Mosquito

November 14, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Fancy this in October, the last
Mosquito of summer left buzzing alone,
Its last fling in my room on the sixth floor
Of a tower block hotel; marooned like one
In the seventh decade with only the past
To look forward to, as the one sure

Topic he can buzz round with some old chum.
‘I had a good bloody summer,’ it seems to say,
‘With waiter and bellman, and that prim peach
Who keeps the consultant’s books across the way.’
And for one last sally it swoops and bites my thumb.
So I bite mine back at it, and reach

For a folded newspaper; all the same aware
How much I resemble it, my own small spites
And hopeless needs reduced to the last fling
Of one who doles out charm in sexless bites
To check-out girls and bank clerks as if to swear,
‘Oh man, I buzz and suck like anything!’

by Alan Brownjohn

Notes from Enitharmon:

Drawing on six decades of work, this new selection charts Alan Brownjohn‘s idiosyncratic take on the issues for which his poetry is known – love (and sex), time (and mortality) and our ecological and cultural environment (threatened and abused).

Brownjohn was born in London in 1931 and was educated at Merton College, Oxford. He worked as a schoolteacher between 1957 and 1965 and lectured at Battersea College of Education and South Bank Polytechnic until he left to become a full-time freelance writer in 1979. A regular broadcaster, reviewer and contributor to journals including the Times Literary Supplement, Encounter and the Sunday Times, Alan Brownjohn was poetry critic for the New Statesman and was Chairman of the Poetry Society between 1982 and 1988. He has also served on the Arts Council literature panel, was a Labour councillor and a candidate for Parliament. In 2007, he received the Writers’ Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award. You can find out more about Brownjohn in these interviews, and hear him read some of his poems at the Poetry Archive.

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. You can sign up to the publisher’s mailing list here to receive a newsletter with special offers, details of readings & events and new titles and Enitharmon’s Poem of the Month.

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.

“What is more beautiful than a road?” – George Sand

June 13, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It’s raining. We talk, here, where we always talk.
Where the pavement flares roundly in front of the Action Centre.
Next door is a caff; we never go there.
The rain started as you told me what the worst thing is for you.
It was gentle then but now we are really wet and you don’t seem to
have noticed.
At my shoulder are my Grandmas and behind them, their Grandmas.
They stand, a long line of women getting wet on street corners.
None of us are dreaming of stairs.

by Anna Robinson

If you use social media, you can now find us on Twitter and on Facebook, where our page has just reached 100 members.

Notes courtesy of Enitharmon:

Anna Robinson‘s first full collection, The Finders of London, introduces a compelling new voice in poetry. Working-class voices lend strength to Robinson’s own, and with it she mythologizes, catalogues, and searches for the anima and animus of this multi-natured city.

Anna Robinson was born and lives in London. She has an MA in Public History from Ruskin College, Oxford. Her pamphlet, Songs from the flats (Hearing Eye, 2006), was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. In 2001, she became the first recipient of The Poetry School Scholarship and her poetry was featured in the School’s second anthology, Entering the Tapestry, (Enitharmon, 2003). Her work has appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Poetry London, Magma, Brittle Star, the reater, In The Company of Poets (Hearing Eye, 2003), and Oxford Poets 2007 (Oxford/Carcanet). As part of Poetry International and the South Bank Centre’s Trading Places project, Robinson was Poet in Residence in Lower Marsh in 2006. A former tutor in prisons, she is a regular poetry judge for the Koestler Competition and is a founding editor for Not Shut Up! and the newly established Long Poem Magazine.

You can read more of Anna Robinson’s work here, and hear her read ‘The Flats’, another poem from this collection, here.

Invocation

April 4, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

These days they say she’s sometimes mistaken
for the revving of a little petrol engine –
her propulsive churr-churring lost in the dark.
But age-old tricks can still be made to work.
Launch a white handkerchief into the air
and – if you are lucky – she’s gliding there,
attracted to you like a catch in the throat,
summoned by signs of life – the hot, the salt
of sudden tears you’d rather were hidden,
making your nose run like a child’s again.
Or she’s drawn to the blood-spill of hurt
that opens flesh and bone. Or she will start
from the dusty roof-space above the bed,
find you wiping love from between your legs.
The white flag of individual weakness
is what serves always to conjure her best
as when old habits, uncertain eyes give out,
when it’s dark wherever they put the light,
she comes then – I think – and this time stays,
cover him, cover him, cover his face.

by Martyn Crucefix

A note to our readers: Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre has just joined the social networking site Facebook. Our page there will feature information about the Centre and links to stories about the poets and publishers we feature, as well as general poetry news that we can’t otherwise mention via the weekly e-mail. Such an interactive site matches our aims of encouraging connections between poets, academics, and readers of poetry, and creating space for discussion of issues surrounding C20th and C21st poetry, so we look forward to hearing from you there. If you are a Facebook user, please do ‘like’ us by clicking here, or by searching for ‘Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre’.

Notes courtesy of Enitharmon:

Martyn Crucefix has won numerous prizes including a major Eric Gregory award and a Hawthornden Fellowship. He has published five collections, including An English Nazareth (Enitharmon, 2004). His translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies was published by Enitharmon in 2006, shortlisted for the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation and hailed as ‘unlikely to be bettered for very many years’ (Magma). Crucefix’s new collection, Hurt, from which ‘Invocation’ is taken, was published in 2010, and you can find more about it at Enitharmon’s page here, where you can also hear the poet read ‘Stag Beetle’. More of Martyn Crucefix’s work can be read at this link.

Accents

January 24, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I lay down under the cherry trees
in our garden where the grass was balding

a little, and looked up into the branches.
I was learning the catechism,

and I went over a few questions
and answers as absolutes; I was thinking

of a dance I had been to on a farm
a dress I wore, something I said

too revealing of feeling;
those chicks left in an open crate

in the shade behind the farm, near a wall,
came into my mind. I thought of how

they might have struggled all wet
out of their eggs, like light escaping;

Senorita Morales came into my thoughts too,
her long fingernails when she pointed out

where the accents should go over the words
on the blackboard, and the way she said

penultima silaba and antepenultima;
and all these thoughts lightly hooked together

like young girls walking down the street
holding each others’ hands by the little finger.

by Jane Duran

Notes courtesy of Enitharmon:

As a young girl, Jane Duran moved to Chile with her family, travelling from New York to Valparaiso on the Santa Barbara, one of the Grace Line fleet. This long journey, passing through the Panama Canal and down the Pacific coast of Latin America, has inspired her collection of poems Graceline. These meditative poems cross over continually between illusion and reality, past and present. Although they evoke the journey, and the extraordinary landscapes of Chile, they also explore darker undercurrents. Her sequence ‘Panama Canal’ evokes the terrors of the Canal’s construction; a sequence on the regime of Augusto Pinochet (‘Invisible Ink’) interweaves cityscapes and landscapes with allusions to the cruelties and bereavements of that time. But the poems are also about her life as a young girl in Chile, the impact of the Chilean landscape on her, and convey a powerful feeling of love for that country. You can learn more about her book here, and more about Jane Duran here. At the second link you can hear her reading from her own work.

Lullaby

November 29, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

People are murdered all the time,
Somewhere – be it in the laps
Of dozy valleys, or on watchful peaks
That peer; so what a cold comfort
To say ‘Ah, but it’s so far off!’
Shanghai or Guernica –
Either is just as close to my heart
As your small frightened hand,
Or the planet Jupiter high above us.
No don’t look up at the sky,
Don’t even look at the earth, just sleep.
For death is racing through
The sparkling dust of the Milky Way
And pouring molten silver
On the headlong shadows tumbling down.

1937

by Miklós Radnóti

‘Lullaby’ is taken from Forced March, published by Enitharmon Press.

Notes courtesy of Enitharmon:

Forced March is a new edition of Miklós Radnóti’s selected poems, in the powerful and moving translations of Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri. Poet Dick Davis explains why this book is so important: ‘Radnóti has emerged as the major poetic voice to record the civilian experience of World War II in occupied Europe. His poems are an extraordinary record of a mind determined to affirm its civilization in the face of overwhelming odds. He is one of the very greatest poets of the twentieth century, and Clive Wilmer’s and George Gömöri’s versions are by far the best that exist in English.’ You can find out more about this book here.

By the time the Second World War broke out, Miklós Radnóti was already an established poet. When the Nazis took over his home town of Budapest, Radnóti was sent to a labour camp at Bor in occupied Serbia. Then, in 1944, as the Germans retreated from the eastern front, Radnóti and his fellow labourers were force-marched back into Hungary. On 9 November, too weak to carry on, he and many comrades were executed by firing squad. When the bodies were exhumed the following year, Radnóti was identified by a notebook of poems in his greatcoat pocket. These poems, published in 1946 as Foaming Sky, secured his position as one of the giants of modern Hungarian poetry. You can learn more about Radnóti here and here.

behind the lines

May 10, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

– just as you might never
find some white-worn
tongue of soap

long fluffed
beneath basin – or
fine marks of particular

weight penned in their
margin near skip-
bottom or

one flake
falling deep in a
cwm between sheer-set

neighbours of pine – or
with morning still
dark that

word
barely spoken
to your sleeping ear

by Mario Petrucci

i tulips (Enitharmon, 2010), from which this week’s poem is taken, is the new collection from Mario Petrucci, a prize-winning poet who draws upon his knowledge of science and ecology to craft arresting, modernistic verse. i tulips is an adventurous suite of spare, fractal lyrics that reveal hidden depths and complexities under the reader’s microscopic gaze. The poem ‘behind the lines’ is an example of Petrucci’s intense and inventive renovation of closely observed human experience. You can find out more about the book here, and more about Petrucci here and here.

Please note that this poem was originally posted incorrectly formatted – that error has now been corrected, and the poem appears above in its correct form.

The Sun Has Burst The Sky

April 5, 2010April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The sun has burst the sky
Because I love you
And the river its banks.

The sea laps the great rocks
Because I love you
And takes no heed of the moon dragging it away
And saying coldly ‘Constancy is not for you’.

The blackbird fills the air
Because I love you.
With spring and lawns and shadows falling on lawns.

The people walk in the street and laugh
I love you
And far down the river ships sound their hooters
Crazy with joy because I love you.

by Jenny Joseph

Nothing Like Love (Enitharmon, 2009), from which this poem is taken, is a brilliant new collection from Jenny Joseph that brings together a number of her early and previously uncollected love poems. A prolific and wide-ranging writer in prose and verse, Joseph is best known for ‘Warning’, a dramatic monologue about ageing. Joyous and bright, ‘The Sun Has Burst The Sky’ showcases her aptitude for love poetry, its seemingly simple sentiments made fresh and vibrant through deft composition. Find out more about the book here. You can hear her read ‘The Sun Has Burst The Sky’ and other poems at this site.

Extraordinary Rendition

February 22, 2010April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You gave me back your frown
and the most recent responsibility you’d shirked,
along with something of your renown
for having jumped from a cage before it jerked

to a standstill, your wild rampage
shot through with silver falderals,
the speed of that falling cage
and the staidness of our canyon walls.

You gave me back lake-skies,
pulley-glitches, gully-pitches, the reflected gleams
of two tin plates and mugs in the shack,

the echoes of love sighs
and love screams
our canyon walls had already given back.

by Paul Muldoon

A collaborative work with photographer Norman McBeath, Plan B is an evocative set of visually-inspired poems from Paul Muldoon. Born in Northern Ireland, Muldoon is a world-renowned poet and academic. These lines are extracted from ‘Extraordinary Rendition’, one of the poems in the book. They display Muldoon’s verbal dexterity and uncompromising tone, and convey a visceral yet understated power – an effect amplified by their juxtaposition with McBeath’s stunning photographs. You can find out more about the book here, and more about Muldoon on this page.

BC-AD

December 21, 2009April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect

Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.

by U.A. Fanthorpe

Having been one of Britain’s most popular poets since publishing her first collection in 1978, U.A. Fanthorpe sadly passed away in April, 2009. Christmas Poems, first published in 2002, collects Christmas card messages sent by Fanthorpe to friends since 1974, and is a fitting tribute to her versatility and wit as a poet. ‘BC-AD’ offers an askance perspective on the Nativity story, striking with the quicksilver power of an epiphany. You can find out more about the collection here, and more about Fanthorpe here.

The Weekly Poem service takes a Christmas break for the next two weeks, and returns on 11 January. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all readers, and thanks for your continued support of the Weekly Poem initiative.

From ‘Stillness’

November 30, 2009April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

In darkness let your fan of fingers open,
imagine amethyst’s purple crystals
at a geode’s heart liquifying to honey
until your face muscles loosen, your shoulders,
which have borne so much, begin to unlock
and stillness is a quilt over your body,
a feather lining within. Now the tock
of pulse emerges and breath passes quietly
as a slippered friend. Beyond the house tyres
whirr on tarmac and geese call as they rush
the sky. The grief of the bereaved will push
into your room and nameless losses sustained
by the displaced. Hold silence and you may hear
rain on fruitless fields, grasses rising again.

by Myra Schneider

Circling the Core is the most recent collection of Myra Schneider‘s prolific writing career, which has encompassed children’s fiction as well as ten poetry collections. ‘Stillness’, the long poem from which this is a complete part, is indicative of her sensitive explorations – often situated within nature – which she performs through sympathetically inhabiting her subjects. The result is sensuous and intricate verse, aided by the technical brilliance which has made Schneider a poet loved by poets. You can find out more about Myra Schneider here.