Category: Nine Arches Press

Broken Waters

~ oxfordbrookesuni


Most people drown
            without making
a noise or splashing. See me


here Baby, watch
            me lying
out plank, below the surface,


all that stillness, all that
            peace, see
how long I can breathe


down here alone. You must
            trust me,
I am your mother after all,


don’t think about the firefighter
            who lies
to the woman on the phone inside


the burning building, says he’s on his
            way up
to save her, then hands her brother


back the phone, tell her you
            love her,
knowing all his tears


won’t be enough to quiet the
            flames, I am
your mother after all, I am made


to do this. When the mother harp seal
            leaves its cub,
nobody calls it a mistake,


I have been at this much longer than
            twelve days –
just let me float here a while, Baby


you will still remember my face.
            It will be
the same one you wear every time


live cuts in such a way – the serration
            drags the exact
formation of ripples upon its shape.


by Amelia Loulli

We’re delighted to say that the Poetry Centre’s ignitionpress has just launched its three newest pamphlets by Joanna Ingham, Jennifer Lee Tsai, and Sarah Shapiro. You can read more about them and buy copies here.

Our International Poetry Competition is still open for entries until 2 September with two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. Our judge is Jackie Kay, and you could win £1000! Find out more and enter here.

This week’s poet, Amelia Loulli, is one of the three poets to appear in the latest volume of Primers, a mentoring and publishing scheme which showcases the work of emerging poets (see more about the scheme below). This year’s scheme is open now until 10 September, and you can find out how to enter it on the Nine Arches website.

Amelia Loulli lives in Cumbria with her three children and an undisclosed, but significantly large, number of books. Her poetry was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2016 and 2017, and last year she was shortlisted for Primers Volume Three. You can follow her work on Twitter.

In 2018, The Poetry School and Nine Arches Press launched their nationwide Primers scheme for a fourth time, in search of exciting and emerging talent in contemporary poetry, with Kim Moore and Jane Commane as selecting editors. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, three poets emerged as clear choices: Lewis Buxton, Amelia Loulli and Victoria Richards. Primers: Volume Three now collects together a showcase from each of the three poets. It is an irresistible invitation to step out of ourselves and our bodies and drop your expectations on the dancefloor, to take the plunge on the rollercoaster-ride of grief, motherhood and new life, and to meet desire in all its outrageous, dazzling and joyous forms. Secrets, disclosures, changed names and brilliant disguises make a vivid, adventurous and often deeply moving selection of new work from some of poetry’s most talented emerging voices.

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 Europeans 

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I saw the Europeans drinking wine under trees.
It was August and their children seemed wise
beyond their years, moving with the dappled light.

Later the Europeans were wearing bright uniforms,
simultaneously grand and preposterous,
their cigarillos discolouring their moustaches.

When the winter came, the Europeans retreated
into forests. People were wolves or wolves
were people. These matters were increasingly unclear.

Every village had good bread, indolent officials,
its own throat-clenching hooch. Occasionally,
its peace was disturbed as love ended in some alleyway.

The Europeans were volatile or taciturn, hearty
or shiftless. Really, you could take your pick.
The only constant was the scrape and shudder of those trams

in the very early morning. In their cities,
the streets were museums. Someone had been shot
heroically on every corner. You could still put your finger

into the bullet holes in the masonry, just as a violin started
up in that apartment over the café. The Europeans
had much to say of poetry and much silence to say it into.

I became convinced they knew something
they would not tell me, but I did not dare
to ask the veterans on the parched square.

by David Clarke

The deadline for our PoetryFilm competition is this Friday (7 June)! Respond in a short film to a poem by one of our award-winning ignitionpress poets and win prizes and screenings! You can find the poems and more about how to enter here.

The Poetry Centre has also just launched its International Poetry Competition for 2019! This year we are delighted to say that our judge is the internationally-acclaimed writer Jackie Kay! There are two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language, and the winners in each category receive £1000. The competition is open until 2 September, and full details can be found here.

Finally, don’t forget about the final two events in our academic year: firstly, there’s our final reading in the current series on Wednesday 26 June at Waterstones in Oxford, which features Ilya Kaminsky and Shara Lessley. Ilya has been receiving extraordinary acclaim in the US and UK for his latest book, Deaf Republic, and Shara’s collection The Explosive Expert’s Wife, has received enthusiastic reviews and award nominations. This is an event not to be missed! Register for a free place here. Then join us and an international group of poets and critics for ‘Our Poetry and Our Needs’, a symposium at the University of Reading on Tuesday 9 July. More details here.

‘The Europeans’ is copyright © David Clarke, 2019. It is reprinted from The Europeans (Nine Arches Press, 2019) by permission of Nine Arches Press.

Notes from Nine Arches:

David Clarke, winner of the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2013, returns with his second collection, The Europeans. Simultaneously close to home and looking outward beyond these shores, these wry and perceptive poems revel with form and encompass journeys, ideas of nationhood and national identity, and the optimism of a time when Europe and the UK enjoyed a quite different ‘entente cordiale’. They are a warning against nostalgia, a lucid and prescient exploration of how we see ourselves and how we are seen. Read more about the collection on the Nine Arches website. 

David Clarke was born in Lincolnshire. His first pamphlet, Gaud, won the Michael Marks award in 2013. His first collection, Arc, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2015 and was longlisted for the Polari Prize. Another pamphlet, Scare Stories, was published by V Press in 2017 and was named a Poetry School ‘Book of the Year.’ His poems have appeared in magazines including Magma, Tears in the Fence, Long Poem Magazine and The Interpreter’s House. You can follow David on Twitter.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2017, All My Mad Mothers by Jacqueline Saphra was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Our titles have also been shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize, and in 2016 David Clarke’s debut poems, Arc, was longlisted for the Polari Prize. To date we have now published over seventy poetry publications, and 20 issues of Under the Radar magazine (and counting). Follow Nine Arches on Facebook and Twitter.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Tailoring Grief

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The tailor says you have to get measured
to make sure grief fits right on your body.
If grief fits too tight it will suck movement out of you,
make you as still as the dead you are mourning.
I once wore grief so tight on my body my ribs tangled into a bow.
The tailor also says wearing an oversized grief will turn you
into a tripping hazard. There is only so much a body can take,
even a plane has weight limits.
We lined up at the tailors to get measured
for my grandfather’s funeral. The women for their Aso-oke,
the men for their Agbada. The orange material draped on the table.
It is our culture to celebrate in colour coordination.
I handed the tailor a torn page from Genevieve magazine
and pointed out the style I wanted.
Imagine if Mary wore a Gele for the funeral of Jesus,
tied it so tight she was dizzy
enough to feel absent from her body.
I picked up my cloth from the tailor on the seventh day.
The off-shoulder dress exposed my neck
so my dented collarbones could collect my tears.
At the funeral my grandmother wore a dress
with sleeves puffed like swollen lungs.
I held her, the tassels at the end of my dress dangled
like a rain of breathing tubes.
From afar our orange dresses looked like saliva dripping
from the gaping mouth of the sun.
The whole village watched in holy envy:
envy is only effective from afar, does not see the layers
of blood-stained threads that sew this body together.
Give me a culture that requires grief to be sewn
delicately on the body, I’ll take it any day.


by Theresa Lola

We have a number of exciting Poetry Centre events coming up! They are all free, but please register via these links. Firstly, on Monday 25 March, join us, TORCH, and Paris Lit Up for a discussion about cultural diversity in literature, featuring authors Elleke Boehmer, Karin Amatmoekrim, and Malik Ameer Crumpler. A showcase from Paris Lit Up and an open mic will follow.

On 30 April, we’re at Waterstones to host four Canadian poets (Chad Campbell, James Arthur, Stephanie Warner, and Jim Johnstone) and celebrate the recent publication of an exciting new anthology of Canadian poetry. Sign up to attend here.

And on 20 May we are collaborating with the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture to bring the acclaimed poet Gillian Allnutt to Oxford – don’t miss her!

Find out more about these and other upcoming events on our events page, and remember that in addition to this Weekly Poem e-mail, you can also follow our work on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We look forward to seeing you soon!

‘Tailoring Grief’ is copyright © Theresa Lola, 2019. It is reprinted from In Search of Equilibrium (Nine Arches Press, 2019) by permission of Nine Arches Press.

Notes from Nine Arches:

Theresa Lola’s debut poetry collection In Search of Equilibrium is an extraordinary, and exacting study of death and grieving. Where the algorithms of the body and the memory fail, Lola finds the words that will piece together the binary code of family and restart the recovery program. In doing so, these unflinching poems work towards the hard-wired truths of life itself – finding hope in survival, lines of rescue in faith, a stubborn equilibrium in the equations of loss and renewal. You can read more about the collection on the Nine Arches website.

Theresa Lola is a British Nigerian Poet, born in 1994. She was joint-winner of the 2018 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2017 Bridport Poetry Prize. In 2018 she was invited by the Mayor of London’s Office to read at Parliament Square alongside Sadiq Khan and actress Helen McCory at the unveiling of Millicent Fawcett’s statue. She has appeared on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, and ASOS Magazine with Octavia Collective among others. She is an alumni of the Barbican Young Poets Programme. Find out more about Theresa’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2017, All My Mad Mothers by Jacqueline Saphra was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Our titles have also been shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize, and in 2016 David Clarke’s debut poems, Arc, was longlisted for the Polari Prize. To date we have now published over seventy poetry publications, and 20 issues of Under the Radar magazine (and counting). Follow Nine Arches on Facebook and Twitter.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

I Am My Own Parent

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I love my red shoes,
all of the shoes I have loved,
they are.

I swing my legs against the wall,
scuffing them slightly.
My Dad is not here to pick them up

by the scruffs of their dirty necks
and leave them shining in the morning.
Instead, the arc of my swing

not quite so high,
the shoes every day a little duller.
At night I leave them in the hall like hope.

In the morning,
absentmindedly dreaming of old loves
and reading poetry until it hurts,

I spring out of bed and decide
to roll up my life into a fist,
smelling of patchouli and roses, and then

unroll it; and to my surprise
it becomes a snail’s yellow shell,
unravelling. On and on it goes,

I tap tap my red shoes,
find I’m already home.


by Deborah Alma 

‘I Am My Own Parent’ is copyright © Deborah Alma, 2018. It is reprinted from Dirty Laundry (Nine Arches Press, 2018) by permission of Nine Arches Press.

Deborah Alma’s debut poetry collection Dirty Laundry is raucous, daring and honest, drawing contemporary women’s lives and those of our foremothers into the spotlight. It voices bold, feminist songs of praise: of persistence, survival, adventures of sexual rediscovery, each reclaiming the space to speak its mind and be heard and seen. A perfect remedy for the heartsick and weary, Alma’s intimate and particular poems are resolute enchantments, a form of robust magic.The collection brims with poems which are unafraid of airing secrets, desires and untold stories. From growing up mixed-race and learning to survive as a woman in the world, to tales of the countryside and themes of escape and finding joy, this book of poems is as vivid as it is frank and fearless. There’ll be no need for any tears, it’ll all come out in the wash… Read more about the collection on the Nine Arches website.

Deborah Alma was born in North London, has lived on the Welsh/ Shropshire borders for the last 25 years where she brought up her 2 sons and she lives with the poet James Sheard. She teaches creative writing, works with people with dementia and at the end of their lives and is the Emergency Poet in her 1970’s ambulance. She edited The Emergency Poet: an anti-stress poetry anthology and The Everyday Poet: Poems to Live By (Michael O’Mara Books) and was the editor of the landmark #MeToo poetry anthology, published by Fair Acre Press. Her first poetry pamphlet True Tales of the Countryside was published by The Emma Press. She is currently Honorary Research Fellow at Keele University. You can follow Deborah on Twitter.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2017, All My Mad Mothers by Jacqueline Saphra was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Our titles have also been shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize, and in 2016 David Clarke’s debut poems, Arc, was longlisted for the Polari Prize. To date we have now published over seventy poetry publications, and 20 issues of Under the Radar magazine (and counting). Follow Nine Arches on Facebook and Twitter.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Winter in the town of three smells

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Polish is spoken here
and mountains have appeared
behind the closed down meat-pie factory.
Bears roll their snouts like drunks,
lumber down, lick sticky locked-up gates,
dots of gristle stuck in rusted padlocks.

All of us, bears, wolves, humans,
raise our heads on windswept days,
inhale traces of bubbling hearts,
intestines, ears, blood.
Where there was once a brewery
there is now a flood of frozen weather.

They’re playing violins around the edges,
frying herrings, the smell of beer rising
as skating couples bite into the ice.
Someone has bought clippers
to shave young men’s heads
in kitchens, drinking black Economy tea.

Here is number for room,
for work in nice, clean-smelling factory.
Outside the Catholic Church, old women stamp snow,
wear fur at their throats, dab holy water like cologne.

After Christmas, we’ll open our windows,
fill our houses with tripe and sweetened cabbages.
New Year will drift in
from the sewage treatment works.


by Josephine Corcoran


The Poetry Centre is excited to announce the winners of this year’s Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, judged by Kayo Chingonyi! First Place in the Open category was awarded to Eleni Philippou, Second to Katie Hale, and a Special Commendation to Isabella Sharp. In the EAL category, First Place was awarded to Helena Fornells, and both Second Place and the Special Commendation went to Rachel Ka Yin Leung. Many congratulations to all! You can read the winning poems and see the shortlist on our website. The awards event will take place on Thursday 15 November, and everyone is very welcome! The winning poets will read from their work, and Kayo Chingonyi will also give a short reading of his own poetry. You can register to attend the event here.

Before that, don’t forget about the wonderful chance to see Jay Bernard at Oxford Brookes on Wednesday 31 October. As part of Black History Month, Jay will be performing from and talking about their work Surge, which won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry last year. Don’t miss it! Tickets are free, but you should register here. 

‘Winter in the town of three smells’ is copyright © Josephine Corcoran, 2018. It is reprinted from What Are You After? (Nine Arches Press, 2018) by permission of Nine Arches Press.

Josephine Corcoran’s inventive and unflinching debut poetry collection, What Are You After?, asks us to consider what it is we’re really here for. Bold and unsentimental, her remarkable poems trace the lifelines of where we’ve been and where we’re going to, and they aren’t afraid to ask difficult questions of where we are now. Read more about the collection on the Nine Arches website.

Josephine Corcoran was born in Southport and moved to London when she was 12, to live with an older sister, after the death of her mother. She now lives in Wiltshire. An Arvon course when she was 30 started her writing and she was a mature student at Bournemouth and Chichester Universities before studying for an MA in Creative Writing at UEA. Her work as a short story writer and playwright has been broadcast on BBC R4 and a stage play has been produced in London. She is founder and editor of the online journal And Other Poems and Writer in Residence at St Gregory’s Catholic College, Bath. 

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2017, All My Mad Mothers by Jacqueline Saphra was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Our titles have also been shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize, and in 2016 David Clarke’s debut poems, Arc, was longlisted for the Polari Prize. To date we have now published over seventy poetry publications, and 20 issues of Under the Radar magazine (and counting). Follow Nine Arches on Facebook and Twitter.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

The Day My Cousin Took me to the Musée Rodin

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Perhaps it was the humid Paris day, perhaps
the naked glory of Le Baiser or my blatant boasts
of l’amour libre of which I knew, in fact, rien
that galvanised my cousin to try his luck with me,

but when he placed one sweaty main upon my
firm nichon and one upon my fesse, I was first
disinclined and then embarrassed. It was clear
he was quite serious, and had in mind, he said,
avec un clin d’œil, a quick and casual act of joy.

When I retorted with grammatical correctness
Je suis ta cousine!, he snorted Frenchly, flushed,
and muttered something vague about la frigidité
des femmes Anglaises, tossed his prematurely
balding tête and sauntered off into the crowd around

Sculpteur et sa Muse, leaving me abandonnée at last
to make some notes, before I took the métro home
to find him locked inside his room, his Jewish mother
elbow-deep in worry, onions and gefilte fish.


by Jacqueline Saphra

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries! 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, and feel free to forward the link to friends and colleagues.

‘The Day My Cousin Took me to the Musée Rodin’ is copyright © Jacqueline Saphra, 2017. It is reprinted from All My Mad Mothers (Nine Arches, 2017) by permission of  Nine Arches Press. 

Notes from Nine Arches:

All My Mad Mothers explores love, sex and family relationships in vivacious, lush poems that span the decades and generations. At the heart of this collection of poems is the portrait of a mother as multitudes – as a magician with a bathroom of beauty tricks, as necromancer, as glamorous fire-starter, trapped in ever-decreasing circles and, above all else, almost impossible to grasp.

Jacqueline Saphra’s The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions (flipped eye, 2011) was nominated for The Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. A book of illustrated prose poems, If I Lay on my Back I saw Nothing but Naked Women (The Emma Press 2014), won Best Collaborative Work at the Saboteur Awards 2015. All My Mad Mothers was published by Nine Arches Press in May 2017 and A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller is due from Hercules Editions in September 2017. She teaches at The Poetry School. You can read more about All My Mad Mothers on the Nine Arches website, and more about Jacqueline’s work on her own site. You can also follow the poet on Twitter. Last month, Jacqueline appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour to talk about her new book, and the interview is available on the BBC website (listen in from 12 minutes onwards).

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets (The Terrors by Tom Chivers and The Titanic Cafe closes its doors and hits the rocks by David Hart) were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2012, Nine Arches launched the Debut New Poets Series of first collections and the press has now published more than 30 collections of poetry and 10 issues of the magazine. We continue to build a reputation as a publisher of well-crafted and innovative contemporary poetry and short story collections. Follow Nine Arches on Facebook and Twitter. 

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Imp

~ oxfordbrookesuni

On the bad days, I shooed her mews away
out of nothing but an absence of joy.
I never installed a back-door flap for her,
so she would patter all night to get in at the window
while I lay wide-eyed and sleepless, pretending not to hear.

I know it was a blessing
when she landed like a fly on my forehead
as I was trying to write,
her cicada rustle scribbling in and out
before the flick of my hand sent her to hide
in the plumbing, where she whined for weeks
until I found her, toad-shy and morning-blind
in the kitchen sink. I held her, for the first time then,
revived her with what has become her favourite wine.

It has often been her game
to go missing. It is where she thrives,
as if she delights in being imagined –
looked-for in the fading light,
or at the beck of a buzzard’s call.
In the garden, I would find her spraint,
stinking of rotten fruit and putrid grain,
the tang of iron and the fume of honeycomb.
She would announce her return with a black-out
bite through electrical cable, then creep in close, dab
my eye with a spider-leg to see if I was awake.

She could drive me mad
with her cuckoo blink –
then I remember how she would
pull me out of the O of a dream
when I couldn’t breathe
and make me a day-bed from her sloughed skin.
She would lap at whatever saltwater
leaked from me. It wasn’t right
for her to see me cry,
but she would tongue my tears away,
curl me a rabbit-fur snake
for a pillow and blow through my ears.
Her opalescent gaze could break
the world-egg open
over and over again.

Tonight, I will leave out a bowl
of blood and marrow to tempt her back,
fall asleep on the sofa, wait
for a child’s hand to touch my face.

by Gregory Leadbetter 

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.

Join us this Thursday lunchtime from 12.15-1pm here at Brookes in JHB 207 for the exciting opportunity to hear readings from our two newest members of staff in Creative Writing: novelist Morag Joss and poet Andrew Eaton. All from and beyond Brookes are very welcome, and refreshments will be served!

And later today (Wednesday), our Visiting Professor Michael Parker, and Aleksandra Parker will be in Oxford to launch their new edited and translated version of Andrzej Franaszek’s award-winning biography of the great Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. The event, which Andrzej Franaszek will also attend and at which copies of the book published by Harvard University Press will be on sale, will also include a screening of the documentary film ‘The Magic Mountain: An American Portrait of Czesław Miłosz’. Visit the TORCH website for more details.

‘Imp’ is copyright © Gregory Leadbetter, 2016. It is reprinted from The Fetch (Nine Arches, 2016) by permission of Nine Arches Press. 

Notes from Nine Arches:

Gregory Leadbetter’s first full collection of poems, The Fetch, brings together poems that reach through language to the mystery of our being, giving voice to silence and darkness, illuminating the unseen. With their own rich alchemy, these poems combine the sensuous and the numinous, the lyric and the mythic. 

Ranging from invocation to elegy, from ghost poems to science fiction, Leadbetter conjures and quickens the wild and the weird. His poems bring to life a theatre of awakenings and apprehensions, of births and becoming, of the natural and the transnatural, where life and death meet. Powerful, imaginative, and precisely realised, The Fetch is also poignant and humane – animated by love, alive with the forces of renewal. You can read more about the collection on the Nine Arches website, and find out more about his work on his website. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Gregory Leadbetter’s debut full-length poetry collection, The Fetch, was published by Nine Arches Press in October 2016. A pamphlet of poems, The Body in the Well, was published by HappenStance in 2007, and his work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Rialto, Magma, The North, Agenda and elsewhere, including several anthologies. Gregory completed a PhD at Oxford Brookes University, and his book on Coleridge’s poetry, the transnatural and the dilemmas of creativity, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), won the University English (formerly CCUE) Book Prize 2012. He has written radio drama for the BBC, and was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2013. Gregory is Reader in Literature and Creative Writing at Birmingham City University, where he is Director of the MA in Creative Writing and the Institute of Creative and Critical Writing.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets (The Terrors by Tom Chivers and The Titanic Cafe closes its doors and hits the rocks by David Hart) were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2012, Nine Arches launched the Debut New Poets Series of first collections and the press has now published more than 30 collections of poetry and 10 issues of the magazine. We continue to build a reputation as a publisher of well-crafted and innovative contemporary poetry and short story collections. Follow Nine Arches on  Facebook and  Twitter. 

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

I found my father’s love letters

~ oxfordbrookesuni

To my unknown father

I found my father’s love letters
in strange and obscure places,
hidden in dark secret spaces,
where memories had closed the doors.

I found blank letters, with matching cards and envelopes.
A small drawer filled with letters unfinished,
crossed through, curling at the edges,
turning in the colour of time.

There was one in Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera
sandwiched somewhere between
Fermina’s rejection of Floretina
and a lifetime of loving, waiting for true love.

I found some penned in a note pad, half-written, half-thought,
scribbled to capture fleeting thoughts,
earnest in writing the emotional overflow
that time edits into streams flowing over with love.

I found one folded
lost in the attic
an elegy to love
that time had forgotten.

I searched to find the true name to those letters entitled my love.
A secret lover? Distant lover? First time lover?
or even my mother of whom you gave a thousand names
but I never heard you call her my love.

by Roy McFarlane

Our next poetry workshop will be led by poet and teacher Sarah Hesketh and is entitled ‘“more than skin can hold”: Writing People’. It will take place on Saturday 1 April from 10.30-4.30pm in the John Henry Brookes Building here at Oxford Brookes University. The workshop will consider the questions that arise when we attempt to represent and remember others in our writing, and all are welcome! Visit our website for more information and to sign up. Please note that places are limited!

The Centre is co-sponsoring an exciting symposium called ‘Poetics of Home: Place and Identity’ which will be in London this Saturday 18 March. It will feature presentations and dialogues by a diverse range of established and emerging poets and poet-researchers whose work engages with and interprets the meanings of homeland and cultural identity. It also includes a reading by George Szirtes and Hannah Lowe. There are a few tickets remaining, so sign up via this page.

‘I found my father’s love letters’ is copyright © Roy McFarlane, 2016. It is reprinted from Beginning With Your Last Breath (Nine Arches Press, 2016) by permission of Nine Arches Press.

Notes from Nine Arches:

This debut collection of poems by former Birmingham Poet Laureate Roy McFarlane explores love, loss, adoption and identity in powerful, precise and emotionally-charged poetry. From bereavement comes forth a life story in poems; the journey of sons, friends, lovers and parents, and all the moments of growing-up, discovery, falling in and out of love and learning to say goodbye that come along the way. Themes of place, music, history, and race interweave personal narratives, with poems that touch on everything from the ‘Tebbitt Test’ and Marvin Gaye to the Black Country, that ‘place just off the M6’. Distinct and memorable, McFarlane’s poems are beautifully crafted, intricately focused, moving their readers between both the spiritual and the sensual worlds with graceful, rapturous hymns to the transformative power of love. Read more about the book on the Nine Arches website, and more about Roy’s work on his own website. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets (The Terrors by Tom Chivers and The Titanic Cafe closes its doors and hits the rocks by David Hart) were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2012, Nine Arches launched the Debut New Poets Series of first collections and the press has now published more than 30 collections of poetry and 10 issues of the magazine. We continue to build a reputation as a publisher of well-crafted and innovative contemporary poetry and short story collections. Follow Nine Arches on Facebook and Twitter.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

To Kill a Robin

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Come January, the pair of us clarted out to pluck
the morning, feet bound in brushwood – plumage
flying out of my Mother’s mouth. It was us
or the birds. If you kill a robin on New Year’s Day,
give a feather to a rodman and he’ll always sail clear.
She would not be a widow, not yet. You could say
I had a mind for the birds, the hunch of me
hunkered in spitting distance of the river, so still
and part of everything in my brown coat, I wanted
to grab my cold breath and pull it back in.
Ma stood listening for the tek tek, a cough hanging
frayed streamers over our heads. I caught the robin
in nithered fingers I barely dared open. There,
the bird perfectly refused to have its neck snapped.
It simply stopped in the cave of my grasp, one
last trill like water rolling a silence over my hands.

by Angela Readman

News from the Centre: leading Scandinavian poet Pia Tafdrup is visiting the UK from 15-17 February in a tour organized by the Poetry Centre. She’ll be in Reading (reading with Peter Robinson), Ledbury (with Fiona Sampson), and in Oxford (with Philip Gross). More details about the tour are on the Poetry Centre website, and there are only 10 tickets left for the date in Oxford. Book via our Shop now!

Be sure to tune in to BBC Radio 4‘s In Our Timeprogramme this Thursday to hear our colleague Prof Simon Kövesi discussing the poet John Clare with Prof Jonathan Bate and Dr Mina Gorji. There’s more about Simon’s research on his webpage.


‘To Kill a Robin’ is copyright © Angela Readman, 2016. It is reprinted from The Book of Tides (Nine Arches Press, 2016) by permission of Nine Arches Press.

Angela Readman’s The Book of Tides is a treasure trove of luscious, visceral poems that are delightfully risky, utterly thrilling and always close to the bone. Readman’s poetry teems with the rare and beautiful, the dark seaweed sparkle of a particular strand of skewed folklore; here we encounter fishermen and mermaids, a man with a beard of bees, a Tattooist’s daughter, Joan of Arc, and Beatrix Potter’s bed – a rich swell of voices with an irresistible and peculiar power.

Salt-speckled and sea tinged, these poems possess a distinctive eye for disconcerting and uncanny details – from notes in bottles and knotted handkerchiefs, to sequin fish-scales and drowned rats. To read Readman’s poetry is to be simultaneously unsettled and enraptured, and to encounter witchcraft, murder, love and loss. As The Book of Tides unfolds, will you dare to put your ear to its seashell, tune into its siren song and cast yourself adrift on its strange and alluring current? Read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

Angela Readman’s stories and poems have appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines, including London Magazine, Staple, Ambit and Mslexia, and she has won awards including the National Flash Fiction Competition. In 2012 she was shortlisted for the Costa Short Story Award for ‘Don’t Try This at Home’ – an award she would go on to win in 2013 with the story ‘The Keeper of the Jackalopes’. Her previous collections of poetry include Strip (Salt, 2007). The Book of Tides (Nine Arches Press, 2016) is her third collection of poems. You can read more about Angela Readman on the Nine Arches blog, and follow her work on Twitter.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets (The Terrors by Tom Chivers and The Titanic Cafe closes its doors and hits the rocks by David Hart) were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2012, Nine Arches launched the Debut New Poets Series of first collections and the press has now published more than 30 collections of poetry and 10 issues of the magazine. We continue to build a reputation as a publisher of well-crafted and innovative contemporary poetry and short story collections. Follow Nine Arches on Facebook and Twitter.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Summer

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Corn scrapes our shins.
We’ve no reason to go back.
Now you’re here, we spend summer
in fields far from our houses
where no-one can see.

We rub mud on naked arms;
put stripes across our faces,
blood red clay over our noses,
tug back our hair.

We march by the river, sun scalds
our scalps, necks. From the back
I can tell you’re not a boy;
your legs are too skinny, your
hips widening gently.

You flay corn with a slender
branch of willow – air whips round
your head faster, faster, you love
the noise. Sap spills in your palm.

We thrust our feet in water,
kick until we’re soaked. Next thing
you’re on the bridge, toes over its edge,
steadying yourself against the breeze.

You bend slightly, unlock your knees,
leap. You drop slowly through the air,
almost as if it’s trying to catch you.

by Abegail Morley


Welcome back to the Weekly Poem after its summer break! Two pieces of news from the Centre: firstly, the deadline for entries into our 2016 International Poetry Competition is only ONE WEEK away! This year’s judge is the award-winning poet Daljit Nagra, and you can find details about how to enter on the Poetry Centre website. There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language, and the winners of each category will receive £1000, with both runners-up receiving £200. Please feel free to pass the word along!

Secondly, 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!).

‘Summer’ is copyright © Abegail Morley, 2016. It is reprinted from The Skin Diary (Nine Arches Press, 2016) by permission of Nine Arches Press.

Abegail Morley’s debut collection, How to Pour Madness into a Teacup (Cinnamon) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best First Collection. Her collections, Snow Child and an ekphrastic collection based on the work of the German satirical painter, George Grosz, Eva and George: Sketches in Pen and Brush are published by Pindrop Press. She collaborated with artist Karen Dennison on The Memory of Water (Indigo Dreams Publishing) based on a residency at Scotney Castle. She was Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year 2015 and Poet in Residence at Riverhill Himalayan Gardens, Kent 2015-2016. Abegail is a co-founder of EKPHRASIS commissioning poets for ekphrastic events, most recently at The Royal Academy of Arts and the British Library. Her website is The Poetry Shed.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets (The Terrors by Tom Chivers and The Titanic Cafe closes its doors and hits the rocks by David Hart) were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2012, Nine Arches launched the Debut New Poets Series of first collections and the press has now published more than 30 collections of poetry and 10 issues of the magazine. We continue to build a reputation as a publisher of well-crafted and innovative contemporary poetry and short story collections. Follow Nine Arches on Facebook and Twitter.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.