About cows

November 7, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

They shit a lot and at first it is a warm pat
ridged with raised circles as it dries.
Water stopped in its tracks or a viscous jelly
hardening from the outside in.
I think of dying in a pool of shite,
the one my mother meant –
Go take a running leap in the slurry pit for all I care.
We had lost three cats that summer.
Seeing them stiffed, legs rigid and shining
made an art of death.
But this was to be about cows,
their lumbering walk to the gap to be milked
as if they know more together than apart.
They can smell a stream of fresh water from a mile.
They can hear grass growing under the bull.
They hold time in their four stomachs, chewing it down
till the evening milking, feeling the hours move on through.
They do not miss the calves they have had taken.
No attachment is apparent in three days.
Perhaps like the farmer in a unit of money,
they count on exchange.
Cows know their own patch but they’ll stray to graze another’s.
Swung towards the hedge in rain, heads dripping,
tail swatch taking a rest from flies.
Apparently rural but worldly wise, cows know that loss
is our only measure, expellation a passing pleasure.

by Siobhán Campbell

News from the Centre: this Thursday we are delighted to welcome this week’s poet, Siobhán Campbell, to Oxford to read with Kate Clanchy as part of the Poetry Centre’s reading series. Everyone is very welcome to hear two internationally-acclaimed writers. The reading takes place at the Society Café, St. Michael’s Street, Oxford, from 7-9pm. Tickets (£4) can be bought on the door or via the Brookes Shop.

Tomorrow (Wednesday), Oxford Writers’ House presents ‘Writing for Audio Drama and Podcasting: an Evening with Robert Valentine and Liz Campbell’. All are welcome, but places are limited! Find out more and sign up here.

On Saturday 11 November, don’t miss an Armistice Day reading with Adnan Al-Sayegh, Jenny Lewis, Peter King & Jude Cowan Montague, together with the launch of Seeds of Bullets, a book on Adnan’s work. Albion Beatnik Bookshop, Oxford, 7.30pm.

Finally, the Woodstock Poetry Festival runs from 10-12 November. A very impressive programme includes readings by the likes of Douglas Dunn and Anne Stevenson. More details here.

Notes from Seren:

Siobhán Campbell was born in Ireland and has lived in Dublin and London as well as San Francisco and Washington DC. Widely published in the USA and UK, she has won awards in the National Poetry Competition, the Troubadour International Poetry Competition, the Templar Poetry Prize and most recently was awarded the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Prize (Open category). She has an MA from the University College Dublin, a PhD from Lancaster University and has pursued postgraduate study at NYU and the New School in New York. She joined the Open University Department of English from Kingston University London where she was Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing. Heat Signature is her fifth collection of poems, and you can read more about the book on the Seren website. Find out more about Siobhán’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Seren has been publishing poetry for 35 years. We are an independent publisher specialising in English-language writing from Wales. Seren’s wide-ranging list includes fiction, translation, biography, art and history. Seren’s authors are shortlisted for – and win – major literary prizes across Britain and America, including the 2014 Costa Poetry Prize (for Jonathan Edwards’ My Family and Other Superheroes). Amy Wack has been Seren’s Poetry Editor for more than 20 years. You can find more details about Seren on the publisher’s website and follow Seren on Twitter and on Facebook.

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

This Is Not A Rescue

October 9, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I want to tell you it will not be as you expect. For years
you have hammered in stakes, handed men the rope and said
consume me with fire. Most have run – one does not burn
a witch lightly. This one is water. He’ll unbind you, take
your hands in his and say remember how you love the ocean?
Come with me. You’ll go to the beach on a cloudy day, watch
foam rise from the sea’s churn until sun appears. In turn
you’ll say let’s go in and even though he hesitates, this man
will kick off his shoes and wade to his shins. Jellyfish,
shot with pink like satin dresses, will dance between you, flash
iridescent. His body is all whorls and planes like smoothly sanded
planks used to make a boat, his ears are pale shells you hear
the waves in, he smells of sandalwood and salt, his eyes
are ocean. He’ll spot the pebbles that in secret you have sewn
into your skirts and give you his penknife to unpick them. 
You can’t swim with those. He’ll teach you to skim. The pebbles
break the surface like question marks. You’ll throw each last one in.

by Emily Blewitt

Notes from Seren:

This Is Not A Rescue is a sparkling debut collection from Carmarthen-born Emily Blewitt, featuring poems on varied subjects from being a ‘woman poet’ to the heroes of Jane Austen. There are also some winning, unusual love poems and work inspired by crows and a couple of characters from ‘Star Wars’. Read more about the collection on the Seren website.

Emily Blewitt read English Language and Literature at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and has an MA in Film and Literature from the University of York. In 2010 she returned to Wales to begin a PhD in English Literature at Cardiff University, where she specialised in poetic representations of pregnancy in nineteenth-century and contemporary women’s writing, graduating in 2016. She has published poetry widely, her work appearing in The Rialto, Prole, The Interpreter’s House, Ambit, Poetry Wales, Furies, Cheval, Nu2: Memorable Firsts, and in Brittle Star. The title poem from her debut collection, This Is Not ARescue, was Highly Commended for best individual poem in the 2016 Forward Prizes, and is published in TheForward Book of Poetry 2017 . You can read more about Emily’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Seamus on the Tube

August 21, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Looking away, not looking away –
The happenstance of what may change everything;
Those standing commuters moving off at Charing Cross
For the Bakerloo Line and then your eyes lifting

Above those seated opposite, as one does, to read
Between faster Broadband and Las Vegas –
“Where your accent is an aphrodisiac,” it says,
And where “what happens here, stays here,”

The Railway Children where in the white cups 
Of the telegraph wires a young boy knows 
That words are carried in the shiny pouches of raindrops.
Like this poem carried for you in the red and white Tube

On the Northern Line in cold January’s real freeze;
Snow is promised in the suburbs so everyone’s scarved
Against the weather. Words taking you back to the fifties
And his boyhood summers before everything changed.

Reaching Warren Street, you’ve read it 
Four or five times, absorbed the innocent wisdom 
And sense of the thing. Those people opposite 
See a crazy old man mouthing words, appearing to sing.

by Tony Curtis

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries for just one more week! Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. First Prize in both categories is £1000, with £200 for Second. The competition is open for submissions until 11pm BST/10pm GMT on 28 August 2017. Visit our website for more details and to enter, and please feel free to share news of the competition with friends and colleagues.

The TOAST Poets scheme is now open for applications until midnight on 25 August! TOAST is a professional development project for mid-career poets. It takes the form of eleven workshops over the course of a year from September 2017 – Summer 2018. Each TOAST poet is offered two, hour-long mentoring sessions with an established poet or editor to discuss their work and what steps they might take to progress. This year’s mentors are Hannah Lowe and Kayo Chingonyi. Visit the TOAST website for more details and to apply.

Notes from Seren:

Seren celebrates the 70^th birthday of the Welsh poet Tony Curtis with the publication of his From the Fortunate Isles: New and Selected Poems. This landmark book features poems from ten of his previous collections, in addition to a substantial number of new poems: marking a career in poetry fifty years in duration. This is a poet whose themes and variations remain consistent: a deep affection for his roots in West Wales, tender attachments to family, a profound interest in the wars of the last century, and an abiding fascination for all art forms, particularly painting and poetry. Writing about Tony’s poetry, the late Helen Dunmore commented: ‘The poems reverberate with present, sensuous experience, but beyond their immediacy there is a deep hinterland of public and private histories, of grief and delight.’ You can read more about the new book on the Seren website.

Tony Curtis was born in Carmarthen in 1946. He studied at Swansea University and Goddard College, Vermont, USA and is the author of a number of poetry collections and pamphlets, including: Taken for Pearls (1993), War Voices (1995), The Arches (1998), Heaven’s Gate (2001) and Crossing Over (2007). He is the editor of a number of popular anthologies on subjects ranging from war to Pembrokeshire, Snowdonia, coal, and orphans in the charitable anthology Tokens for the Foundlings (2012). His many critical books include The Art of Seamus Heaney (1982), and Dannie Abse (1985), How Poets Work (1996) and Welsh Painters Talking (1997). Curtis has won the National Poetry Competition, the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Cholmondeley Award. He is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at the University of South Wales, where he established and was Director of the MPhil in Writing, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has toured widely, reading his poetry to international audiences. You can read more about Tony’s work on his website and on his Facebook page.

Grunting Up

July 24, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Who would have thought that these great slab-sided beasts
who fall to their knees and slump belly up, 
would sing this rhythmic, grunting lullaby?

Weight drops from back and loins but
swollen, undulating glands seem added on,
like a full frill at the bottom of a skirt.

The piglets rush to their particular nipple
and plug on, tongues curling, eyes closed,
chubby fingers, lined up, reaching.

And then she begins. This low throbbing,
this song to the milk flow,
this crooning hymn.

by Ilse Pedler

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries for just one more month! 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 please feel free to share news of the competition with friends and colleagues.

Notes from Seren:

N.B. Grunting up is the name given to the noise a sow makes when her piglets are sucking.

Her life as a busy vet inspires the poet Ilse Pedler in her debut poetry pamphlet, the winner of the prestigious Mslexia pamphlet competition in 2015, The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels. The author uses both free verse and traditional forms like the sonnet and sestina to delve into days that can include dramatic situations with animals, both farm and domesticated species, and their human carers. A secondary theme runs throughout the collection, exemplified by the poem ‘Suturing Secrets’ – the secrets we keep as spouses or parents or from those we are close to. You can read more about the pamphlet on the Seren website.

Ilse Pedler was born in Derby in 1963 and grew up in Birmingham. A Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, she works as a vet in Saffron Walden. She has a son, stepson and a number of small and medium-sized animals. Her poems have been published in Poetry News, Orbis, The North and other journals. Writing about this collection, Helen Ivory has commented: ‘These poems point to the equality of mammals; the locked cabinets of our bodies, how a neat incision, a skilled turn of the wrist can reveal the hearts of dogs and humans alike. There is tenderness here, and a sense of wonder at the world, that scientists and artists share. This is a striking and sure-footed debut.’

Nomad Song

June 12, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Now, far from the sea
the sea-lure remains.
Come home, I say.

My hands can carry less and less.
I want you near,
but you move further away.

Your belongings come along:
a small teak stamp box,
smooth and soft in my hands.

A tiny glass hexagon
colorful parrots inside.
They swing with you in eternity
on little plastic vines.

Chatwin’s ‘Anatomy of Restlessness’,
the last book you read.
‘We are travellers from birth.’

You, too, shed things and places
like layers of skin.

Now, far from the sea
the sea-lure remains.

Come home I say,
but you move further away.

by Lynne Hjelmgaard

Join us this Saturday when we pair up with the Oxfordshire Science Festival for a celebration of poetry about science! We’ll be hearing the winning poems in the Science Festival’s school poetry competition (judged by Poetry Centre Director Niall Munro and others), and there will be a reading by Oxford-based poet Kelley Swain, recently one of the poets-in-residence at the Oxford Museum of Natural History. For more details, visit this page.

There are only a handful of tickets left for ‘moments/that stretch horizons’: an international poetry symposium, which takes place here at Brookes on 28 June. Together with colleagues from the University of Reading, and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) at the University of Canberra, we will be exploring poetry about the environment, prose poetry and the lyric, and poetry and publishing. Tickets for the day (including refreshments and lunch) cost £10 (£7.50 for postgraduates). All poets, critics, and readers of poetry are welcome, and you can sign up here.

The Poetry Centre’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.

‘Nomad Song’ is copyright © Lynne Hjelmgaard, 2016, and reprinted by permission of Seren Books.

Notes from Seren:

The poet Lynne Hjelmgaard has written a beautifully evocative recollection of a journey she took by sailboat with her husband across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and Europe. A Boat Called Annalise moves from scenes of risk and turbulence, of wild beauty on the open water, to visions of their dream-like destination in the West Indies. The author’s clear-eyed and tender observations are as insightful about the paradox of paradise: tropical splendor amidst local poverty, as they are about the challenges of relationships at close quarters. You can read more about the book on the Seren website.

Lynne Hjelmgaard was born in New York City and lives in London. She taught Creative Art for children in various schools and institutions before she started writing poetry. She left the States in 1990 for the second time and has been living permanently in the UK since 2011. As a result of crossing the Atlantic in a sailboat with her husband she wrote the poems that were later collected in Manhattan Sonnets. After her husband died in 2006, she received a residency grant for the Danish Academy in Rome where she wrote poems that later appeared in The Ring. Writing about A Boat Called Annalise, Dannie Abse remarked: ‘[t]he whole book is powered by the synergy of related poems. This arresting sequence is much more than that of a percipient tourist. Widowhood allows them to acquire a poignant universality.’ You can learn more about Lynne Hjelmgaard’s work on the poetry pf website.

Meteor

April 3, 2017April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

And this is how everything vanishes,
how everything that vanishes begins,
the hinged moment looking forwards and back.
Like that night when we sat with the back door open,
the summer distilled to the scent of jasmine,
the scrape of cutlery, the chink of glass.
A robin stirred in the dusty hedgerow.
Clothes held our bodies as a mouth might a kiss.
Then the meteor brought us to our feet:
a stripped atom, trapping electrons
to excite the darkness with its violet light.
I remember how it disturbed the heavens,
burned against the air to leave no trace.

by Deryn Rees-Jones

The Poetry Centre is delighted to announce the launch of this year’s Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition! We are also excited to say that this year our judge is the award-winning poet Helen Mort. With two top prizes of £1000 on offer, the competition seeks to celebrate the great diversity of poetry being written in English all over the world. Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: English as an Additional Language – for poets who write in English as an additional language, and Open category – for poets whose first language is English. 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.

This Saturday, head along to the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Oxford for ‘Nevertheless, she persisted: an evening of feminist/equality poetry in Oxford’. Presented by The Persisters, this event will encourage poetry, equality and empowerment for all. The headliners are Kelley Swain and Rowena Knight, and there will be an open mic open to all. Sign up from 19:00. Entry £4. Profits will be donated to Oxfordshire Sexual Abuse and Rape Crisis Centre. You can find more details on the Facebook page.

Notes from Seren:

‘Meteor’ is included in What It’s Like to Be Alive: Selected Poems from the highly-regarded poet, Deryn Rees-Jones. A milestone in the career of this author, the book includes generous selections from her previous individual collections including her debut, The Memory Tray; her subsequent Signs Round a Dead Body; her murder-mystery in verse: Quiver; her T.S. Eliot prize-nominated, Burying the Wren; and her long poem inspired by Edward Thomas’ wife, And You, Helen. A poet of intimate lyricism, of thoughtful speculation, close to the natural world, or ‘creaturely’ as John Burnside puts it, this is work which balances a singular musical quality with a profound intelligence as well as a deep emotional power. Read more about the book on Seren’s website.

DerynRees-Jones was born in Liverpool, and educated in North Wales and London. Her debut, The Memory Tray, was nominated for the Forward Prize, and her most recent collection, Burying the Wren, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and nominated for both the Roland Mathias and the T.S. Eliot prize. Her other collections published by Seren include Signs Round a Dead Body; a murder-mystery in verse, Quiver; and a collaboration with the artist Charlotte Hodes, And You, Helen, that includes images alongside a long poem inspired by the wife of the poet Edward Thomas. She has edited the influential Modern Women Poets anthology and a companion critical book, Consorting with Angels, for Bloodaxe. In addition to being chosen as one of the Next Generation Poets in 2004, Deryn has received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and was picked as one of the top ten women poets of the decade in Mslexia magazine. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Liverpool where she co-directs the Centre for New and International Writing, and edits the Pavilion Poetry Series for Liverpool University Press. You can find out more about Deryn’s work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

The House on Fire

March 8, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Paper burns the fastest. And the dried flowers
you leave on all the windowsills, and the piano
flaring its final silence. All that silver
running to mercury. The noise of it fills each room
until the roof angles up off its beams.
In the bathtub your hair splays out like white
weed. The wallflowers dozing against the porch
slump into their own scorched scent.
Each room breathless and slamming its doors,
flames leaning down to touch the water –
Then we’re walking through the ruts of the frozen field again,
my red wellies, the dry sheets of ice that crack like toffee,
the horses echoing out the mist and nuzzling velvet
into the palms of our hands. And you’re in the kitchen
cutting puffballs with the bread knife, and you’re sowing
crumbs into the flowerbeds, and saying not yet.
Then you’re striking matches at the cooker
with your swollen fingers all bent
and the phone is ringing,
and the light is in my eyes. I’ve seen ghosts
pour like water through a dim room, white things,
weak things that scatter in a draught, and now I see you,
and how your ghost is like fire: roaring,
laughing, eating.

by Rhiannon Hooson

Our next poetry workshop will be led by poet and teacher Sarah Hesketh and 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 on 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. For more information, contact the organizer, Jennifer Wong, via poeticsofhome2017@gmail.com

And finally, Happy International Women’s Day! To celebrate, this week’s publisher, Seren, is offering its acclaimed anthology, Women’s Work at half price! Visit the website for more details.

Notes from Seren:

A thoughtful, complex and lyrical first collection of poems by Rhiannon Hooson, The Other City is inspired by personal history as well as stories from classical mythology, and in the book the poet uses gorgeous specific details that bring her poems to life. She also has a lively way with a narrative, pulling one into a story that might be about Zeus, a lover’s infatuation with her hair, or a cat that tracks ‘finches/ across the thin crust of snow’. There are quite a few poems about her childhood in Wales: the farm where she grew up, the rooms presided over by her father and mother: ‘…the fizz of green kindling,/the line of boots in the porch’.

Rhiannon Hooson was born in Mid Wales in 1979, where she lived until moving to the north of England in 1998. She studied and later taught at Lancaster University, where she was awarded first an MA in Creative Writing (with Distinction), then a PhD in poetry. Her first pamphlet, This Reckless Beauty, was published in 2004, and in 2008 she received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. Her work has appeared in a number of literary magazines and anthologies. She now lives in the Welsh marches after time spent living in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Writing about her new book, The Other City, Graham Mort has commented: ‘This is a beguiling debut from a poet who already has a recognizable voice and emotional register. Sensuous, musical, darkly involved, the poems make and confound their own realities.’ You can read more about TheOther City on the Seren website, and more about Rhiannon’s work on her site.

Teenager

January 30, 2017April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The only thing he remembered
about the burglary was the dog
as he’d dragged it across the floor,
its claws out in resistance,
fur hooding its eyes.
His own teeth were bared
as he shook and twisted
the folds of its neck.
The dream of his father!
His mute mother
had brought him here to
join him and he’d found
a drunk, violent man
who beat her.
He knew at court, that he
had an extra punishment.
He would be deported when
the others were released.
At the time he didn’t care,
he hated this shit-hole of a country
as much as it hated him.
But inside, he found
he was good at maths,
got certificates in fitness,
reflected on his life.
But it was down in writing
that he hated his mother
so now they said he hadn’t
got family life.
He’d told them he was glad
he’d hurt the dog
so they said he had no remorse.
They told him he was now
nineteen and no longer a child
and would be deported with £46.
They asked him which airport
he wanted to go back to
but he didn’t know
what ones there were.
He’d left when he was seven.

by Caroline Smith

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

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

Notes from Seren:

Vividly detailed and emotionally powerful, The Immigration Handbook is as revealing as it is timely. Here we meet with the traumatised individuals that the news stories only speak of as numbers. These are lives fraught with violence and tragedy that Caroline Smith has encountered in her work as the asylum caseworker for a Wembley MP. We journey with them through the labyrinthine government bureaucracies they must navigate to survive. With clarity and integrity she lays before us stories of stoic resilience and humorous forbearance, of kindness to others and of joy in the midst of sorrow. These are poems that step out of the headlines and into our hearts. You can read more about the book on the Seren website.

Caroline Smith was born in Ilford and grew up in Hertfordshire. She originally trained as a sculptor at Goldsmith’s College. Her first publication was a long narrative poem ‘Edith’ about a Lancashire-born woman who works as a nanny in Glasgow, but is haunted by a secret from her pre-war life. Smith’s first full collection, The Thistles of the Hesperides, is about the community of West Pilton in Scotland where Caroline lived in the 1980s when it was one of the most deprived housing estates in Europe. Published widely in literary journals, she has twice won prizes in the Troubadour Poetry Competition. Smith has had work set to music, broadcast on the BBC and is also the author of a musical play, TheBedseller’s Tale, that was performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. She lives in Wembley with her family. Find out more about Caroline’s work on her website or by following her on Twitter.

‘These poems are very moving and it’s hard to do justice to the way Caroline Smith conveys the anxieties, hopes and disappointments experienced by immigrants. She never allows the reader to forget that behind the refugee statistics there are suffering human beings; very often the victims of a seemingly insensitive and overstretched bureaucracy.’ Lord Alf Dubs (formerly a Director of the Refugee Council and Chair of Liberty. He was one of 669 Jewish children saved from the Nazis on the Kinderstransport.)

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me

December 19, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I swooned at the large god of him, sunning.
A tooth for every day of my life.
He performed his run along the bank,
as males do. I brought my boat closer.
He took to following, at a distance.

I wasn’t taken in, knew his four-chambered heart
pumped love out and in, in and out,
knew his tongue had few good uses,
knew all about his grin. Yet whoever said he was cold-
blooded has never truly known this beast.

He brought out the prehistoric in me. I dived.
We swam, belly to belly, to where the Niles meet,
tussled as we thrashed among the weeds. After, I lay
the length of him, a limestone lilo, studs patterning
my skin. He smiled at me, often. Taught me all he knew.

Years later, when a man tried to drag me under,
I practised the force my lover had held back –
levered my small jaws open to their furthest extent,
splashed them down on the human’s arm.
My attacker still carries the mark of my smile.

by Katrina Naomi

This is the last Weekly Poem of 2016. The Poetry Centre wishes you a very Merry Christmas! We look forward to sharing more poems with you in 2017, as well as details of our upcoming readings, workshops, and events for 2017. For more initial details on those, do visit the Poetry Centre website.

Notes from Seren:

With warmth, flair and a certain ferocious wit, Katrina Naomi tears into her subject matter in The Way the Crocodile Taught Me: a childhood fraught with dislocation and violence but also redeemed by more tender memories of a sister and a kindly, although at times comically obtuse, grandmother. The tone of the work is as much tender as turbulent, reflecting the protagonist’s travails. Vicki Feaver has praised Katrina Naomi’s ‘cool voice and fierce eye’, and this pointed, lively and always entertaining book is sure to delight all those who know Katrina’s work, and undoubtedly win new fans for her courageous and unabashedly entertaining poems. You can read more about the book on Seren’s website.

Katrina Naomi has a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College. She was the first writer-in-residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, West Yorkshire and was recently writer-in-residence at Gladstone’s Library in North Wales where she wrote a sequence on the Suffragettes, published by Rack Press as Hooligans. Her debut collection The Girl with the Cactus Handshake received an Arts Council Award and was shortlisted for the London New Poetry Award. Her pamphlet Lunch at the Elephant & Castle won the 2008 Templar Poetry Pamphlet Competition and her pamphlet Charlotte Brontë’s Corset was published to acclaim by the Brontë Society. She is a Hawthornden Fellow, a tutor at Falmouth University and runs Poetry Surgeries for the Poetry Society. Katrina’s recent work has been broadcast on Radio 4 and published by the TLS, The Spectator, The Poetry Review and Poetry Wales. She received an award from the Royal Literary Fund in 2014 for her writing. She enjoys performing her poetry and collaborating with visual artists, musicians and film-makers. She recently had an exhibition at London’s Poetry Café entitled ‘The Argument: Art V Poetry’, following a collaboration with the visual artist, Tim Ridley. She is originally from Margate and lives in Cornwall.

You can find out more about Katrina’s work on her website, in this recent interview from Literature Works, and by following her on Twitter.

Happy Seventieth Birthday Blues, Mr Zimmerman

November 8, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I’m staring into seventy, staring at that old bad news,
Yeah, staring into seventy, staring at the rank bad news.
I’m getting slowly smashed, but it’s not the getting smashed you’d choose.

It’s a wall that’s got no garden shining on the other side,
A wall that’s got no pardon, smiling on the other side –
Just ask any angel who ever crossed that divide.

I heard the devil singing, he was singing to me long ago,
He sang me through the sixties, he sang me years and years ago –
Sang Man, if you’re a woman you just have to grow and grow.
I’m a long-born woman, and it’s the shortest straw.
I’m a long-born woman, smoking my cheroot of straw.
But I’m no damned angel, I was born to be a whole lot more.

I’m looking at the wall. Are you telling me it’s a gate?
I’m looking at a wall, yeah, he’s telling me it’s the gate.
You can find it if you’re blind, baby blue, it’s not too late.

We’re only ever twenty, we’re only ever at the start.
We’re only ever peddling that iconic parabolic start.
And there’s no wall, baby, it’s the shadow of an empty heart.

Go cruising into seventy: seventy’s a broad highway;
Cruise along at seventy, along that broad highway –
You’ll soon be doing eighty, if the angels get out the way.

by Carol Rumens

The latest Poetry Review blog review is now available! Written by Alex Wortley, who recently completed his MA by Research about Seamus Heaney at Brookes, it examines a new collection of poetry by Michelle Cahill. You can read Alex’s review here.

The awards event for the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition takes place on Friday 25 November from 6-8pm. It will feature a reading by the judge, Daljit Nagra, as well as a number of the winning and shortlisted poets. If you would like to attend, please let us know by the end of this week. Simply reply to this e-mail.

Notes from Seren:

Animal People is the new collection by distinguished poet Carol Rumens. Often inspired by and infused with the weathers of various seasons of the year, many poems also feature a strong sense of place, whether it be the dramatic mountain rock-scapes of Snowdonia or the gritty streets of London and Hull. This particular poem has also appeared in the Seren anthology The Captain’s Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob Dylan at 70 edited by Phil Bowen, Damian Furniss and David Wooley. There is a strong sense of commemoration in this collection, of time passing and of the challenges of mortality, and also a number of brilliant pieces that are influenced by translations or re-readings of classic works of literature. The title poem refers to a sequence devoted to themes inspired by autism and what it means to be ‘on the spectrum’. Read more about Animal People on the Seren website.

Carol Rumens was born in South London. She has taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury, Queen’s University Belfast, University College Cork, University of Stockholm, and the University of Hull; she is currently Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Bangor. The author of sixteen collections of poems, as well as occasional fiction, drama and translation, Rumens has received the Cholmondeley Award and the Prudence Farmer Prize for her poetry, and has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her work has appeared regularly in publications such as The Guardian, The Observer and Poetry Review, and she currently writes the hugely popular ‘Poem of the Week’ feature for The Guardian. Writing about Rumens’s work in the Times Literary Supplement, Isobel Armstrong described her as ‘a European poet whose imagination goes beyond the confines of Europe, a poet of borders and transit, and of movement across frontiers which makes both the experience of alienation and that of “home” a relative matter.’ Read more about Rumens’ work on her website.