The River Flowing Under The Bank of England Dreams of Power

July 8, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Our slow-green hair has grown. Samson sings
in the loosening links of his brick chain,

ancient tunes of sewage, wave, and drains.
We abrade the runs they lace us through

we swell, we pound; soon otters, willow,
dace and cress below the human landscape

shall burst into their money rooms and break
their fishbone combs, their bead-pearl cufflinks,

coins duller than carp scales, empty wells of ink.
Bonds shall be broken, mussels prise the pyx.

Fish shall dine on floating boards, and silver-fixing
conclaves shall be lunch for oyster and clam.

City pavements tremble over our premature tomb;
the sky empowers us, we fatten, wax, grow bold.

We shall reclaim vaults, gild our snails with gold,
slew filth through their halls. We shall share nothing.

by Marianne Burton

Notes from Seren:

Marianne Burton studied law at Oxford and qualified as a solicitor. She worked in the City specializing in advising Friendly Societies, and as a director on the board of a pharmaceutical company. She has a first class degree in Literature from the Open University and a Creative Writing MA from Royal Holloway where she studied with Andrew Motion and Jo Shapcott. In 2010 she was tutored at Ty Newydd by Gillian Clarke and Carol Ann Duffy who encouraged her to put together her first collection. Her poems have been widely published in top literary journals including Poetry Wales, Poetry London, and the Times Literary Supplement. Her pamphlet, The Devils’ Cut, was a Poetry Book Society choice in 2007. She has won and been placed in many competitions including Mslexia, TLS, Edwin Morgan, Bridport, and Cardiff. Her work has also appeared in USA outlets such as Poetry Daily, the CSM and Broadlands: Texas Poetry Review. The book from which this poem is taken, She Inserts the Key, was today shortlisted for the 2013 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, one of the Forward Prizes for Poetry.

Writing about her work, Andrew Motion has observed that ‘Marianne Burton’s poems combine grace with intelligence, toughness with delicacy, and thoughtfulness with sensuality. This means her work is full of surprising challenges and reconciliations – all of which bring rich rewards to the reader.’ You can read further selections from the book on the Seren website.

Seren Books (‘Seren’ means ‘star’ in Welsh) is based in Bridgend, South Wales. Originally conceived by Cary Archard and Dannie Abse as an offshoot of Poetry Wales magazine in the latter’s garage in Ogmore-by-Sea in the early 80s, under Managing Editor Mick Felton the press has gone from strength to strength and has published a wide range of titles including fiction (which under Editor Penny Thomas has seen the Booker-nominated novel by Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days, and an acclaimed novella series based on the medieval Welsh tales from the Mabinogion) and non-fiction (including literary criticism such as the new John Redmond title Poetry and Privacy, as well as sumptuous art books like the collaboration between photographer David Hurn and poet John Fuller, Writing the Picture). Seren’s poetry list, edited by Amy Wack since the early 90s, has produced T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated titles by Deryn Rees-Jones and Pascale Petit, Costa winner John Haynes, and a large list of Forward Prize winners and nominees, as well as continuing to publishing classic Welsh writers. Most recently, Seren has also added Irish and American writers to its list.

For more details about Seren, visit the publisher’s website, where there is a blog about Seren’s news and events. You can also find Seren on Facebook, on Twitter, and on YouTube, where there are videos of a number of poets reading from their work.

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 Glorious Fellowship of Migraineurs

May 20, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

When we gather we greet each other
by lifting tentatively one hand to one eye.
We meet in darkened rooms, quietly;
share no wine. Nobody speaks
but often our voices join to moan
the migraineurs psalm, low and holy.

The hours before fizz brilliantly, scented
with burnt toast and oranges, petrol, sparking
fireworks, fireflies, stars. Everyone
dons a halo, everyone’s soul
shines out through their pores, whether unnaturally
small or wrapped in a skin of water.

We sleep the night together, slip off
one by one on waking from
a dream we pass between us, in which
the structure of the sky is revealed. We make
no dates, but palm to temple, salute
in a migraineur’s kiss, our transcendence.

by Polly Atkin

There are two events to draw your attention to this week. This week’s poet, Polly Atkin, is one of a number of scholars contributing to Shifting Territories, a conference on modern and contemporary poetics of place, which is taking place on Wednesday and Thursday this week at theInstitute of English Studies in London. As well as panels of papers responding to poetry and place, the conference features readings by Jo Shapcott and David Morley, a keynote paper by Eóin Flannery, a workshop by Steven Matthews, and an evening event in association with the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature with Alice Oswald and Hugh Haughton. Find out more about the conference here.

Tomorrow at 7pm in Headington Hill Hall, Oxford Brookes, the Poetry Centre presents ‘”The Cheerful Companion”: Poetry, Music & Performance in Eighteenth-Century Poetic Miscellanies.’ The event will consist of a series of short talks, readings, and music, followed by an interactive session in which participants will be able to experience an authentic eighteenth-century sewing session hosted by Nicole Pohl from Oxford Brookes. All are welcome and you can find more information about the event here.

Notes from Seren:

Polly Atkin was born in Nottingham in 1980, lived in London for a number of years before moving to Cumbria in 2006 to research poems about place. Widely published in journals, various of her poems have been placed first in the Troubadour, and Kent and Sussex Competitions, been commended in the National Sonnet, McLellan, Basil Bunting, Wigtown, and Troubadour Competitions, and shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. Her pamphlet bone song (Clitheroe: Aussteiger, 2008) was shortlisted for the 2009 Michael Marks Pamphlet Award. She currently teaches English Literature and Creative Writing part-time at Lancaster University. ‘The Glorious Fellowship of Migraineurs’ comes from Polly Atkin’s MsLexia prize-winning pamphlet, Shadow Dispatches. Writing about her work, the poet Paul Farley has commented: ‘Polly Atkin’s first short collection is shot through with wit and imaginative invention and an attractive acuity. For the approaching reader: this book is truly available.’ You can read more about Shadow Dispatches at Seren’s site here, and follow Polly Atkin on Twitter here.

Seren Books (‘Seren’ means ‘star’ in Welsh) is based in Bridgend, South Wales. Originally conceived by Cary Archard and Dannie Abse as an offshoot of Poetry Wales magazine in the latter’s garage in Ogmore-by-Sea in the early 80s, under Managing Editor Mick Felton the press has gone from strength to strength and has published a wide range of titles including fiction (which under Editor Penny Thomas has seen the Booker-nominated novel by Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days, and an acclaimed novella series based on the medieval Welsh tales from the Mabinogion) and non-fiction (including literary criticism such as the new John Redmond title Poetry and Privacy, as well as sumptuous art books like the collaboration between photographer David Hurn and poet John Fuller, Writing the Picture). Seren’s poetry list, edited by Amy Wack since the early 90s, has produced T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated titles by Deryn Rees-Jones and Pascale Petit, Costa winner John Haynes, and a large list of Forward Prize winners and nominees, as well as continuing to publishing classic Welsh writers. Most recently, Seren has also added Irish and American writers to its list.

Lord Forgive Me

April 15, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Kyrie eleison! I said it in the pub.
I said it to my bitter then I said
it to my heart, with nothing not to dread:
my sins were great: I drank there with my love.

Kyrie iesu christe, God above
and me below, drinking at the Hog’s Head.
‘So. Will you love me better when I’m dead?’
He knew it was a joke, but didn’t laugh

just turned away to look at the TV.
(Arsenal was playing Everton.)
Another man was fixed upon the game

and held his hands together on his knee
and chanted and rebuked. But not my man,
who recognizes neither loss nor blame.

by Kathryn Maris

Notes from Seren:

Kathryn Maris is from New York City and has published poems in The Spectator, Poetry Review, The Harvard Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry, and Slate as well as several anthologies. Among her awards are an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and Hawthornden Castle. She lives in London, where she teaches creative writing and writes essays and reviews.

Kathryn Maris’s first book, The Book of Jobs, appeared in the USA in 2006. Her second collection, God Loves You, is published by Seren this month. In it, she borrows rhythms, vocabulary and themes from the Bible. The result is more than artful parody, although a sly wit is in evidence. It is an approach that accommodates large themes, unravelling them in new ways. Commenting upon her work, Carol Rumens has written that ‘[t]here’s a delicious sense of both open-mindedness and devilry […]. Her company is quirky, stimulating and sparklingly intelligent. You could say she’s like Sylvia Plath with added chutzpah. But, really, Kathryn Maris is like no-one but herself.’ You can read more about Kathryn Maris’s new book at Seren’s site here, read a 2007 interview with Maris here, and follow her on Twitter here.

The Black Guitar

July 2, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Clearing out ten years from a wardrobe
I opened its lid and saw Joe
written twice in its dust, in a child’s hand,
then a squiggled seagull or two.

Joe, Joe
a man’s tears are worth nothing,
but a child’s name in the dust, or in the sand
of a darkening beach, that’s a life’s work.

I touched two strings, to hear how much
two lives can slip out of tune

then I left it,
brought down the night on it, for fear, Joe
of hearing your unbroken voice, or the sea
if I played it.

by Paul Henry

Notes from Seren:

Paul Henry is one of Wales’s leading poets. Described by the late U.A. Fanthorpe as ‘a poet’s poet’ who combines ‘a sense of the music of words with an endlessly inventive imagination’, he came to poetry through songwriting. The Brittle Sea, New & Selected Poems has recently been published by Seren in the UK and by Dronequill in India, under the title The Black Guitar. A popular Creative Writing tutor, Henry has read his poems and performed his songs at festivals across the UK and Europe and also in the USA and Asia. He recently presented the ‘Inspired’ series of arts programmes for BBC Radio Wales and ‘Do Not Expect Applause’, his celebration of the Scottish poet W.S. Graham, for BBC Radio Three.

As well as portrait-poems set against the Breconshire villages where Henry lived from his mid teens, the book collects poems about the undulating river Usk and the post-industrial cityscape of Newport, Gwent. The Brittle Sea also includes the three poems Henry was commissioned to write for BBC2’s ‘Poetry in Motion’, which celebrated the Welsh national rugby team as they prepared for the 2007 World Cup.

You can read more about this new collection at Seren’s website, read more from Paul Henry’s work at his own website, and hear the poet read ‘Daylight Robbery’ and ‘The Black Guitar’ on Seren’s YouTube channel here.

Seren is based in Wales (‘Seren’ means ‘star’ in Welsh) and recently celebrated its 30th birthday. Begun as an offshoot of the magazine Poetry Wales by Cary Archard and Dannie Abse in the latter’s garage in Ogmore-by-Sea, the press has now grown and employs a number of staff. It is known for publishing prize-winning poetry, including collections by recent Forward winners, Hilary Menos and Kathryn Simmonds, as well as books by Owen Sheers, Pascale Petit, Deryn Rees-Jones, and many others. The fiction list features a new title by Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days, that was longlisted for the Booker Prize. The high-quality arts books include the recent collaboration between the poet John Fuller and the photographer David Hurn, Writing the Picture.

Loie Fuller’s Dancing School

May 21, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I am terpsichorean
a figure in burlesque.

Sometimes Miss Pepper stranded on the prairie
sometimes Buffalo Bill’s navvy
sometimes a soubrette.

Imagine my surprise at the spectacular
a bijou opera house.

An alien in melodrama
Aladdin-girl in melos.

In the cave of the fire of life,
I am Ayesha of two thousand years

finding a silhouette
within slimness.

Such methods of the divine
becomes a gal from Chicago.

by Nerys Williams

Notes from Seren:

Originally from Pen-y-Bont, Carmarthen, Wales, Nerys Williams has been a recipient of a Fulbright Scholar’s Award at UC Berkeley and a winner of the Ted McNulty Poetry Prize. She gained a DPhil at Sussex in 2002 through research focused on a reading of error and the lyric in contemporary American poetics. Nerys has lectured in American Literature at University College, Dublin since 2003. A native Welsh speaker, she has also worked at BBC Wales and as a care assistant on psychiatric wards. Nerys has published poems and critical essays widely and is the author of A Guide to Contemporary Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) as well as a study of contemporary American poetry, Reading Error (Peter Lang, 2007). She recently published her first collection of poetry, Sound Archive (Seren 2011), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize’s Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and the Michael Murphy Prize. Of her first book Poetry Review wrote that ‘a certain other-worldliness combines well with a vigorous realism to tease the reader into putting two and more than that together to perceive something rare and beautiful.’

You can read more about the collection and watch Nerys Williams read from her book here, and follow her thoughts on her blog here. Nerys was interviewed on RTE 1 about her collection, and you can hear the discussion at this link. You can also follow the poet on Twitter; search for @archifsain.

You can find out more about Loie Fuller, the subject of the poem, at Susan Gillis Kruman’s page about the dancer and (possibly?) watch her in action here.

For more details about Seren, visit the publisher’s new website, where there is a blog about Seren’s news and events. You can also find Seren on Facebook, on Twitter, and on YouTube, where there are videos of a number of poets reading from their work.

Seedcorn

April 9, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

In Nutwood, Rupert’s father wore a bracken-
coloured jacket when he did the garden;
his mother stayed indoors, in an apron

frilled like the mantelpiece. Bluebell woods
had winding paths which led him home again
after his visit to the elves, deep in their caves

where lanterns flamed with trapped sunshine.
On the next page you could make an elf
by folding paper on the dotted line.

One day in Bournemouth, my teenage heroine
hopped on a bus because she liked its name,
then spent a golden summer out of time;

the hidden house she camped in, she revived:
pulled paper off the wainscot, scrubbed it white,
trundled the mildewed chairs off-stage, repaired

a lacquered bed inlaid with tourmaline;
then, dead on cue, right on the final page
our hero returned to claim his lost domaine.

Jan Morris made up Hav from everywhere
she’d been: the iron dog from Venice, a bridge
from Newport in South Wales; she wove it all

together. We’re the same, framed by the dots
we’ve joined as bandage, hammock, parachute.
We glut on stories, we slip between their lines

to sleep, still in their dream-mesh caught.
In a cocooned trance we are re-formed:
this is where we come from, how we make our home.

by Ellie Evans

Ellie Evans is Welsh-speaking and lives in Powys, mid-Wales. The Ivy Hides the Fig-Ripe Duchess is her first poetry collection, but she has already been widely published in magazines and anthologies, and has read at many poetry festivals. Using a surrealist palette of imagery and a tightly focused idiom, the author takes us on strange journeys: to the post-apocalyptic world of the title poem, or into a skewed 18th century Venice in ‘The Zograscope’. These strange worlds are always to the purpose; they are, as Marianne Moore famously said of poetry, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’ The novelist and poet Gerard Woodward has written that ‘Evans has an extraordinary ability to conjure startling and surprising images out of the most commonplace material. There is a very interesting juxtaposition of the domestic and the exotic in her work.’ You can read more about Ellie Evans and see her read from her work here, and visit her website at this link.

Our Reticent Neighbour

February 27, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A bakelite telephone rings on the mortuary desk.
Voice recognition kicks in, whirrs awkwardly.

They’re tapping doors and shutters tonight
the gas-lit length of our street. By the time
you’ve pounded stairs, crossed a lobby
insinuated Yales into mortices, they’ve vanished.

Retread the four flights and try again for sleep,
despite search-beams searing the dark. Despite
unmarked ambulances that trawl the suburbs,
half-trained mastiffs that jangle and snarl.

No one’s readying for this night’s shift.
Word’s out. Declassified resumés are destined
for lock waters. A currency broker wakes
in a Third Street tailors’ doorway, coughing.

Lutheran rooming-house occupants
make hasty atonements on discovering
their Gideon Bibles bookmarked at Samuel.
The town ursologist leaves one safety-gate unlatched.

The bakelite instrument’s terrible jangle subsides.
But surely that’s a normally reticent neighbour
rehearsing his C-sharp-minor mazurkas?

by Anne-Marie Fyfe

Anne-Marie Fyfe was born in Cushendall on Ireland’s Antrim Coast. She now lives in West London where she has taught literature and creative-writing and programmed poetry events and festivals for many years, including organising and hosting the reading series at London’s famous Troubadour coffee house. She was until recently Chair of the Poetry Society.

‘Our Reticent Neighbour’ is from Understudies: New and Selected Poems, compiled from three earlier collections and including a section of new poems. Anne-Marie Fyfe has read throughout the world at festivals and events and on BBC radio and television. The poet Tom Paulin has described her work as having ‘a lyric clarity, an ontological accuracy and unflinching vigilance that is both spiritual and revelatory.’ Understudies: New and Selected Poems includes selections from her previous books: Late Crossing (1999), Tickets from a Blank Window (2002) – both from Rockingham Press, and The Ghost Twin (Peterloo, 2005). You can learn more about Anne-Marie Fyfe on her website, watch her read a poem from this recent collection here, and read an interview she gave to Pam Johnson at Words Unlimited.

Six Million Hand-driven Rivets

December 19, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My father is dying – tentatively, unhappily –
and I give him a bridge.

Precisely, I give him Sydney Harbour Bridge,
this Christmas, this turning year,

as I travel under it, gazing up at all its iron.
Girder-strong, massive, the old world built this

into the new. There are photos of Englishmen
in 1930 in waistcoats and cufflinks

and neat bowties, straddling the sky, hammering
rivets into air. My father would approve:

How many rivets? he’d ask me.
Facts, hard facts. I’d tell him the answers

to ease the time – and the number of man hours,
the number of years, before they could journey

over the water with perfect confidence,
step on step, to reach the other side.

by Robert Seatter

This is the last of the weekly poems for this year. Poems will start appearing in your inbox again on Monday 9th January. Many thanks to all our readers for your continued support of the Weekly Poem. If you’re on Facebook or Twitter, don’t forget you can catch up with us there. In the meantime, the Poetry Centre hopes that you enjoy a very happy Christmas and an excellent start to 2012.

Robert Seatter has published two previous collections with Seren: Travelling to the Fish Orchards and On the Beach with Chet Baker. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked as an EFL teacher in Italy and France, as an actor and journalist, and also in publishing and broadcasting. He lives in London where he currently works for the BBC. You can read further selections from Writing King Kong here (click on the book’s cover), and here, and you can see and hear Robert Seatter reading from his work on this page.

The Tadpole Goddess

October 31, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My Lethe, motionless between green thickets
Where flags prick up their rust-stained saffron ears,
You hear no splash of oars, no dust-up of lost souls
Except for dragon-flies a-spin, and tadpoles
That hang like little mud-bubbles, expecting
Their childhood gloom to lift, and life bounce up in them.
Your spirit’s airless, Lethe; boot-top-deep,
You’re less ditch than a mouthful of saliva
Drained by a dental tube. So why this leaning
To breathe into your film of suspect glitters,
And leave my slutty kiss? The final flutter on
Posterity? Perhaps a faster current
Washes the tubers, where my hair would tangle
And pass, and finally drag me to pure water.
I’d travel free of earth, rapid and weightless
And miles out of my depth, my shadow flinging
north and north, my coughed-up lungs your rattles
To play with till their fragments swam like tadpoles.
I’d find my cold Elysium, and to keep.

by Carol Rumens

A poet, novelist, translator, and editor, Carol Rumens was born in South London in 1944. She started writing at school and went on to study (and drop out from) a philosophy degree at London University. She has won many awards for her writing and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Rumens’s latest collection, De Chirico’s Threads, features a play-for-voices about the life of the painter Giorgio de Chirico, as well as a number of occasional poems, such as ‘The Tadpole Goddess’. You can read a number of other poems from the new collection at the link to the book above. In addition to her own work, Carol Rumens selects and comments upon another poet’s writing each week in her blog on the Guardian website here. She also maintains a website here.

‘II’

March 30, 2009April 18, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

II
“Can we believe that we are fulfilling the purpose of our existence while so many of the wonders and beauties of the creation remain unnoticed around us?”
– Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life.

For Torben Larsen, entomologist.

In case after case,
            amazements of complex colour:
dots and stripes and swirls –
            the Peruvian dazzle,
                        frail mica-translucence,
                                    mercury-liquid blueness,
                                                glass-wing come-and-go glitter.

It’s the entomologists’ fair,
           and we’ve queued in October rain
                        for the Kempton Racecourse turnstiles,
jumping to islands between puddles,
            cracking jokes with strangers.

At the trestle tables inside
            it’s quite hard to get a look-in,
what with these serious chaps,
            boxes tucked under arms,
                        and the quiet observant children
                                    unsurprised as experts.

About killing, I learned yesterday:
            most often a light pinch
                        under raised-up wings,
the long heart constricted
            to its last beat.

Among all the rest, birdwings.

Why, if Wallace’s wonder –
                        golden-winged croesus croesus –
                                     turns up, should I not buy one?
                                                I feel hesitation beginning.

A naturalist once said to me:
            ‘The individual doesn’t matter’ –
and I doubt it’ll be the collector’s
            delight in rare acquisitions
                        that will one day extinguish species,
or the scientist’s need to test
            theory by close observation –
                        which may, rather, help to save them.

It’s logging, it’s slash and burn.
Smoke stifling the forest.
Commerce. And desperation.

And I too have needed a body –
            something more dead than a photo –
                        to bring me the sense of his life
                                    ancient, single, and other.

Those glaucus solid mounds
            that gave him mosaic vision,
colours that still reflect
            his favourite yellow flowers,
hind-wing edges, silky
            with hair-like scales, that combed
                        the lek with a sexual perfume.

I think of your hands showing,
            like this, how he’d rise from beneath,
                        touching his body to hers,
and her antennae tilt to smell
            his personal scent, the hairs
                        and pheromone hind-wing patches,
                                    intimate under her feet.
‘The taste of this one?’ Choosing.

What need do I still have,
            now, to possess a body,
                        having sensed (overhear myself think this)
                                    a soul – what better word is there?

On the train home, I turn
            the pages of second-hand books
                        purchased instead – facts and photos;
wonder, dozing a little,
            at the tenuous job of poet.

by Anne Cluysenaar

From Batu-Angas, Seren 2008

This beautiful sequence of poems by Anne Cluysenaar is inspired by the travels and discoveries of the great naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913). The title Batu-Angas, meaning ‘burnt rocks or cooled lava’, is derived from the language spoken on the volcanic island of Ternate, where Wallace experienced that flash of insight which led him to the theory of natural selection. To the poet, ‘cooled lava’ suggests the brief glimpses we get as human beings into the “huge slow changes” of evolution. The poems – evocative, precise, questioning – are accompanied by a rich selection of images: some of living animals and plants, some chosen by Wallace to illustrate the accounts of his travels, while others, photographed for this book, are of Wallace drawings and specimens sent back by him to Britain during his years in Amazonia and the Malay Archipelago. 2008 is the 150^th anniversary of the discovery by Wallace and Darwin of evolution by natural selection.

Anne Cluysenaar’s Timeslips, New and Selected Poems, appeared from Carcanet in 1997. She has edited the selected poems of Henry Vaughan and is a poetry editor for the journal Scintilla. She and her husband run a smallholding on the Welsh borders.

Seren is an independent literary publisher, specialising in English-language writing from Wales. Our diverse and eclectic list has something to offer anyone with an interest in excellent writing. Our aim is not simply to reflect what is going on in the culture in which we publish, but to drive that culture forward, to engage with the world, and to bring Welsh literature, art and politics before a wider audience.

Please visit our website for more information on our authors and titles.