Hydrotherapy

July 15, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

                                                                                       as
                                                                                  gods play
                                                                             on sanctus strings

                                                                                       healing
                                                                                  fingers bring
                                                                                liquid upon you

                                                                                       spilt
                                                                                     down after
                                                                                 down cliff after

                                                                                         cliff
                                                                                   without plan
                                                                                to basin a

                                                                                    place
                                                                                   to rest
                                                                                to rust from

                                                                                        one
                                                                                   hour to
                                                                                 next in salts

                                                                                         silt
                                                                                      scatter of
                                                                                  light and elect

                                                                                            pain
                                                                                   is not
             granted to us

                                                                                          prayer
                                                                                      thrives in
                                                                             lit air O

                                                                                         holy
                                                                                     spirits you
           walk up there

by Andrew Bailey

Many apologies for the fact that this week’s Weekly Poem is late. This was due to a server problem, and we hope to have resolved it for now.

Those of you following us on Facebook, Twitter, or looking over the recent Forward Prizes shortlists, will have seen the exciting news that Brookes’ Creative Writing Fellow Patience Agbabi has been shortlisted for Best Single Poem for ‘The Doll’s House’. You can read the poem on the Poetry Society website (pdf), and find out on the Brookes website about how Patience came to write it.

The Poetry Centre and the Department of English and Modern Languages is also delighted to announce a PhD Studentship in Poetry. This is a three-year, full-time PhD studentship in any aspect of Poetry and Poetics. More details can be found here, and we would very much welcome your circulation of this news.

Notes from Enitharmon:

In Zeal, Andrew Bailey honours the moments in which the everyday face of the world slips for a second. Dream, myth, faith or intoxication will lead you there; but these glimmers can intrude upon a life when they are least expected. With a poetic eye alert to these moments and roots in the work of Redgrove, Raine, Hopkins and Blake, Bailey’s writing follows an unselfconscious and fascinating path toward the more than quotidian. Penelope Shuttle called Zeal ‘[a] notable début’, observing that ‘[e]lements of earth, air, fire and water are the presiding spirits of this collection, poems that explore transactions between a strongly realised physical world and inward experience. Fluid tactile language is tempered here by stringent observation and wit.’ You can find out more about the collection on the Enitharmon site, and follow Andrew Bailey’s work on his blog and on Twitter.

Enitharmon Press takes its name from a William Blake character who represents spiritual beauty and poetic inspiration. Founded in 1967 with an emphasis on independence and quality, Enitharmon has been associated with such figures as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Kathleen Raine. Enitharmon also commissions internationally renowned collaborations between artists, including Gilbert & George, and poets, including Seamus Heaney, under the Enitharmon Editions imprint.

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.

It Won’t Be Anytime Soon

May 27, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I need a man with enough sagacity
To wear a coonskin cap
And escort me and my party
Through the Cumberland Gap
A man sufficiently rough hewn
Not to see shooting a racoon
As serious crime
You need a man with enough powder and ball
To see that what lies behind a waterfall’s
The American sublime
Though you may one day track down your Daniel Boone
It won’t be anytime soon

I need a man with just enough gravity
To see how a dripping tap
Will bend the back of a levee
Until you hear it snap
A man sufficiently immune
To the broad strokes of the Times-Picayune
As might turn on a dime
You need a man with enough native wit to call
It like it is from the flood wall
Even as the waters climb
Though he may rise one day with the harvest moon
It won’t be anytime soon

I need a man with enough lucidity
To read a contour map
Of Zion or Monument Valley
Without the appropriate app
A man sufficiently attuned
To looking beyond buttes and dunes
Of sandstone and shale and lime
You need a man with enough old-fashioned gall
To tell you you look small
In geological time
Though that may one day strike you as opportune
It won’t be anytime soon

by Paul Muldoon

Poetry news! The inaugural Reading Poetry Festival runs from 5-9 June and promises to be a fantastic event. Speakers include Iain Sinclair, Bernard O’Donoghue, Leontia Flynn, Kei Miller, Zoe Skoulding, Peter Robinson, and Steven Matthews. There are also two exhibitions curated by Peter Robinson and Natalie Pollard. Many events are free but require you to book. Click here for the full programme and details about how you can book tickets.

Notes from Enitharmon:

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the BBC. Since 1987 he has lived in the USA, where he is now Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. Apart from Songs and Sonnets, Muldoon’s most recent collections of poetry are Plan B (also published by Enitharmon in 2009), Maggot (2010), and The Word on the Street (2013). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Muldoon was elected a Member of the American Academy in Arts and Letters in 2008. Among his awards are the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the International Griffin Prize, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, and the Shakespeare Prize.

Writing in The Guardian about Songs and Sonnets, Maria Johnston commented that ‘perhaps th[e] hyphenated category “poem-songs” best describes these songs and sonnets. They are complex, charged performances that vibrate in the interim between one thing and the other. They’ll rock your world.’ You can read more about Songs and Sonnets on Enitharmon’s site here, and more about Muldoon from his own website here.

Trees in winter

March 25, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Trees —
they know the recess
of winter, how
to retreat,
continue bereft of leaves,
without grief,
as though practising
the acts of dying;
branches
braced
motionless,
seemingly supported
by freezing air,
frame the view
to the city;
fine adventitious roots,
like the repressed,
multiply,
stretching way out beyond
the drip-line;
taproots strike
veridical
into the hiemal earth,
that deep
blue lake;
not yet the cessation
of things.

by Sharon Morris

Notes from Enitharmon:

Sharon Morris was born in west Wales and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she is currently a senior lecturer. She has exhibited photography, film and video, and performed live artworks bringing together spoken text and projected images. Having completed a PhD in 2000 on the relation between words and images, referring to writer H.D. and artist Claude Cahun, she continues to write on semiotics, visual theory and poetics, for which she received a Leverhulme research fellowship in 2003. Her poems have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Tying the Song (Enitharmon, 2000), the first anthology from The Poetry School, and In the Company of Poets (Hearing Eye, 2003). John Haynes has described the poems in Gospel Oak, Sharon Morris’s new collection, as ‘lithe, fluent poems which typically begin here and now and end beyond it, whose delicate descriptions of nature often evoke a history as it were “under the ground”.’

You can read more about Gospel Oak at this page on Enitharmon’s website and from this interview with Sharon Morris in the Camden Review. Sharon Morris will be reading from her collection this Saturday March 30 from 7.30-9.30pm at The Shuffle at The Poetry Café, Betterton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC1. More details can be found on The Shuffle’s Facebook page.

The Crane Dance

January 14, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The clew paying out through his fingers, a deftness
that would bring him back to her, its softness the softness
of skin, as if drawn from herself directly, the faint
labial smell, guiding him up and out, as some dampness
on the air might lead a stone-blind man to the light.

Asterios dead for sure, his crumpled horn, his muzzle
thick with blood . . . So at Delos they stopped,
Theseus and the young Athenians, and stepped
up to the altar of horns to dance a puzzle-
dance, its moves unreadable except to those who’d walked
the blank meanders of the labyrinth.
And this was midday: a fierce sun, the blaze
of their nakedness, the glitter of repetitions, a dazzle
rising off the sea, the scents of pine and hyacinth . . .

Well, things change: new passions, new threats, new fears.
New consequences, too. Nowadays, we don’t think much
about Theseus, the Minotaur, Ariadne on the beach
at Naxos, staring out at the coming years.
But people still dance that dance: just common folk,
those criss-cross steps that no one had to teach,
at weddings and wakes, in bars or parks,
as if hope and heart could meet, as if they might
even now, somehow, dance themselves out of the dark.

by David Harsent

Notes from Enitharmon:

Yannis Ritsos (1909–1990) is one of Greece’s finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. Louis Aragon called him ‘the greatest poet of our age’. He wrote in the face of ill health, personal tragedy and the systematic persecution by successive hard-line, right-wing regimes that led to many years in prison, or in island detention camps. Despite this, his lifetime’s work amounted to 120 collections of poems, several novels, critical essays, and translations of Russian and Eastern European poetry. The 1960 setting, by Mikis Theodorakis, of Ritsos’s epic poem Epitaphios was said to have helped inspire a cultural revolution in Greece.

David Harsent‘s In Secret gives versions of Ritsos’s short lyric poems: brief, compressed narratives that are spare, though not scant. They possess an emotional resonance that is instinctively subversive: rooted in the quotidian but at the same time freighted with mystery. The poems are so pared-down, so distilled, that the story-fragments we are given – the scene-settings, the tiny psychodramas – have an irresistible potency. In Secret was the Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for the Winter Quarter, 2012. You can find In Secret on the Enitharmon site here, and read a short article by David Harsent about Ritsos from The Guardian here.

The Wash House

October 29, 2012April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The turning on was slower done — the firebox stoked,
the wooden lid the copper had, gilded shine of its deep pan.
And side by side two great stone sinks
for suds and rinse, could hold a muddy child.

The place became a store — chook mash,
pig grits — housed a mat and dust of wares,
played host to mouse. Cat found a hide for bed
and laid her kittens there.

One small window choked with web,
light gave way across the floor; each step
softening to listen hard
though you could never say what for.

Warped tracks of tallboy teased, opened to a world of finds.
A jar of pennies turned to bank. Rust crept
along the blades of knives. And each oilskin coat, from its nail,
stiffened like a corpse impaled. The kittens ended in a sack.

The shedding held small lost endeavour, walls with cracks
poached by the weather, dissolved the meanest acts of time
where garden slept in seed sachets, the mewing
ghosts, the lynching strength of binder twine.

by Rhian Gallagher

Notes from Enitharmon:

Rhian Gallagher was born on the South Island of New Zealand. She lived in London for 18 years and returned to New Zealand in 2006. Gallagher’s first collection, Salt Water Creek, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for First Collection in 2003. She received a Canterbury History Foundation grant (NZ) in 2007 and the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award (NZ) in 2008. Feeling for Daylight: The Photographs of Jack Adamson was published by the South Canterbury Museum, NZ, in 2010, and her second collection of poetry, Shift, was published in summer 2012. In this collection she beautifully evokes a long-distance love affair as it blooms and ages, alongside the estrangement and joy of a life lived beyond national boundaries. In the three sections of Shift, home, love, and self are each explored in a different poetic style, each given a chance to live freely, for ‘[g]iving up on words is the final failure’. The book won the New Zealand Post Poetry Award 2012, and you can read more about it here.

Castles

July 16, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

We built our castles on the sand.
The tide came in, and there an end.

We built our castles out of fear.
Trust began to disappear.

We built our castles stone by stone.
Their shadow chilled us to the bone.

We built our castles far apart.
Twin halves of a broken heart.

We built our castles thoughtlessly.
No chance for you, no luck for me.

We built our castles in the air.
Nothing we hoped to find was there.

We built our castles. Let them fall.
Time disposes. Love is all.

by John Mole

Notes from Enitharmon:

Born in 1941 in Taunton, Somerset, John Mole has lived for most of his life in Hertfordshire, teaching English and running The Mandeville Press with Peter Scupham. An extensive and diverse writing career has seen him publish, alongside many poetry books, the selection of essays Passing Judgements and a libretto for Alban, a community opera which premiered in St. Albans Abbey in the spring of 2009. Recipient of the Gregory and Cholmondeley Awards for poetry, and the Signal Award for his writing for children, he is currently poet-in-residence with the charity Poet in the City.

In his most recent book, The Point of Loss, from which ‘Castles’ is taken, personal memories are explored with a sharpness which avoids sentimentality while the seriousness of many of his subjects is addressed with a blend of affection, sardonic humour and a characteristic lightness of touch. Political, intimate and exceptionally readable, The Point of Loss engages with its subjects in a variety of verse styles, ensuring that every poem is memorable in its own right despite the range of Mole’s interests. As John Clare, Herod and Billie Holiday rub shoulders with figures from the writer’s own life, it is the significance we have to one another which is fleshed out here without pretension.

You can hear John Mole read from a selection of his work at the Poetry Archive here, and read a poem he wrote as part of his work with Poet in the City here.

At the Yeoman’s House

May 28, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

June, Nine p.m.

The social bees work late,
Barren girls with honeyed thighs
Labouring among aquilegia,
The eagle flower, purple-spurred,
Multitudinous, nearly a weed.

I sit in the mid-year garden
To hear the poplars clatter,
And to admire what I have done.
The day is advanced, the bees
Drone vespers, the sun hits the wheat.

Farmers sat on the doorstep
At this hour, aching and comfortable,
Their eyes registering
A patch of pinks and mignonette
As their gaze settled for the big field.

An ancient man who had been
Young here arrived to say,
‘Mother saw to the flowers, of course’.
Of course. Father saw to that.
Their ancient son spoke of hives,

Hives here? ‘Hives, honeybees,
Pears in the orchard, muck
In the soil, all you had to have.’
The same water plashing, as
They put it then, and gulped by the horses.

Their shoes turn up in the beds.
I see my luckless father
Ploughing, confident in his rut,
His eye on the holly marker,
His tongue conversing with beasts,

Social bees will not pause
While there is light, while an anther
Can be seen to yield. And the poplars
Applaud them with gray and silver leaves,
The roses blacken, the cornfield fades.

by Ronald Blythe

Notes from Enitharmon:

Ronald Blythe has written novels, short stories, poetry, literary criticism, and social history. Among his books are Akenfield, now a Penguin Modern Classic, The Age of Illusion, The View in Winter, Divine Landscapes, Aldeburgh Anthology, The Assassin (his most recent novel), and Aftermath: Selected Prose 1950-2010. He has published critical studies of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, William Hazlitt and Henry James and for many years has been President of the John Clare Society. He has received honorary doctorates from the universities of East Anglia and Essex and in 2006 was awarded the Benson Medal, the highest honour of the Royal Society of Literature.

When as a young writer in 1947 Blythe first visited Bottengoms Farm on the Essex-Suffolk border, the ancient house of the artists John and Christine Nash, he could not have guessed that this would in time become his own home and the centre of the writing life. The old farm nestled in a valley, in a landscape little changed since the Middle Ages, immediately surrounded by a richly-stocked garden created by the Nashes from the flinty fields. From his current perspective, Blythe looks back in this collection with affection to the friendships with artists, writers, farmers, gardeners, and neighbours that were to enrich his life. You can read more about Blythe’s relationship with the farm and the people he met there in this interview by Patrick Barkham on the Enitharmon site, and hear Ronald Blythe interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs here.

Children in the Cherry Tree

May 7, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

They perch in the cherry tree – two fledglings
Not quite hidden, gigglers in the dusk, hatching a plan.
The tree begins to shake them. It is not laughing,
It groans, its limbs beat slowly like prehistoric wings
And skin-soft leaves, yellow and pink and red cascade.

So high and so cold, the tree now such a stranger.

Peering out from their eyrie, and down through the web
Of branches, the silent high-riders hear shouts
In their throats. Their colours are lowered, dashes
Of scarlet and white legging it down as light fails.
As darkness lopes along the waiting blue hills.

by Kevin Crossley-Holland

Upcoming events from the Poetry Centre

This week, as part of the Amazing Acts festival at the Pegasus Theatre in Oxford, Oxford Brookes presents two literary events. On Thursday 10th May at 7pm, Philip Pullman and Kate Clanchy host a showcase for competitively-selected students of the prestigious Oxford Brookes Creative Writing MA Programme. On Friday 11th May at 7.30, poet Fiona Sampson presents ‘Science Writes to Life’, an event in which budding and professional poets read original writing inspired by contact with scientists at Oxford Brookes. Fiona Sampson will also be reading some of her own work, commissioned by the Poetry Centre. All are welcome to these evenings, and more details about these and other festival events, including ticket information, can be found on the Oxford Brookes website.

Notes from Enitharmon:

Kevin Crossley-Holland is a poet, translator from Anglo-Saxon, and Carnegie Medal-winning author for children. His new and selected poems, The Mountains of Norfolk, was published in 2011, and brought together poems from eight previous collections. These works are spare yet sensuous, bearing witness to relationships, history, East Anglia, language and the craft of writing, and the meeting-places of body and spirit. The volume also contains a group of new poems musing on youth and old age, friendship, love and the layers of landscape. Kevin Crossley-Holland is the author of the bestselling Arthur trilogy, Gatty’s Tale and The Penguin Book of Norse Myths. His most recent book for children is Bracelet of Bones, in which a Viking girl travels from Norway to Constantinople, and he is the author of The Hidden Roads, a memoir of childhood. Kevin has worked with many composers and artists, and with Lawrence Sail he has edited two anthologies for Enitharmon Press: The New Exeter Book of Riddles and Light Unlocked: Christmas Card Poems. Kevin is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Patron of the Society for Storytelling and of Publishing House Me, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. He is currently the President of the School Library Association. He lives in north Norfolk with his wife and four children. You can read another selection from The Mountains of Norfolk here, and find out more about Kevin Crossley-Holland from his website.

Yves Tanguy

April 2, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The worlds are breaking in my head
Blown by the brainless wind
That comes from afar
Swollen with dusk and dust
And hysterical rain

The fading cries of the light
Awaken the endless desert
Engrossed in its tropical slumber
Enclosed by the dead grey oceans
Enclasped by the arms of the night

The worlds are breaking in my head
Their fragments are crumbs of despair
The food of the solitary damned
Who await the gross tumult of turbulent
Days bringing change without end.

The worlds are breaking in my head
The fuming future sleeps no more
For their seeds are beginning to grow
To creep and to cry midst the
Rocks of the deserts to come

Planetary seed
Sown by the grotesque wind
Whose head is so swollen with rumours
Whose hands are so urgent with tumours
Whose feet are so deep in the sand.

by David Gascoyne

Notes from Enitharmon:

David Gascoyne’s death in November 2001 was marked by lead obituaries in all the British broadsheets as well as in Le Monde. As a poet and translator he had been internationally renowned since the 1930s. He was the first chronicler in English of the Surrealist movement (whose members numbered the painter Yves Tanguy, the subject of this poem), and an essayist and reviewer of dazzling range. His association with Enitharmon Press dates back to 1970 and in the past decade there have been eight publications which will be lasting testaments of his importance. As well as his poetry, Enitharmon also publishes Gascoyne’s Selected Prose 1934-1996, and his Journal 1936-1937. You can read more about his Selected Poems at Enitharmon’s website here, where it is possible to hear Gascoyne read two other poems from the collection. You can also hear the poet read more of his work at the Poetry Archive. Ian Sinclair reviewed a new biography of Gascoyne in Saturday’s Guardian.

The Ballad of the Moon, Moon

January 16, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The moon came to the forge
with her bustle of tuberose.
The boy looks and looks.
The boy is looking at her.
In the stirred night air
the moon sways her arms
and bears, lubricious and pure,
her breasts of hard tin.
‘Run, moon, moon.
If the gypsies come
they will turn your heart
into necklaces and white rings.’
‘Boy, let me dance.
When the gypsies come
they will find you on the anvil
with your little eyes shut.’
‘Run, moon, moon, moon
for I already hear their horses.’
‘Boy, let me be, do not step
on my starchy whiteness.’

The rider came closer,
drumming on the plain.
Inside the forge
the boy’s eyes are shut.
Bronze and dream, the gypsies
came through the olive grove.
Their hands held high,
their eyes half closed.

How the owl sings,
ay, how it sings in the tree!
The moon crosses the sky
with a child by the hand.

Inside the forge the gypsies
scream and weep.
The air is keeping watch.
The air watching over her.

by Federico García Lorca

Fascinated by the folk music of his native Spain, Federico García Lorca wrote two books inspired by gypsy rhythms: Poem of the Deep Song (on the world of flamenco and cante jondo) and the best-selling Gypsy Ballads, from which ‘The Ballad of the Moon, Moon’ is taken. In Poet in New York (written 1929-1930) he turns the American city into an image of universal loneliness, and in tragedies like Yerma, Blood Wedding, and The House of Bernarda Alba he takes the measure of human longing and of the social repression that would contribute to his early death (he was shot by right-wing forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War).

In Romancero gitano/Gypsy Ballads, carefully translated by Jane Durán and Gloria García Lorca (Lorca’s niece), the poet transforms into metaphor and myth the fantasy and reality of a marginalized people. Lorca described Romancero gitano as ‘the poem of Andalusia … A book that hardly expresses visible Andalusia at all, but where hidden Andalusia trembles.’ Seeking to relate the nature of his proud and troubled region of Spain, he drew on a traditional gypsy form; yet the homely, unpretentious style of these poems barely disguises the undercurrents of conflicted identity never far from Lorca’s work. You can find out more about this bilingual, illustrated edition here, more about Jane Duran here, and more about Lorca himself at the Fundación Federico García Lorca website here.