Still

June 5, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Between two monarchs bitter feuds are commonplace
And swarms are never slow to mobilise.
From miles away you’ll sense them massing for battle,
You’ll sense an appetite for hostilities, a violent thirst.
Cowards and dawdlers are dragooned into action.
Sounding the war-conch with droning wings
They stream into the breach, fizzing with fury,
Nerves set like wires, venomous bayonets fixed.
Back as far as their sovereign’s chamber
They’ll defend and engage, resolved to kill or die.
Or out of the blue yonder into the field
They’ll pour from the hive, countless as rain.

by Simon Armitage

The Poetry Centre would be delighted to see you at ‘moments/that stretch horizons’: an international poetry symposium for practitioners, a collaboration between the Poetry Centre, the University of Reading, and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) at the University of Canberra. We will explore one theme current in contemporary writing: poetry about the environment, and two concerns of poetics: prose poetry and the lyric and poetry and publishing. Each panel set up to discuss these issues will be composed of a mixture of UK-based academics and writers and academics/poets from IPSI. The symposium will take place at Oxford Brookes University, and places are limited. Tickets for the day (including refreshments and lunch) cost £10 (£7.50 for postgraduates). All poets, critics, and readers of poetry are welcome, and you can sign up here.

The Poetry Centre recently launched the Oxford Brookes 2017 International Poetry Competition, which is judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort. Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: English as an Additional Language and Open category. First Prize in both categories is £1000, with £200 for Second. The competition is open for submissions until 11pm GMT on 28 August 2017. Visit our website for more details.

Notes from Enitharmon:

Still is a sequence of poems in response to panoramic photographs of battlefields associated with the Battle of the Somme. Chosen from archives at Imperial War Museum, these astonishingly clear photographic images are ahead of their time. Still is published on the centenary of the battle, which is considered to be one of the bloodiest in British military history. Consequently, Armitage’s thirty poems are versions of the infamously tense Georgics by the Roman poet Virgil. The contemporary words meld with the visual devastations of war to haunting effect.

Designed by Praline Design Studio and published by Enitharmon Press and the Imperial War Museums, Still is an 74pp large-scale landscape publication with introductory texts, contemporary maps, fold-outs and decorated endpapers. You can find out more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

Simon Armitage lives in Yorkshire, has taught at universities in this country and the United States, and is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield. He has published eleven full-length collections of poetry, including Selected Poems and Seeing Stars, as well as notable translations of medieval verse such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Death of King Arthur and, most recently, Pearl, which won the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He has published two novels and four works of non-fiction; Walking Home – the prose account of his walk along the Pennine Way as a latter-day troubadour was a SundayTimes bestseller. Armitage also writes extensively for radio, television and film, is a regular broadcaster and presenter with the BBC, is the lyricist and singer with the band The Scaremongers, and has written several theatre pieces including dramatisations of both the Odyssey and the Iliad. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes such as the Keats-Shelley Prize and the Cholmondeley Award, and in 2010 was honoured with the CBE for services to poetry. He is currently the Oxford University Professor of Poetry, and you can hear recordings of his recent lectures on the Oxford University website. You can also read more about Armitage’s work on his website.

‘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.)

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 POET ASKS HIS LOVE ABOUT THE ‘ENCHANTED CITY’ OF CUENCA

April 1, 2017April 20, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Did you like the city the water carved
drop by drop in the centre of the pines?
Did you see dreams and faces and paths
and the walls of pain the air lashes?

Did you see the blue crevice of a broken moon
that the Júcar moistens with crystal and trills?
Did your fingers kiss the thorns
that crown the remote stone with love?

Did you remember me when you climbed
to the silence the snake suffers,
prisoner of crickets and shade?

Did you not see in the transparent air
a dahlia of sorrows and joys
that my burning heart sent you?

by Federico García Lorca

‘The Poet Asks His Love about the ‘Enchanted City’ of Cuenca’ is copyright © the Lorca Estate, 2016. It is reprinted from Sonnets of Dark Love (Enitharmon Press, 2016) by permission of Enitharmon Press.

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

In The Tamarit Divan and the Sonnets of Dark Love, written toward the end of Federico García Lorca’s brief life, desire and death come together in poetic chiaroscuro. In these dark and final meditations and flashes of passion, the poet pays homage to Spanish mystics, to Italian masters of the sonnet, and to the Arab poets of his native Andalusia. This poem appears in the bilingual edition translated by Jane Duran and Gloria García Lorca with essays by Christopher Maurer and Andrés Soria Olmedo. Read more about the poem on the Enitharmon website, and join Jane Duran for an evening of ‘Love and Resistance’, a salon event presented by Hope Road and Enitharmon Press, where she will be reading with author Leo Zeilig. The event takes place on Tuesday, March 28 from 6-8pm at Enitharmon Editions, 10 Bury Place, London WC1A 2JL. For more details, visit Enitharmon’s site.

In the Orchard

March 28, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Black bird, black voice,
almost the shadow of a voice,
so kind to this tired summer sky,
a rim of night around it,
almost an echo of today,
all the days since that first
soft guttural disaster
gave us ‘apple’ and ‘tree’
and all that transpired thereafter
in the city of the tongue.

Blackbird, so old, so young, still
happy to be stricken with a song
you can never choose away from.

by Anne Stevenson

There are only a few places left for our next poetry workshop this Saturday! It will be led by poet and teacher Sarah Hesketh and is entitled ‘“more than skin can hold”: Writing People’. The workshops runs from 10.30-4.30pm in the John Henry Brookes Building here at Oxford Brookes University, and will consider the questions that arise when we attempt to represent and remember others in our writing. All are welcome! Visit our website for more information and to sign up.

Alongside poet Kelley Swain and Claire Hamnett from the Oxfordshire Science Learning Partnership, Niall Munro (Poetry Centre Director), is one of the judges for the Oxfordshire Science Festival poetry competition! If you know pupils in Oxfordshire schools aged 7-16, please encourage them to enter! Full details (and information about prizes!) are available on the OSF website.

This Sunday, as part of the Oxford Literary Festival, actor Toby Jones talks to Oxford Brookes’ Professor Simon Kövesi about his life and career and how he interprets the written word in his performances. You can book tickets for the discussion on the OLF website and hear Toby read Blake’s poem ‘London’ at this link.

‘In the Orchard’ is copyright © Anne Stevenson, 2016. It is reprinted from In the Orchard (Enitharmon Press, 2016) by permission of Enitharmon Press.

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

In the Orchard is not so much a collection of poems about birds as a book of memories and rare moments in which a number of familiar birds have played a spark-like role in bringing poems about. They are chiefly lyrical in character and range in time from ‘Resurrection’ written over fifty years ago to recent poems like ‘The Bully Thrush’, but they are not ordered chronologically and shouldn’t be associated with events in the poet’s private life. The etchings by Alan Turnbull are the result of his patient and painstaking study of each bird as it relates to the poem in which it appears. You can read more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

Anne Stevenson, an Anglo-American who has lived in Britain for many years, published eleven collections of poems with OUP before Bloodaxe Books brought out two further volumes incorporated into her Collected Poems 1995–2005. Her Selected Poems were published by The Library of America, after she won The Poetry Foundation of America’s Neglected Master’s Award in 2007. In the same year she received the Lannan Prize for a Lifetime’s Achievement in poetry. In recent years Bloodaxe has published Stone Milk (2007) and Astonishment (2012). Find out more about Anne Stevenson’s work and hear her read from her poems on her website.

5 (from Clavics)

January 20, 2017April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

         Making of mere brightness the air to tremble
         So the sun’s aurora in deep winter
                               Spiders’ bramble
                               Blazing white floss
                               Silent stentor!—
                      Viscosity and dross
                               No more amass
                               At the centre
         The whole anatomy of heaven and earth
         Shewn as the alchemists declare it
                               Poised beyond wrath
                               Resurrection
                               Of skin and bone
                               To dispirit…
                      The day cuts a chill swath,
                               Dark hunkers down.
         I think we are past Epiphany now.
         Earth billows on, its everlasting
                               Shadow in tow
         And we with it, fake shadows onward casting.

             Trust you to be a comic poet manqué
                    Evidence too sweet to dismiss
                      See above. Well, thank you!
                                (Taking the piss,
                                      Donkey?)
                                       Confess
                                  Melancholy
                      A touch too much my thing.
                       Erasmus, In Praise of Folly:
           Grand antidote no substitute for bling
by Geoffrey Hill

We’re delighted that celebrated poet and teacher Tamar Yoseloff will be returning to Brookes to lead a workshop entitled ‘Poetry and Identity: Creating Character’. The workshop will take place on Saturday 11 February from 10.30-4.30pm and is designed to coincide with an exhibition by acclaimed French photographer Claude Cahun running in Brookes’s Glass Tank Gallery. The cost is £45 (£40 for Brookes staff and students), and spaces are limited! Please visit our website for more details and to book a place.

We are also excited to invite you to join us at one of the stops on a UK tour by Pia Tafdrup, one of Scandinavia’s leading writers. In a series of events from 15-17 February organized by the Poetry Centre and supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, Pia will read at the University of Reading with Peter Robinson, at Ledbury, where she will be in conversation with Fiona Sampson, and in Oxford, where she will read at Oriel College alongside T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet Philip Gross. You can find out more and book tickets via the Centre’s website.

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

An elegiac sequence, mourning for the musician William Lawes who was killed at the Battle of Chester in 1645, Clavics is delicately constructed, each page comprised of a section made up of two stanzas, together forming the shape of a key. Before long, however, the tone makes it clear that nothing is to be taken at face value; amongst the lines are provocations and incongruities, playful references and about-turns. Clavics is a celebration of seventeenth-century music and poetry, yet is confrontational and sometimes shockingly modern. From one line to the next you may be pulled out of a potently evoked moment of history, thrust up against the wall of sexual politics and strained meaning in contemporary language, and then dropped back onto a battlefield. Read more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

From working-class Worcestershire roots, Sir Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016) became one of Britain’s most celebrated poets. In his distinguished literary career Hill published 19 books of poetry and also several books of criticism, collated in his award-winning Collected Critical Writings (OUP, 2008). In 2010 he was elected Oxford Professor of Poetry and in 2012 he was knighted for his services to literature. He previously taught at Leeds, Cambridge and Boston University, Massachusetts. His twelfth collection of poems, A Treatise of Civil Power, appeared in 2007, following on Scenes from Comus (2005) and Without Title (2006). Oxford University Press published his Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 in 2013.

‘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.)

Belle Étoile

October 19, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

(after Paul Louis Rossi)

One more time
I’ve let myself drift
Through the network of darkened streets
Once more the boat has left harbour
And I’ve forgotten oars and compassMysterious
Women, or statues,
Stone façades or plaster faces
You steal my nights from me
You mix your blood with mine, in spite of me

Nothing welcomes me nothing
In the solitude where I wander
Not a single opening door
And the fluttering of handkerchiefs can’t hold me
The current is too strong, the rudder’s broken

Let it go give up
Don’t stretch out a hand to the drowned man
I’ll roll like a pebble to the sea
And don’t go grieving over him he has
His eternity of recollection innocence and forgetfulness

In the bitter strictness of the night
The stars are extinguished after so many glances
It’s between two waves that the voyage ends
The lighthouses winking to each other on the coast
I’m lit up suddenly like phosphorescence, glowing algae

by John Kinsella and Alan Jenkins

Booking for our exciting poetry writing/visual art workshop with Tamar Yoseloff closes tomorrow (Thursday) at 5pm! Just a couple of places remain, so move fast if you would like to join us! Visit the Poetry Centre page for more details.

We invite all our Weekly Poem subscribers to join us at the awards evening for our International Poetry Competition on Friday 25 November at Oxford Brookes from 6-8pm. The event will feature readings from our judge, Daljit Nagra, and the winning and shortlisted poets. To attend, please e-mail poetrycomp@brookes.ac.uk by 11 November with details of how many places you require. We hope to see you there!

‘Belle Étoile’ is copyright © John Kinsella and Alan Jenkins, 2015. It is reprinted from Marine (Enitharmon Press, 2015) by permission of Enitharmon Press.

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

This remarkable collaboration had its origins when John Kinsella and Alan Jenkins, two very different poets who had long admired and enjoyed each other’s work, discovered by chance that the new poems they were working on shared a preoccupation with the sea. Marine brings together those poems and others written since, all dealing with the sea in its many moods and weathers, with people’s relationship to and exploitation of their marine environment, from the Indian Ocean to the shores of the Atlantic; the two poets’ highly distinctive voices, while drawing on a dazzling variety of forms and sources, complementing each other in a powerful counterpoint. Read more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

Alan Jenkins’s volumes of poetry include Harm, which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 1994, A Shorter Life (2005), Drunken Boats (2008), and Revenants (2013). He is Deputy Editor and Poetry Editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He is a Fellow of the RSL. Learn more about Alan Jenkins’s work from his page on the British Council website

John Kinsella’s recent works of poetry include Armour (Picador, 2011) and Jam Tree Gully (WW Norton, 2012). Picador published Sack in November, 2014. He is editor and the author of anthologies, works of criticism, fiction and poetry. He is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. You can find out more about John Kinsella’s work from his website.

Qujaavaarssuk hears advice from a man who is not his father

September 19, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Listen to me, Qujaavaarssuk
sometimes others will contend with you
and sometimes they’ll tell lies

sometimes a stronger man will claim he was first to hear the whale breathing
even when he knows you heard it by night
and he did not hear it until dawnsometimes the men in your own boat will mock you
and you’ll hear loud laughter
when all you wish to hear is your wife’s singing

and sometimes your limbs will feel heavy, the sea will launch itself on your boat
filling it with water before you can leave the shore
and while you are bailing, others will reach the hunting grounds.

Qujaavaarssuk, these things are hard, but they do not bring hunger.
Hunger will come of its own accord.

by Nancy Campbell

This week’s poem by Nancy Campbell comes from her collection Disko Bay, which is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. This prize, together with the prizes for Best Collection and Best Single Poem, will be awarded tomorrow. You can read a conversation between the Forward Foundation and Nancy at this link. Nancy will be reading for the Poetry Centre alongside Rachel Blau DuPlessis on 14 January, and you can find more information on the Centre’s site.

Acclaimed poet and teacher Tamar Yoseloff will becoming to Oxford to lead a ‪‎poetry writing workshop entitled ‘The Space of thePoem’ on Saturday 22 October. Inspired by the exhibition by Pan Gongkai running at Brookes’ Glass Tank, we will look at examples of Chinese painting, concrete poetry and text-based sculpture as a way of generating new poems – participants will be encouraged to share their first drafts during the session. You can read more about the workshop on the Brookes website,where you can also book your place (please note that those places are limited!).

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

The poems in Nancy Campbell’s first collection transport the reader to the frozen shores of Greenland. The Arctic has long been a place of encounters, and Disko Bay is a meeting point for whalers and missionaries, scientists and shamans. We hear the stories of those living on the ice edge in former times: hunters, explorers and settlers, and the legendary leader Qujaavaarssuk. These poems relate the struggle for existence in the harsh polar environment, and address tensions between modern life and traditional ways of subsistence. As the environment begins to change, hunters grow hungry and their languages are lost. In the final sequence, Jutland, we reach the northern fringes of Europe, where shifting waterlines bear witness to the disappearing arctic ice.

Nancy Campbell is a British writer and artist whose recent work explores polar and marine environments. She has engaged in residencies at a number of ecological and research institutions, from the world’s most northerly museum on the island of Upernavik to the University of Oxford. She was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2013. Nancy’s books include The Night Hunter and Tikilluarit (Z’roah Press, New York, 2011/13), and How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet (Bird Editions, 2011), which won the Birgit Skiöld Award. Her poems, essays and reviews are widely published, and she was awarded the Terrain Non-Fiction Prize in 2014 for ‘The Library of Ice’. You can read more about Nancy’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

The Camera Cannot Lie

September 5, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Superstitious about images I cling on
to old snapshots of long dead dogs and cats
afraid to kill a second time shapes that still
run and jump, demand and give in memory
to erase them forever as though
in the old saw of terror ‘they had never been’.
And as for the living how can I tempt fate
with fire or scissors, and so the drawer fills up.Yet they’re not us, these faces, masks, muzzles
that stare from celluloid or screen. And this latest
put into my hand by a still sad widow
of five years, shows a group of us I can
number my dead among, memorial
to a buried decade, gone yet visible
in this shiny icon. But these stills can’t show
how they ran through fields, laughed or were lovers.
Memory has to fit then up with life again
though stillI turn them over hoping to catch
their voices, friends of fur or flesh, part of
my story I retell and again.

by Maureen Duffy

News from the Centre: our international poetry competition recently closed for entries – thanks to all who sent in their poems! Our judge, Daljit Nagra, will shortly begin to judge the entries, and winners and the shortlist should be announced early next month.

We are delighted that the acclaimed poet and teacher Tamar Yoseloff will be coming to Oxford to lead a ‪‎poetry writing workshop entitled ‘The Space of the Poem’ on Saturday 22 October. Inspired by the exhibition by Pan Gongkai running at Brookes’ Glass Tank, we will look at examples of Chinese painting, concrete poetry and text-based sculpture as a way of generating new poems – participants will be encouraged to share their first drafts during the session. You can read more about the workshop on the Brookes website,where you can also book your place (please note that those places are limited!).

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

Maureen Duffy was born in 1933 in Worthing, Sussex. As well as being a poet, playwright and novelist, she has also published biographies of Aphra Behn and Henry Purcell, and The Erotic World of Faery , a book-length study of eroticism in faery fantasy literature. She made her début as a novelist with That’s How It Was , published to wide acclaim in 1962. Her first openly gay novel was The Microcosm (1966), set in the famous Gateways Club in London. Recent publications include the poetry collection Family Values (Enitharmon Press, 2008) and a novel The Orpheus Trail (Arcadia, 2009). She is also the author of 16 plays for stage, television and radio, the most recent being Sappho Singing in 2010. A new novel, In Times Like These, was published by Arcadia in 2013. In total, Duffy has published 31 books, including six volumes of poetry. Her Collected Poems, 1949-84 appeared in 1985. You can read more about her work on her website.

Pictures from an Exhibition, from which this poem is taken, celebrates the mind’s eye, which is its own exhibition gallery: transforming Darlington Station into an upturned ship’s hull or a mauled pigeon into a still life, and glorying in the lives, loves and creations of painters from Veronese to Anselm Kiefer. You can read more about the collection on the Enitharmon website.

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.

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.

This Place

March 28, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

When my time comes
and I ask you
again and again where I am
you’ll be able to tell me, truthfully
that this place is a train
that I know quite well

Calling at:
Warrington Bank Quay
Wigan Northwestern
Preston

Calling at:
Wigan Northwestern
Warrington Bank Quay
and London Euston, where this journey terminates

Calling at:

by Sarah Hesketh

This is the first of a special trio of poems to be posted on the list over the next week from poets who are featuring in one of the two Poetry Centre events in the upcoming Oxford Literary Festival. Sarah Hesketh will be reading alongside Harry Man and Claire Trévien on Tuesday 5 April at 4pm (there are more details on the Oxford Literary Festival website), whilst Helen Mort and Alan Buckley will be performing their poetry show ‘The Body Beautiful’ on Sunday 3 April at 2pm; more details on the OLF website. We hope to see you there!

In 2013 poet Sarah Hesketh spent 20 weeks visiting a residential care home for people with dementia. The result is The Hard Word Box, a book of poems and verbatim interviews that takes the reader on a surprising and enriching journey through memory and imagination.

The agility of Hesketh’s poetic voice channels moments of tenderness, suffering and humour, revealing dementia as a negotiation with language and silence. The Hard Word Box is an inventive and compassionate meditation on the things that will be lost. Read more about – and further samples from – the book on the Penned in the Margins website.

Sarah Hesketh obtained an MA in creative writing from UEA. Her first full collection of poetry, Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf, was highly commended in the Forward Prize 2010. In 2013 she was poet-in-residence with Age Concern, working with elderly people with dementia, and in 2014 she published The Hard Word Box, a collection of poems and interviews inspired by this experience. In 2015, she was commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust to produce ‘Grains of Light’, a sequence of poems based around the story of Holocaust survivor Eve Kugler. You can read more about Sarah’s work on her website.

Penned in the Margins creates publications and performances for people who are not afraid to take risks. The company believes in the power of language to challenge how we think, test new ideas and explore alternative stories. It operates across the arts, collaborating with writers, artists and creative partners using new platforms and technologies. Read more about its work on its website. You can also follow Penned in the Margins on Twitter and on Facebook.

Razorshell Wreck on Barleycove Beach on the Eve of All Saints’ Day

October 5, 2015April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A small wreck is a large wreck when a species is in retreat,
undertow and wave-sets soothe and stress between slate hills:
the rise & fall, the artwork re-inscribed in sand which will
gradually wash away, the full weight of the Atlantic.

So attuned, so sensitive, so determined to pull themselves down –
foot anchored hydraulic pull to start again down down down –
razorshell feedertube sucking low tide sweet and sour
into the glasses-case body, enrapture, huddling organs

snug against a cutthroat world’s predators, the larger shifts
making small changes massive, prescribe low-tide second-sight,
test hope as St Jude’s day swell ripped the world apart, a mass
of brethren exposed to make detritus of selves, the soup of origins and excrescence sharply in bands of shifting light,
dozens scattered on this earthquake beach, this harbour wave jewel
where corpses cut bare feet to bone or sinew, ghouls and gods
make sense of spring water bottles and plastic ropes binding
‘best kept secrets’. So many starved here, and razorshells make
discrete sub-fences that will briefly hold the residue of Lisbon’s collapse,
a history divined in shell, its dead reflections, separations along
vaguely perfect faultlines, what fate saw from below the sand.

by John Kinsella and Alan Jenkins

News! 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 Adam Phillips seminars at Keble College continue. Seminars focus primarily on American poetry of the twentieth century, and at the meeting Phillips will introduce the material and lead the discussion. For more details about the series, and forthe link to the reading material, please visit: https://tinyurl.com/nbgwdwb The next seminar will be on Robert Hass’s ‘On Teaching Poetry’, and will take place at 4.30pm on Wednesday 21 October in the Pusey Room, Keble College. All are welcome.

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

John Kinsella’srecent works of poetry include Armour (Picador, 2011) and Jam Tree Gully (W.W. Norton, 2012). Picador published Sack in November, 2014. He is editor and the author of anthologies, works of criticism, fiction and poetry. He is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University.Alan Jenkins’s volumes of poetry include Harm, which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 1994, A Shorter Life (2005), Drunken Boats (2008), and Revenants (2013). He is Deputy Editor and Poetry Editor of the TimesLiterary Supplement. He is a Fellow of the RSL. You can read more about his collaboration with John Kinsella on the Enitharmon website.

The Rolling Stones

September 21, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

An unrestrainable storm’s energy,
a blues tornado building year by year,
smashing successive decades like stage-props
into a singular reality –

the music’s drive, and how Keith Richards loads
that power-line with such a laid-back style
he might be anywhere the drug dictates;
and now in high key the dervish explodes

frenetically, adopting a persona
for each volatile lyric expression,
a manically improvised Lucifer,
a lashingly exploitative ‘Gimme Shelter’,

a transsexual identity which dares
contain a crowd that’s like an exodus
come across country for the new ideal,
and with the red light on, it really scares.

Jagger’s psychopathic ‘Midnight Rambler’,
cued up to stick a knife right through the throat,
a pyrotechnical ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’,
no ostentation from the bass-player,

it’s all up front by a shared microphone,
and what was revolutionary is still
an ongoing assessment of our lives,
survival, altered consciousness, a tone

that challenges the way we live and think,
and devastates the old world, moves into
the centre of new chaos, while the pack
flail for the singer on the spotlit brink…

by Jeremy Reed

Some local poetry news: Mimi Khalvati, Giles Goodland, and the winners and commended poets in the 2015 Four Corners Poetry Competition will be reading in the Common Room, St Cross College, Oxford on Tuesday 13 October, 2015. The event will open at 5.30pm, with readings from 6-7pm. To attend, contact Ella Bedrock: ella.bedrock@stx.ox.ac.uk

In Voodoo Excess, Jeremy Reed charts in poetry and prose the astonishing career of the Rolling Stones from the band’s early days in 1962 to the 50th anniversary tour in 2012 and its extension in 2013. With great originality he examines why the Stones have been a musical and cultural phenomenon, and everything public and mythical, anecdotal and apocryphal about the larger-than-life individual band members. You can read more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

Called by the Independent ‘British poetry’s glam, spangly, shape-shifting answer to David Bowie’, Jeremy Reed’s poetry, fiction and performances are inimitable and utterly opposed to grey mainstream poetry. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. He has received numerous awards work has been translated abroad in numerous editions and more than a dozen languages. He is widely acknowledged as the most imaginatively gifted British poet of his generation. His Selected Poems were published by Penguin in 1987. You can watch Reed performing with The Ginger Light in his poem ‘Kit Marlowe’ here.