poetry and Business: Risk, Recession, Recovery’, in which MBA students and established poets collaborate. Find out more about the festival and how to buy tickets on this page.

This week’s poet, Wendy Klein, will be reading at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Oxford with Dorothy Yamamoto on Wednesday 15 May at 8pm. You can find more details on our Facebook page.

Notes from Cinnamon Press:

By turns raw, tender, and humorous, Anything in Turquoise takes us on a lyrical and emotional journey from an American childhood filled with ‘Bebbe Meises’ (old wives’ tales) to points east – Mongolia, from where ‘Having failed and failed to grasp lessons/about cultures in varying states of disrepair/having walked away even sadder’, we are moved to Vietnam where not only an American helicopter, but the poet is ‘caught and pinned’, and to Cambodia, where a school-turned-Khmer Rouge holds ‘a single framed image/for each grisly death, galleries/or portraits … half a holocaust /under my feet.’ Moving West we are caught in ‘Hurricanes and other Storms’, ‘the tilted headstones and bones left by Katrina … they know how to bury their dead’, before finding ourselves in California where a slippery past intrudes on the present and the poet’s mother is sharpening ‘her Semitic tongue’ to ‘lacerate the soul-less goyem’ before ‘lurching towards incarceration, divorce,/death.’ Finally we find ourselves ‘Elsewhere’ in the company of Jackson Pollock repainting the cave until we stand, ‘blinded/by this orgy of naked colour, already pining for our past.’ You can find out more about the collection at Cinnamon’s site here.

Wendy Klein‘s poetry has appeared in many anthologies and poetry magazines. A retired family psychotherapist, she is a regular reader at the Troubadour and Poets’ Cafe in Reading. Her first collection was Cuba in the Blood (Cinnamon Press). She enjoys belly-dancing and the curative company of dogs.

Cinnamon Press is an independent publisher run by a family team and based in North Wales and the Midlands. We select books that we feel passionate about and concentrate on a list of poetry and fiction titles into which we put maximum effort at every stage of development. We also run regular writing courses and writing competitions, including major awards for poets, novelists and short story writers and a series of mini competitions. Find out more about the publisher and join their mailing list here. You can also find Cinnamon 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.

A Place Of Fine Ridges

February 18, 2013April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A place of fine ridges
Where light was flung up from the valleys
Where flags flew in the blond wind
Little snowy pockets and high mountain monasteries
So you knew you could get a blessing before leaving for the summit
And you did
And you watched yellow-ribboned flags fly against red
And this was a new impossible adventure
From which you would learn, grow
Develop from the magic and mystery
But you knew one day too
You would trace a tablecloth pattern of red, yellow and blue
Like the blond wind and the coloured flags
And there would be an ashtray nearby and somebody talking
And it would be as if the ridges, never before seen
And the special light from the soft contours
Had never been

by Elizabeth Ashworth

Notes from Cinnamon Press:

In Flashes and Specks Elizabeth Ashworth displays a carefully honed skill, acute powers of observation and an enviable range. Birds and light, shadow and dark, the questing spirit of Walt Whitman, impermanence and a refusal to take anything for granted coalesce in mature language that is threaded with humour and made precise by the artist’s eye at work. You can read more about the book at Cinnamon’s website here, where you can also sample further poems from the collection.

Elizabeth Ashworth is a short story writer, poet, and journalist. Liz was born in Buxton and has lived in north Wales for most of her. She has taught creative writing for many years to children and adults. Her Outposts poetry collection A New Confusion won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, and she was second prizewinner in the HE Bates Short Story Competition.

The Roaring Boys

December 3, 2012April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

er cof Iwan Llwyd

Of all the poets I have known
it’s the Roaring Boys I remember
best; they roared through Canada
and the United States, they

roared through Germany and
France; they roared through England,
but best of all they roared through
Wales; they wrote on anything,

bits of paper, notebooks of a
special kind, the backs of their father’s
wills; they wrote even when they
reached the edge of the endless

sea; Death is unique, he has no mother
and God is afraid of him; when he
came for the Boys, Wait, one said,
I’ve an englyn to write; another

snatched him and kissed his beaky
lips; a last glass of cool white wine,
said a third; Death had visited Keats
and Jeffers, Wordsworth and Thomas

R.S., but the Roaring Boys, he said,
I will never forget; a disgrace to their
nation, and its glory, stumbling
through time like the road to a tavern

where the landlord has the glasses primed
because he knew they were coming
with a thirst and an appetite
as they burst through the sunlit doors.

by John Barnie

Notes from Cinnamon Press:

There is a sense of unburdening in The Roaring Boys – a confessional mode that is certainly present in previous volumes, but which here achieves a new plangency. It is all the more striking for butting up against the poet‘s characteristic tonalities – an unsentimental lyricism, sharp with dissecting irony. That unburdening is carried by form: each poem is a single sentence in which concept, argument and emotion are controlled by the sluice gates of semi-colons. Dramas unfold across clauses that bridge voices, tones and timescales. Find out more about the collection on Cinnamon’s site here.

John Barnie is a poet and essayist from Abergavenny, Gwent. He lived in Denmark from 1969-1982, and was the editor of Planet, The Welsh Internationalist from 1990-2006. Barnie has published several collections of poems, mixed poems and fiction, and two collections of essays, one of which, The King of Ashes, won a Welsh Arts Council Prize for Literature in 1990. His collection Trouble in Heaven (Gomer, 2007) was on the Wales Book of the Year 2008 Long List and his previous collection with Cinnamon Press is The Forest Under the Sea. John Barnie plays guitar in the bilingual blues and poetry group Llaeth Mwnci Madoc/Madoc’s Moonshine. He is a Fellow of Yr Academi.

Treachery

October 1, 2012April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It feels nearer the sun up here.
The stony track struggled up
through dark of trees towards
a growing disc of light, which swelled, broke
into majestic brightness.
Now the path levels, the valley opens.

Across the river one farm spreads yard and barns
in shadow against light. Above it rises
bare mountain, a final wall that flanks
the upper valley, curves round its distant head,
in a strange visual accord
with the valley-floor’s sharp green
of re-seeded garths, proclaiming
work, settlement, fertility.

Alongside a fence that dwindles
towards the far-off valley-head, unseen
high passes, into barren distance
runs a green road. On it, down
from hidden solitudes, a dark dot
gleams and grows, zooms into a phalanx
of mountain-bikers, black-clad, impassive,
hissing dizzily past. Unmoved,
a fat ewe suckles her twins
under a track-side thorn.

In this domain of sun,
so all-encompassing, so royal,
only the traitor mind creates
in the shiver of sun on skin
a shudder of ice-wind, subverts
with a sly imagining of snow.

by Ruth Bidgood

UPDATE! Matthew Jarvis, author of the book Ruth Bidgood mentioned below, has written a blog post in response to ‘Treachery’, giving some very valuable context about the setting for the poem. You can read it here, and find out more about Matthew’s book here.

Notes from Cinnamon Press:

In Above the Forests, perspectives of ordinary life, rendered with this poet’s effortlessly questing precision, serve as means of further discovery. Her writing has always shown ‘how different is real/from ordinary’. As she says, ‘to feel bounded is our only way of being with things, because we have fewer dimensions than actually exist…but we can feel the boundary sometimes being transcended.’ In these poems, the lie of Welsh land, local and family history, social pressures, the promptings of dream and of scientific speculation are all evoked, serving to draw the reader, often literally step by step, into processes of questioning, self-questioning and an intuitive crossing of boundaries. (Anne Cluysenaar.)

Ruth Bidgood was born of a North Welsh father and a West Country mother in Seven Sisters, Glamorgan. Educated in Port Talbot and at Oxford University in the 60s, she later returned to Wales and settled in Powys. Her second collection received a Welsh Arts Council award; the sixth and seventh were shortlisted for the Welsh Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 1993 and 1997 and Time Being was a Poetry Society Recommendation and won the Roland Matthias Prize for 2010. Above the Forests was launched to mark Ruth’s 90th birthday in conjunction with a critical appraisal of her work by Matthew Jarvis: Ruth Bidgood (University of Wales Press, 2012).

Gags

April 21, 2008April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Up from the descending semis,
Sean’s nan had the forest
in her mouth, bracken
plumbing her tongue.

The strait’s liquids
had changed a child’s sibil-
ance to ancient
occlusive stops.

We called her Gags.
My butty said he could
understand the babble.
I’m not sure.

She was a leaf-
thing, curled in her chair,
waiting for a second
turn to take her off.

by Richard Marggraf Turley

From The Fossil-Box (Cinnamon, 2007).

“I grew up in the Forest of Dean. ‘Gags’ was written as the final section in a longer poem called ‘Vorrest’, which explores the idea of Dean as part of my ‘impending past’. Gags was the nan of my childhood best butty (forest dialect); to our eyes she seemed as old and strange as the forest itself.”

Richard Marggraf Turley won First Prize in the Keats-Shelley Prize, 2007. His poems have appeared in journals and magazines. Richard was born in the Forest of Dean and moved to Wales when he was seven. Richard’s co-authored volume, Whiteout, appeared with Parthian in 2006. His first solo collection, The Fossil-Box, was published by Cinnamon in 2007. He is also the author of two books on the Romantic poets. Recent radio interviews include an appearance on Radio 3’s The Verb, presented by Ian McMillan.

Cinnamon Press is a young, fast-growing small press based in North Wales and publishing writers from Wales, the UK and internationally, as well as the poetry journal Envoi. The list is mainly poetry, but also includes some fiction and cross-genre books.

-wards

November 26, 2007April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The snow falls thickly,
a strong wind moves
the white-fronted geese flying south,
grey wings out of cold,
calling in half song,
half bark.

An early moon, knife-edged,
shining indiscriminately,
cuts light on anyone.

The train takes me north,
scooping into the cold
air, sharp and clear,
where there is no sound,
not one –
the fields unravelling,
the trees running backwards
in my wake,
behind.

by Judy Kendall

From The Drier The Brighter (Cinnamon, 2007)

Like many of the poems in The Drier The Brighter, ‘-wards‘ plays around with the graphic surface of the poem, in particular the font and punctuation. The more extreme experiments with punctuation and use of space elsewhere in the collection are here more muted and mainly appear in the title which is in italics and begins with a hyphen. These typographical choices highlight the transitory state of the voice and content of the poem – left hanging, neither ‘to-wards’ or ‘back-wards’, but in transit, like the voice in the poem, disorientated, not knowing which way is forward or backward. Is the speaker moving forward or are the fields outside the train running backwards?

The poem also owes a debt to Chinese parallelism. Each idea is repeated, often in successive lines, and sometimes in the same line. ‘The snow falls thickly’ (l.1) refers to winter weather, movement, and extremity. This is followed by a parallel line containing three more indications of winter weather (wind), movement (moves) and extremity (strong). This use of parallelism also reinforces the idea of movement as lack of movement – being caught in movement, and not in arrival.

Judy Kendall is a poet and translator whose recent poetry collection The Drier The Brighter came out with Cinnamon Press in 2007. She has spent several years teaching in Japan and Africa but now works as a lecturer in Creative Writing and English at Salford University.