Category: Enitharmon

How to Make a Woman Out of Water

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Move to a boathouse by a river –
the walls must be yellow, the windowsills blue.
Sleep downstairs with your head upstream,
wait for a dream of swimming.

When it rains all night and you lie awake
collecting the music of a leak
and reading The Observer’s Book of Water
until you’ve learned that chapter

on whirlpools and waterspouts by heart,
listen to her whisper and giggle
as she scribbles her slippery name
over and over down the glass.

Have a bucketful of oysters in the sink
in case she’s feeling peckish
and a case of Rainwater sherry
chilling in a cave behind the waterfall.

At the bottom of the well
there’s one white pebble –
put it beneath your tongue
until it dissolves into a kiss.

Become so dry she will slip
into the shape of your thirst.
Prepare to be a shiver on her surface.
Taste her arrival on the wind.

by Charles Bennett

from How to Make a Woman Out of Water (2007)

The title poem of Charles Bennett’s new collection, his first since the highly-acclaimed Wintergreen, is full of sensual magic and supple music. It is charged with power and grace, yet lightened by a wry sense of humour. It is lithe and strongly flowing as water itself, and gives a pure pulse of clarity and drive that runs like an undercurrent through the whole collection. Beguilingly simple and approachable, these poems speak with the fluid voice of water. Vivid explorations of water’s depth, linked to the dark release of deep sleep, culminate in the collection’s central sequence: when one of a pair of lovers falls asleep on a beach, the other muses on the seascape, on lives that flourish on the littoral, and the nature of love itself.

Charles Bennett was born in 1954 and was a mature student in the 1980s at London University and the University of Massachusetts, where he was mentored by Joseph Brodsky and Amy Clampitt. He later wrote his doctorate on Seamus Heaney. He has been virtual poet-in-residence for the National Library of the Blind and until recently director of the Ledbury Poetry Festival. He won the North West Poetry Pamphlet competition for The Mermaid Room and his first collection Wintergreen was published by Headland in 2002.

Founded in 1967, Enitharmon Press publishes fine quality literary editions. While specialising in poetry, we also publish fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, and an extensive list of artists’ books.

Snake, Swimming

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Slim, not a whisper through liquid but still
Silently moving, elegant as silk and slender,
That yellow neck-ring poised above the water –
You move alongside, yet distant, vulnerable,

So that we too try to stay still,
To watch you watching us, there in the river
As if this moment might go on for ever
Until you find those reeds, hospitable

Sheltering substance, close-packed, over the still
Moving and menacing tracks that cover
Where you might go, your sole endeavour
To sound out any agent that might kill.

You are with me now, unappeased, still
Fixed in my being, giving a shiver
Along the spine and spreading all over,
Magnificent, and lost, and beautiful.

by Anthony Thwaite

from Collected Poems (2007)

Anthony Thwaite’s Collected Poems, published as he reaches seventy-seven, give readers an opportunity to see gathered together all the poems he wants to preserve from the sixteen collections he has published since his debut in the Fantasy Poets series in 1953. Although his roots are partly in the Movement, he has developed a distinctive style – once described as ‘cunningly modulated eloquence’ – and a range of concerns which have defined his poetry from the beginning: memory, history, archaeology, travel (he has lived in Japan and Libya, writing of them with subtlety and affection), the intricacies of relationships, and now the frustrations of age. Through his own voice and those he has adopted (most memorably in ‘The Letters of Synesius’ and Victorian Voices), he has made a significant contribution to the literature of the last half-century, elegantly and perceptively setting the curiosities of the present against the layers of the past.

Anthony Thwaite was born in 1930. He spent his childhood in Yorkshire, the USA (1940-44) and school in Somerset. After national service in Libya he read English at Oxford. He then married and went to Japan for two years, where he taught English Literature at Tokyo University.  Since then he has been a BBC radio producer, literary editor of the Listener and the New Statesman, co-editor of Encounter, and in 1986 was chairman of the Booker Prize judges. He is a literary executor of Philip Larkin and the editor of his Collected Poems and Selected Letters.  He is a regular reviewer for the Guardian and other journals. In 1990 he was made an OBE for services to poetry.

Founded in 1967, Enitharmon Press publishes fine quality literary editions. While specialising in poetry, we also publish fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, and an extensive list of artists’ books.

Please note: We’ll be taking a break from sending out Weekly Poems over the summer. The service will resume again in the autumn.

Amaretti

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Toadstool tops.  Two.  Cracked as nana’s old
knee sore.  And you launched one: thumb-spun
higher than a dollar – your mouth – that catpink
ridge-beam waiting; barely budged your chin to
grind it like a roof tile; offered the other, pathetic
as a button on your outstretched palm.  And I
snatched it quick as a whisker, bit, felt my tongue
melt caverns deep inside, release its acrid-sweet
almond adultness –
                                  which I dribbled out in spite
of the almost-shake of your loaf, the high arches
of your brows.  Then you tunnelled the wrapper
between fingers to roll a joke, a giant’s
cigarillo from air’s tobacco; stood it
end first on ma’s stainless tea tray, flicked
your flint lighter to chase the tip with flame
which seeped downwards, filled my head
with burning –
                                  until, at the last,
it wobbled, transfigured, a ganglion
of desire there, rose up into our cathedralled
Italian stairwell: willed wisp of your making
who stood, an edifice of father frowning
his gargoyled wonder into mine, our wish
held up by ash, all trembling, climbing
into hallowed space.

by Mario Petrucci

from Flowers of Sulphur (2007)

Flowers of Sulphur crackles with metaphorical energy.  Over a decade in the making, this remarkable new book confirms Petrucci’s reputation for exploring the gamut of human experience.  It demonstrates, once again, his rare capacity to bridge the gap between science and poetry with power and authenticity. ‘As with the best poets, thinking and feeling are, for Petrucci, a single act’ (George Szirtes). Indeed, just as we now know that light is both corpuscular and wave-like in nature, so Flowers of Sulphur is able to embody many, often seemingly paradoxical, qualities.  These poems ring with complexity and clarity: like our quantum world, this award-winning collection reinvents itself moment to moment so as to unsettle, move and inspire us.

Mario Petrucci is an ecologist, physicist and war poet. He is also the only poet to have been in residence at the Imperial War Museum. His book-length sequence on Chernobyl won the Daily Telegraph / Arvon International Poetry Competition in 2002. A Natural Sciences graduate, Mario works as an educator and a radio/TV broadcaster. Poems from Heavy Water are featured in Poetry Review, The London Magazine, Acumen, Agenda, on BBC Radio and at The Royal Festival Hall. Flowers of Sulphur has won an Arts Council of England Writers’ Award and the London Arts New London Writers Award, but also collects together many individual prize-winning poems, including successes in the Bridport, the London Writers Competition, and Frogmore and the National Poetry Competition.

Founded in 1967, Enitharmon Press publishes fine quality literary editions. While specialising in poetry, we also publish fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, and an extensive list of 

Yesterday When I Was Young

~ oxfordbrookesuni

in memory of Dusty Springfield 

Mimosas, dear, forcing lemony scent
into a cold reactionary March wind,
I bought them on the day you died
to raise a yellow torch in memory
of how your voice addressed our needs
in every shade of love that’s blue
and shared with us its aching entreaty
to find a little sunshine after rain,
a sanctuary from bruises dealt
invisibly across the soul.
Today, your death-day, you are on the air
posthumously, your husky R&B
slow-burners building in their rise and fall
smokily pitched delivery.
Your life returns with every anguished catch
in phrasing, you the bouffant blonde,
the patron saint of mascara

wreathed in a boa, lending signature
to how the song hinged on a frantic sob
to make the pain definitive…
I keep on hearing retros of your voice
as though you’re still singing familiar hits
six hours after your death. Big purple clouds
arrive, dispensing hints of flashy showers.
You’ve gone away, like someone takes the train
with no-one knowing, no address,
no destination, no reporting back
about pure music on the other side.
We listen to you in Freedom, First Out,
and hold you near this way and celebrate
a torchy diva’s dramas, feel the hurt
in your vocal authority,
and hope you’re healed in passing, wish you where
the light in its entirety shines through.

by Jeremy Reed

from This Is How You Disappear (2007)

This Is How You Disappear is Jeremy Reed’s most autobiographical book to date, and one in which he celebrates the dead and missing friends who were the formative and enduring influences on his life as a poet.  Using the elegy to imaginatively recreate the often extraordinary individual characteristics of his subjects, Reed’s personal book of the dead is one that burns with his customary dynamic for dazzling imagery, glows with compassion for the suffering, and sparkles with a visual retrieval of detail so acute it hurts. With the title taken from the first line of a Scott Walker song, ‘Rawhide’, This Is How You Disappear is elegiac poetry at its most brilliant.

Jeremy Reed was born in Jersey, Channel Islands, and read for his PhD at the University of Essex. He is widely acknowledged as the most imaginatively gifted British poet of his generation, praised by Seamus Heaney for his ‘rich and careful writing’ and by David Lodge for his ‘remarkable lyric gift’. His Selected Poems were published by Penguin in 1987. Subsequent collections have been Nineties (Cape, 1990), Dicing for Pearls (1990), Pop Stars (1994), Sweet Sister Lyric (1996), Saint Billie (2001) and Duck and Sally Inside (2004), all from Enitharmon Press.  He has also published Heartbreak Hotel (Orion, 2002), a verse biography of Elvis Presley.

Founded in 1967, Enitharmon Press publishes fine quality literary editions. While specialising in poetry, we also publish fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, and an extensive list of artists’ books.

Lieserl Einstein

~ oxfordbrookesuni

That summer waiting to hear about my GCSEs
I worked in an ice-cream kiosk on the beachfront
and met a boy expecting to study maths in London
who had a way of putting Mr Whippy in cones,
and away from the children dripping lollies along
the promenade, I let his fingers do sums on my skin.

Come September I was counting back the weeks,
trying to predict when the multiplication we had been
working on would be noticed, and I could understand
what my new physics teacher meant about the cat
in the box that’s just been poisoned which you can’t
be sure is dead until you lift the lid and take a look.

Throughout October there was morning sickness and
the cat was running around the house to the screams
of my mother, who called me a slut loud enough
for Mrs Evans and her hard hearing, while my father,
too stunned to remind his wife about the neighbours,
tore up my postcard of Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

Now it’s September again and I’m back at my desk,
my mother at home with her own second chance,
another summer gone, a new law of motion learnt,
comparing hair and eyes, the way we sometimes cry,
and the boy from the kiosk comes home when he can
and demonstrates that he also has a way with bottles.

Tonight, when you finally slept, I read about Einstein
and how even he with his head for figures could make
the classic miscalculation and get his girlfriend pregnant;
but they gave their daughter away, a wrong answer.
We will work this out. You are simply someone new
among our number that we need to take account of.

by Lorraine Mariner

from I am twenty people!: A Third Anthology from The Poetry School, edited by Mimi Khalvati & Stephen Knight (2007)

The third of an ongoing series of anthologies, I am twenty people! celebrates The Poetry School’s tenth anniversary in style. Adventurous, unorthodox, playfully serious and seriously playful, these new poets explore their different worlds with confidence and panache. Nothing, it seems, is off limits, neither political engagement nor experimental audacity. From the intimate lyric to the historical narrative, the poetry gathered in I am twenty people! is more than simply a promise of future achievement.  Offering, from each of its twenty poets, selections from a mature body of work that will surely lead to outstanding first collections, here is an anthology that stands in its own right as a hallmark of the best of new writing in Britain today.

ALICE ALLEN · LINDA BLACK · JEMMA BORG  · CAROLE BROMLEY · CLAIRE CROWTHER · PATRICK EARLY · LUCY HAMILTON · LOUISA HOOPER · VALERIE JOSEPHS · JENNY LEWIS · MARY MACRAE · LORRAINE MARINER · BARBARA MARSH · KAREN MCCARTHY · DAVID PENN · DERRICK PORTER · SHAZEA QURAISHI · KATHRYN SIMMONDS · SARADHA SOOBRAYEN · KAY SYRAD

Founded in 1967, Enitharmon Press publishes fine quality literary editions. While specialising in poetry, we also publish fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, and an extensive list of artists’ books.

Falling Asleep with Henry James

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The wrongly placed (as it had seemed to him)
Apostrophe got up upon its several
Tiny feet, strode purposefully across

The margin and began a traverse
Of the ridges of his index fingernail.
In the meantime, Miles had passed his arm

Around his little sister and was reading
To her as they walked together, up and down,
In the garden.   No doubt an English

Garden with flowerbeds ─ nothing to match
The Villa Rincon and its high, cool terraces,
The grey-green leaves of the olive trees

Set off by the wrinkling blue of the sea.
Page fifty-six was where his marker was.
The children had evidently gone inside.

But not the pair of ladies, who were deep
In agitated conversation.   Fifty-eight.
The cicadas had stopped, leaving behind

One of those silent moments when the world
Seems to have gathered itself together
And be crouching.  The younger of the ladies

Was threatening to leave.   A pine cone dropped,
And he had the uneasy feeling there was
Someone else looking out from underneath

His eyelids and leaning their elbows
(Could it be Quint?) on the sills of his skull.
And in that instant nothing seemed to him

More natural than that these things, as he
Had read somewhere, should be those other things
Which clearly they were absolutely not.

by Neil Curry

from Other Rooms: New & Selected Poems (2007)

There is a powerfully dramatic and narrative quality to the new poems which preface Neil Curry’s Other Rooms, and we hear in them a wide variety of voices speaking to us from different times and different places, but speaking to us of things which nevertheless concern us deeply today.  Whatever form Curry adopts is handled with flexibility and skill, and wherever the poems are set there is a geographical and linguistic exactness which makes them as compelling as his acclaimed translations of the classics.    

Neil Curry was born in Newcastle upon Tyne and now lives in Ulverston in the Lake District. His verse translations of Euripides, published by Methuen and Cambridge University Press, and in the USA by Doubleday, have been performed in many countries. Enitharmon has published his four earlier collections:  Ships in Bottles (1988), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Walking to Santiago (1992), The Bending of the Bow (1993) and The Road to the Gunpowder House (2003).

Founded in 1967, Enitharmon Press publishes fine quality literary editions. While specialising in poetry, we also publish fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, and an extensive list of artists’ books.

Break of Day in the Trenches

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The darkness crumbles away,
It is the same old Druid Time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand,
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems, odd thing, you grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Helpless whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurl’d through still heavens?
What quaver – what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping,
But mine in my ear is safe – 
Just a little white with the dust.

by Isaac Rosenberg

from Poetry Out of My Head and Heart (2007), edited by Jean Liddiard

An astonishing discovery was made in 1995 during the British Library’s removal from the British Museum. Thirty-four letters and eighteen draft poems, including  ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, ‘Dead Man’s Dump’ and ‘Returning, We Hear the Larks’ by the major First World War poet Isaac Rosenberg, were found in a bundle of papers stored by former museum keeper Laurence Binyon, himself a poet and Rosenberg’s mentor. The newly discovered papers include all Rosenberg’s complete letters and draft poems to Binyon and the poet Gordon Bottomley, together with material about Rosenberg from family, friends and mentors such as his sister Annie, Whitechapel librarian Morley Dainow, schoolteacher Winifreda Seaton, and patron Frank Emanuel. All are published here, most for the first time.

Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol in 1890 to Jewish immigrant parents from Lithuania. His family moved to the East End of London in 1897, and after a rudimentary education Rosenberg at 14 was apprenticed to an engraver. Wealthy patrons enabled him to study at the Slade School of Art (1911-14) and for nine months in 1914-15 he lived in South Africa. The only poems to be collected in his lifetime were self-published in a pamphlet form – Night and Day (1912), Youth (1915) and Moses (1916). Enlisting in the Army in October 1915 he served on the Western Front until his death on night patrol on 1 April 1918.

Founded in 1967, Enitharmon Press publishes fine quality literary editions. While specialising in poetry, we also publish fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, and an extensive list of artists’ books.

Atlas

~ oxfordbrookesuni

There is a kind of love called maintenance,
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;

Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;

Which answers letters; which knows the way
The money goes, which deals with dentists

And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
And postcards to the lonely; which upholds

The permanently rickety elaborate
Structures of living; which is Atlas.

And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in the air,
As Atlas did the sky.

by U.A. Fanthorpe

from U.A. Fanthorpe & R.V. Bailey, From Me to You: Love Poems (Enitharmon, 2007)

U.A. Fanthorpe and R.V. Bailey write: ‘Wordsworth speaks of the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. This seems an apt description of these love poems. They are not important resonant pieces of writing: they simply happened when one of us felt like writing to the other other, quite often when one of us was away from home. Some of them coincided with Valentine’s Days or birthdays, but that was more a matter of good luck than foresight. Quakers, rightly, maintain that Christmas Day is only one important day of all the 365 important days of the year. It’s the same with love poems: they are appropriate at any time, and can be written, incidentally, to dogs, cats, etc., as well as humans. […] The pleasant thing about writing such poems, apart from having someone to write them for, is that there is no particular restriction as to subject matter. In Christmas Poems, UA felt the draughty awareness of the diminishing cast of subjects, from donkey to Christmas tree. With love, on the other hand, the sky’s the limit.’

U.A. Fanthorpe was born in 1929. She was Head of English at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and then ‘became a middle-aged drop-out in order to write’, publishing her first collection, Side Effects, in 1978. Her seven volumes of poetry are all published by Peterloo Poets, and her Selected Poems was published by Penguin in 1986. In 1994 she was the first woman to be nominated for the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford. She was awarded the CBE in 2001 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2003, when her Collected Poems (Peterloo) were published.

R.V. Bailey was born in Northumberland and has worked as cafeteria assistant, librarian, information officer, teacher, counsellor, and latterly as director of undergraduate courses in Humanities at the University of the West of England, Bristol.  She is the other voice in poetry recordings by U.A. Fanthorpe (Awkward Subject, Double Act, Poetry Quartets 5), and has published a pamphlet, Course Work (Culverhay Press, 1997) and a full collection with Peterloo, Marking Time (2004).

Founded in 1967, Enitharmon Press publishes fine quality literary editions. While specialising in poetry, we also publish fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, and an extensive list of artists’ books.

Horses

~ oxfordbrookesuni

When we can’t look at each other, eye-to-eye,
I think of horses sidling up to each other,
shying away from each other,
how horses stand like strangers,
eyes on the side of their long heads. 

Look into the ball of the eye, slit
horizontal like a letter box,
so unlike our own round pupil;
inside you will find a blind
pulled over its blazing star.

Beside my bed stand four carved horses:
a Spanish horse of pink quartz,
as highly polished as the shoes of a tango dancer;
a yellow horse, heavy and translucent
as a solid sea, with a heart-line of turquoise;
an ancient horse of marble that doesn’t look
like a horse, inscribed with petroglyphs
from the south west;
light shines through my precious amber horse,
as if through fossilized honey.

There is a gentleness between them,
these horses of the herd. 
It’s not a question of beauty or resemblance:
to the Zuni a fetish is only of value if it works.
I feed them cornmeal.  I need their strength.

by Sharon Morris

from False Spring (2007)

The poems in Sharon Morris’s first collection are both meditations on mortality and nature, and sharp edged celebrations of life – in turn tender, incantatory, dramatic, quotidian and elegiac. The three sections describe three different places, metaphorically and geographically: in ‘False Spring’ the poet takes us out into the open spaces, the wildernesses at the edge of the city of San Francisco, touching on the myth of Persephone. This mythic thread is carried on through ‘Rome’, where the city’s overlaid histories parallel the tension between what is revealed and what is hidden, while the final section ‘Salt of Almonds’, through the image of the desert in Spain, speaks of what will persist and endure.

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).

Founded in 1967, Enitharmon Press publishes fine quality literary editions. While specialising in poetry, we also publish fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, and an extensive list of artists’ books.