Category: Shearsman

New Life

~ oxfordbrookesuni

By the time she reached the age of twelve,
The girl with the red scarf and brown eyes
Had seen human body parts scattered in front
Of the house where she had been born, and she had
Fallen asleep to the sound of bombs and rifles.

She had walked out of the ruins of the family room,
Crossed eight countries, mostly on foot,
Scaling snowy mountains, descending on railway tracks
To signal the way to her parents who pushed the pram:
Made her own map of this world.

Through the nets of barbed-wire fences,
Cataloguing, as she passed through, the beatings
Her parents suffered at the borders where they crossed,
She looks back and smiles at the words
She has now abandoned, because they no longer help. 

At her first school, the teacher speaks a language of freedom
Unknown to her. In this new language, she says,
She’d like to make a garden with her parents and her brother,
Who tries his own language as he sits up in the pram rattling
A plastic toy donated to him by a benevolent woman.

The map of the world the girl has drawn
Is being absorbed by the map of this century—
Soles of shoes scattered across the way to hope.
The road to a better life has not yet been planned,
Everyone is waiting for an architect.

by Carmen Bugan

News from the Poetry Centre: welcome back to the Weekly Poem after a short break as we wrestled with the beginning of the semester! We’re delighted to share a poem by Carmen Bugan this week, since Carmen will be reading in Oxford with Tamar Yoseloff on 4 November in Waterstones Oxford. Do join us! You can sign up for a free ticket here. We’ll be featuring a poem from Tamar’s new collection, The Black Place (Seren) next Monday.

We have a number of other events coming up over the next month or so, including an open mic and small exhibition on the theme of mental health on 6 November (more details here), our International Poetry Competition Awards, with a special appearance and reading by Jackie Kay on 28 November (sign up to join us here), and a reading by Canadian poet Doyali Islam and Oxford-based poet Mariah Whelan on 29 November; tickets here. All these events are free to attend. And if you’re interested in creative writing but don’t quite know where to start, you might like to join us at Headington Library for three free workshops, starting with poetry tomorrow (Tuesday) and continuing on 12 November (fiction), and 12 December (non-fiction). More details here.

Finally, our latest podcast, with spoken word poet and author of Stage Invasion: Poetry and the Spoken Word Renaissance, Peter Bearder, has just been released! You can find it here.

‘New Life’ is copyright © Carmen Bugan, 2019. It is reprinted from Lilies in America (Shearsman, 2019) by permission of Shearsman. 

Carmen Bugan’s books include the memoir Burying the Type-writer: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police (Picador), which has received international critical praise, the Bread Loaf Conference Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction, and was a finalist in the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her previous collections of poems are Releasing the Porcelain Birds and The House of Straw (both with Shearsman), and Crossing the Carpathians (Carcanet). She is also the author of a critical study called Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile. Carmen has a doctorate in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford University and has been a Hawthornden Fellow, the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan, and is a George Orwell Prize Fellow.

Her new book, Lilies from America: New and Selected Poems, published by Shearsman, was awarded the Poetry Book Society’s Special Commendation for Autumn 2019. Writing about the book, poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has said: ‘This selection of Carmen Bugan’s poems offers readers an experience with all the surprise and continuity of a long, complex novel. […] [W]e realise that this is the record of a life already recorded, in the distorting staccato of the surveillance transcript, a distortion that leaks into the language of the later poems. Yet faith in the capacity of words to deliver truth survives, reflecting and recalling the exhuming of the typewriter, even if memory is vitiated and language is profaned.’ You can hear Carmen read from her work in a recent recording with A.E. Stallings in Boston  here, and listen to her discuss her parents’ buried typewriter in the context of the Cold War here. You can find out more about Carmen’s work on her own website here.

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.

Pondskater

~ oxfordbrookesuni

From the bridge I see teams of rowers
arcross the delilium, cracks
in the eye wave-weave the nameslake.
In flagellar schememes
of diatomic cross-selling
they waterclot concentricity
unsentensing waverlengths of twisight.
This is my longtomb partnerve agile,
fragile sky is hinge to
the parallel dark, foreverending
camerangel. The river commissions
a new meadow where the last heat
in a star burns (the phantom photon
enlarges on this) as moons
are rowed and sent thithaway
trireming intimotions or slap
dashadows in noded disjointment
their mittens petaling the sandbeds.
Presisting the intelligence is
furtile when clouds are falling in.
In this way our passage through
days conjugates a lifelung
seismiotic in distorts and
waterlilt semisphere. The pond
quake cruxes into inscensible
nameslicks, tinetingles and waterrings,
as in the skyline is awrighted what
is writ on water: your name, where.

by Giles Goodland

News from the Poetry Centre: join us tonight at 7pm in the Chapel of Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford for ‘A Crack of Light: Poems of Commemoration, Reconstruction, and Reconciliation’. This event features poetry produced by the poets-in-residence of the Post-War international seminar series, co-organized by Oxford and Oxford Brookes. The poets reading will be Mariah Whelan, Sue Zatland, Patrick Toland, and Susie Campbell. There are only a few tickets remaining and they are free, but do sign up here!

The Poetry Centre is also collaborating on a one-day symposium for a second time with the University of Reading and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI), based at the University of Canberra. The symposium, entitled ‘Contemporary Lyric: Absent Presences, the Secret & the Unsayable’, will take place on Tuesday 26 June from 9.30-5pm at the Museum of Early Rural Life at the University of Reading. All are welcome but places are limited. Find out more and sign up to attend via our website.

Finally,the Poetry Centre recently launched our 2018 International Poetry Competition! Open until 6 August, the competition has two categories – Open and English as an Additional Language – and this year is judged by the highly-acclaimed poet Kayo Chingonyi. You can find full details and enter here. 

‘Pondskater’ is copyright © Giles Goodland, 2018. It is reprinted from The Masses (Shearsman Books, 2018) by permission of Shearsman Books.

Notes from Shearsman:

‘Pondskater’ comes from Giles Goodland’s new book, The Masses. It is a collection in which, as Richard Price writes, ‘the creepy-crawlies visibly teem. Adapting the sound-mutating technique Goodland perfected in Gloss, where well-known phrases are minutely changed to sly and comic effect, here the creatures which are usually only glimpsed, only imagined with a flinch, are foregrounded in phonic mutation. Amid the rich density of these playful and sometimes frightening poems are cut-back lyrics, often about fatherhood in a diminished world, and these give the book overall a sense not just of the strangeness of the fauna around us but of the strangeness of our own language nests, of the fragility of the world an older generation has ruined and is now bequeathing to the young.’ You can read more about the book and find further sample poems on the Shearsman website.

Giles Goodland was born in Taunton, was educated at universities in Wales and California, and completed a D.Phil at Oxford. He has published several books of poetry including A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001) Capital (Salt, 2006) and Dumb Messengers (Salt, 2012). He works in Oxford as a lexicographer and lives in West London.

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with a very active translation list. Founded in 1981 as a magazine, with some occasional chapbooks, the press – now based in Bristol – has grown rapidly in recent years, and is now one of the most active poetry publishers in the U.K. You can find out more about Shearsman’s work from the publisher’s website.

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 Homecoming

~ oxfordbrookesuni

For Lois Pereiro

In Ithaca everyone was dead.
They say it was me, Argos the dog, who woke first:
           –  Dead, dead, dead!
A smell stronger than dung,
the smell of a living man,
made me vomit celestial remains,
cloud-bones,
rainbow-hides.
That man who reeked of legend,
a twitching skeleton,
a bad-tempered ghost,
ripped open the scar with his nails
and smeared the mired shadows with words.
There were our names. All of them.
And the infallible memory of the trees
in Laertes’ orchard.
Half a hundred rows of vines,
thirteen pear trees,
ten apple trees,
forty fig trees.
The blind old man saw, in the end, his son, thanks to the earth’s algebra.
After, Odysseus
came and woke us one by one
and our tears, since then,
are the rope that binds the light
with a violent joy.

by Manuel Rivas, translated by Lorna Shaughnessy

This is the second in our series of four poems taken from the shortlist for The Corneliu M Popescu Prize. The Prize, run by the Poetry Society, was formerly called the European Poetry Translation Prize. The first winner of the Prize, in 1983, was Tony Harrison for The Oresteia. The prize was relaunched in 2003, and renamed in honour of the Romanian translator Corneliu M Popescu, who died in an earthquake in 1977 at the age of 19. The Popescu Prize 2013 has a shortlist of seven books, and the winner will be announced on 29 November.

The original poem ‘The Homecoming’ is copyright © Manuel Rivas, 2009, and the translation is © Lorna Shaughnessy, 2012. It is reprinted by permission of  Shearsman Books from  The Disappearance of Snow  by Manuel Rivas, translated by Lorna Shaughnessy.

The judges of the Popescu Prize, Karen Leeder and David Wheatley, comment: ‘What is your message?’ asks Manuel Rivas in ‘Missed Call’, but these translations show that, as well as being what gets lost, poetry in translation can be about what gets through, the connections we make, and the voices we hear loud and clear.

Poet, novelist, short-story writer and journalist, Manuel Rivas was born in A Coruña, Galicia (north-western Spain) in 1957, and writes in Galician, which is one of Spain’s co-official languages. His work has a deep connection with the landscape, folklore and history of Galicia, but has a universal impact that has led to him being recognised as one of Europe’s leading contemporary writers. A desaparición da neve is his most recent collection of poems and had the unusual distinction of being issued with a single volume in Spain together with translations of the poems into Catalan, Basque and Castilian. Further selections from The Disappearance of Snow can be found in  this pdf file from the Shearsman website.

Lorna Shaughnessy was born in Belfast and lives in County Galway. She lectures in the Department of Spanish, NUI Galway. She has published two collections of her own poems, Torching the Brown River and Witness Trees (Salmon Poetry) as well as two translations of contemporary Mexican poets: Mother Tongue: Selected Poems by Pura López Colomé and If We Have Lost Our Oldest Tales by María Baranda, both with Arden House.

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with a very active translation list. Founded in 1981 as a magazine, with some occasional chapbooks, the press – now based in Bristol – has grown rapidly in recent years, and is now one of the most active poetry publishers in the U.K. You can find out more about Shearsman’s work from the  publisher’s website.

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 Homecoming

~ oxfordbrookesuni

For Lois Pereiro

In Ithaca everyone was dead.
They say it was me, Argos the dog, who woke first:
           –  Dead, dead, dead!
A smell stronger than dung,
the smell of a living man,
made me vomit celestial remains,
cloud-bones,
rainbow-hides.
That man who reeked of legend,
a twitching skeleton,
a bad-tempered ghost,
ripped open the scar with his nails
and smeared the mired shadows with words.
There were our names. All of them.
And the infallible memory of the trees
in Laertes’ orchard.
Half a hundred rows of vines,
thirteen pear trees,
ten apple trees,
forty fig trees.
The blind old man saw, in the end, his son, thanks to the earth’s algebra.
After, Odysseus
came and woke us one by one
and our tears, since then,
are the rope that binds the light
with a violent joy.

by Manuel Rivas, translated by Lorna Shaughnessy

This is the second in our series of four poems taken from the shortlist for The Corneliu M Popescu Prize. The Prize, run by the Poetry Society, was formerly called the European Poetry Translation Prize. The first winner of the Prize, in 1983, was Tony Harrison for The Oresteia. The prize was relaunched in 2003, and renamed in honour of the Romanian translator Corneliu M Popescu, who died in an earthquake in 1977 at the age of 19. The Popescu Prize 2013 has a shortlist of seven books, and the winner will be announced on 29 November.

The original poem ‘The Homecoming’ is copyright © Manuel Rivas, 2009, and the translation is © Lorna Shaughnessy, 2012. It is reprinted by permission of  Shearsman Books from  The Disappearance of Snow  by Manuel Rivas, translated by Lorna Shaughnessy.

The judges of the Popescu Prize, Karen Leeder and David Wheatley, comment: ‘What is your message?’ asks Manuel Rivas in ‘Missed Call’, but these translations show that, as well as being what gets lost, poetry in translation can be about what gets through, the connections we make, and the voices we hear loud and clear.

Poet, novelist, short-story writer and journalist, Manuel Rivas was born in A Coruña, Galicia (north-western Spain) in 1957, and writes in Galician, which is one of Spain’s co-official languages. His work has a deep connection with the landscape, folklore and history of Galicia, but has a universal impact that has led to him being recognised as one of Europe’s leading contemporary writers. A desaparición da neve is his most recent collection of poems and had the unusual distinction of being issued with a single volume in Spain together with translations of the poems into Catalan, Basque and Castilian. Further selections from The Disappearance of Snow can be found in  this pdf file from the Shearsman website.

Lorna Shaughnessy was born in Belfast and lives in County Galway. She lectures in the Department of Spanish, NUI Galway. She has published two collections of her own poems, Torching the Brown River and Witness Trees (Salmon Poetry) as well as two translations of contemporary Mexican poets: Mother Tongue: Selected Poems by Pura López Colomé and If We Have Lost Our Oldest Tales by María Baranda, both with Arden House.

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with a very active translation list. Founded in 1981 as a magazine, with some occasional chapbooks, the press – now based in Bristol – has grown rapidly in recent years, and is now one of the most active poetry publishers in the U.K. You can find out more about Shearsman’s work from the  publisher’s website.

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 a Fraud Whose Work Has Come to Be Canonical

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Now all the lies are told
go public and seek praise
as prizes now unfold
like afternoons on days
dishonor schemes in groves
and shame lurks in the eyes
and lips can only love
a self which they contrive.

Born to charm and born
for easy triumph, turn
this way and like some
weeping thing amid a field
of bones, anthologize despair
and cry at last Forlorn!
because in all this barren yield
there is no living air.

by John Matthias

If you are around Oxford this weekend, the Poetry Centre warmly invites you to attend our performance poetry event on Sunday 17 June at the Old Fire Station. It features six leading local voices: George Chopping, Paul Askew, Tina Sederholm, Alan Buckley, Jennifer A. McGowan, and Vahni Capildeo. We also have a guest headlining act: Rose Solari. Tickets will be available on the door or in advance from WeGotTickets.com. Find out more about the event and some of the poets taking part by visiting our new Poets in Oxford page.

‘To a Fraud Whose Work Has Come to Be Canonical’ is copyright © John Matthias, 2011. It is reprinted from Collected Shorter Poems Vol. 2 by permission of Shearsman Books.

Notes from Shearsman:

John Matthias was born in 1941 in Columbus, Ohio. For many years he taught at the University of Notre Dame and continues to serve as poetry editor of Notre Dame Review. He has been a Visiting Fellow in poetry at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and lived for much of the 70s and 80s in East Anglia. His books of verse include Turns, Crossing, Northern Summer, A Gathering of Ways, Swimming at Midnight, Beltane at Aphelion, Pages, Working Progress, Working Title, New Selected Poems and Kedging. He has also published translations from the Swedish, editions of David Jones’s work, and a volume of literary criticism, Reading Old Friends. In 1998 Robert Archambeau edited Word Play Place, a selection of essays on Matthias’s work.  Another book of essays on his poetry appeared in 2011 in the Salt Companion series, edited by Joe Francis Doerr. In 2011, Shearsman Books also published his essays in Who was Cousin Alice? And Other Questions. His collected poems are being published in three volumes, with the Collected Longer Poems slated to appear in October, and the Collected Shorter Poems Vol. 1 in 2013. You can watch John Matthias reading from his shorter poems at UC Berkeley here (his reading begins at around 10:30).

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with an active translation list. You can learn more about the publisher here, and find Shearsman 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.

Alfie Does Not Speak Much Now

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Dorset tenor does not speak much. Harsh mum.
Acquiescent dad. Storm forms and lasts.
Gradual to sudden invasion of dying people,
houses priced out of local reach, cows in fields.

Was lean to shed, doing time, mind slant
numinous creature to the locked lollard,
keeper of birds, hens and beans, skull herd,
hot room surgeon to flinch and buckle.

Was gaunt in the sun and rented room, crew
cut, get it right cheese maker, not so cheeky,
sing a long, what’s that in the magician’s hat,
that T. Cooper moment, mild analgesic, aspirin.

Alfie spits tobacco, his first and index fingers
tightly holding a roll-up, his right arm arcing
outwards and down. His stare fixed, seemingly
intent upon some distant object. Quiet bull.

Now owl, lady’s bedding, dace out of school,
ace in the hole in an underworld of muteness,
nod and nudge, flutterer of bets, plough of silence,
confederacy of dunces, apocrypha and apocryphal.

by David Caddy

‘Alfie Does Not Speak Much Now’, is copyright © David Caddy, 2011. It is reprinted by permission of Shearsman Books from The Bunny Poems (2011).

Notes from Shearsman:

David Caddy is a poet and critic from the Blackmore Vale in north Dorset. He was educated as a literary sociologist at the University of Essex. He founded and organised the East Street Poets, the UK’s largest rural poetry group from 1985 to 2001. He directed the legendary Wessex Poetry Festival from 1995 to 2001, and later the Tears in the Fence festival from 2003 to 2005. He has edited the independent and eclectic literary magazine, Tears in the Fence, since 1984. He co-wrote a literary companion to London in 2006, has written and edited drama scripts and podcasts, and regularly contributes essays, articles and reviews to books and journals. Read more selections from The Bunny Poems by visiting Shearsman’s page about the book here, and watch David Caddy reading from his work at Whittier College’s Dezember House last year.

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with an active translation list. You can learn more about the publisher here, and find Shearsman 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.

The Bird-Ghost

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Like winter breath on a pane of glass
sprayed with fixing medium,
like a burglar’s greasy handprint
or white ectoplasm trace,
that bird of prey had hammered hard
against the built environment.

You could pick out its bent beak’s blunted face
and from a slow-motion film,
the flicker of that wing feather stain.
A smudged bird, arrested in headlong attack,
its output of energy equal to its impact
on the unseen or unforeseen
(our bedroom window pane),
it had made such a stunning mark.

by Peter Robinson

‘The Bird-Ghost’, is copyright © Peter Robinson, 2012. It is reprinted by permission of Shearsman Books from The Returning Sky .

Notes from Shearsman:

Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953, and grew up mainly in Liverpool. He co-edited the magazines Perfect Bound and Numbers while helping organize various Cambridge Poetry Festivals and a Poetry International at the South Bank Centre. His many volumes of poetry include a Selected Poems (2003), Ghost Characters (2006) and The Look of Goodbye (2008). He was awarded the Cheltenham Prize for This Other Life (1988). Both The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems (2002) was a recommendation of the Poetry Book Society, and The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (2007) received the John Florio Prize in 2008. Other publications include four volumes of literary criticism, the most recent being Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible (2010), various edited collections, anthologies, and The Complete Poems, Translations & Selected Prose of Bernard Spencer (2011). The poetry editor for Two Rivers Press, he is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading.

The Returning Sky is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for the first quarter of 2012. You can read more from the collection at this link (pdf), and find out more about Peter Robinson’s life and work from his website and this interview at the Poetry Kit website. You can also hear him read from his work at the Archive of the Now website (search for Peter Robinson).

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with an active translation list. You can learn more about the publisher here, and find Shearsman 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.

The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer, 2004-05

~ oxfordbrookesuni

—as he damned well deserves to be
after all these ticky-tacky years
soiling and being soiled
leaded and unleaded, head heavy with Cremnitz
living the life of a prize smear
staying up half the night with rags . . .

What woman wouldn’t go down—
be bare on the bare floor
sniffing his oily woodwork
keeping his thighs company
checking their health, their tree-stump
strength and protean quality?

Gallantly he pits her presence
against the mess he’s made of wall
his fury of backdrop
their crib of a love nest
his gloriously free comic routine
and her bliss, there’s no mistaking it.

Every other woman can go jump.
And the gormless feminist men, too.
Brave the fire that’s in submission.
See how ignitable she is—
like that bundle of sticks on the stool.
Brushes, some say, but they’re ready to burn.

He’s even made a clearing in the room.
They could swing a dozen cats.
The wall, every stab and jet, ripples with mirth.
And what does he say about what
he’s been doing with faces lately?
Those not hers, the wild golden ones—

I’m thinking of Ria, a naked portrait
a face that’s pitted, ecstatically roughed—
an attack that could be viscous
as if he’d break each atom open.
Yes, he says, wait and it will settle
paint abides by Egyptian rules.

Meanwhile all naked admirers
will cling to what they must—
what’s oily, hot, conflagrations of riposte.

by Barry Hill

The Poetry Centre is on Facebook and on Twitter – join us there!

‘The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer, 2004-05’, is copyright © Barry Hill, 2012. It is reprinted by permission of Shearsman Books from Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud .

Notes from Shearsman:

Barry Hill was born in Melbourne in 1943, and completed his tertiary education in Melbourne and London, where he worked as an educational psychologist and a journalist.  He has been writing full time since 1975, living by the sea in Queenscliff, Victoria. He has won major national awards for poetry, history and the essay. Penguin and Faber have anthologized his short fiction, and stories have been translated into Chinese and Japanese. He has written many pieces for radio. His libretto, Love Strong as Death was performed at The Studio, at the Sydney Opera House in 2004. 

Broken Song: T G H Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (Knopf, 2002), Hill’s magnum opus on Australian poetics, which won a National Biography Award and the 2004 Tasman-Pacific Bi-Centennial Prize for History, has been described as ‘one of the great Australian books’; it was reviewed in the TLS in 2003. His poetry has been published in the Kenyon Review, The Literary Review and Agenda, as well as the major literary magazines in Australia, including the annual anthologies, Best Australian Poems. In 2008 he won the prestigious Judith Wright Prize for his reflections on revolutionary romanticism, Necessity: Poems 1996-2006. Along with As We Draw Ourselves (2007) this book also includes his responses to living in Italy, and his Buddhist travels in India and East Asia. Lines for Birds (2011) is a collaboration with the painter, John Wolseley.

Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud, is Barry Hill’s ninth collection. Read more about the book on this page, and sample several more poems from it here (pdf). An article about Hill’s response to nakedness in Freud’s work and the writing of the book, including further poems, is available to read here.

Between 1998 and 2008 he was Poetry Editor of the national newspaper, The Australian and between 2005 and 2008 he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is currently the recipient of an Australia Council Fellowship, which enables him to spend time in Kyoto and Calcutta while writing a book called The Peace Pagoda, about the travels of Rabindranath Tagore in Japan.

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with an active translation list. You can learn more about the publisher here, and find Shearsman 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.

Smoke

~ oxfordbrookesuni

In order to revive the orange age, you must assemble all of the witnesses, all those who suffered, those who laughed and even the youngest and those who were furthest away.

            You must rekindle your grandmothers; make them come with their great crucifixes of cinnamon in tow and well-nailed with those large aromatic cloves, just as when they lived surrounded by fire and syrup.

            You must interrogate the gillyflower and harass her with questions, until not a single purple detail is lost.

            You must talk with the butterfly, seriously, and savage roosters with their hoarse voices and great silver talons.

            And the veronicas shall come from way back when, pale veronicas—wandering among the flowers and smoke and trees—and the face of sugar, the portrait of the figs shall return.

            And advise the wisteria so that they bring their old resemblance to grape. And the populous pomegranate, and the procession of yuccas, and the guardian of the loquat tree, yellow and hateful, and my mane of hair from that time, all of it full of witches and planets, and the wandering livestock and the angel of the hills and of the amethysts—with one pink and one blue wing —and the lemon blossoms, as big as spikenards.

            And all of the silverplated cages shall come and all of the colored bottles and the keys and the fans and the Christmas cake standing on its cherry stilts.

            In order to revive the orange age, you cannot forget anyone, you must call everyone, most importantly the smoke man, who is the most serious and the most delicate and the most beloved.

            And you must invite God.

by Marosa di Giorgio, translated by Susan Briante

The Poetry Centre is on Facebook and on Twitter – join us there!

This section from ‘Smoke’ is copyright © Shearsman, 2011; translation © Susan Briante, 2011. It is reprinted by permission of Shearsman Books from Hotel Lautréamont: Contemporary Poetry from Uruguay , edited by Kent Johnson and Roberto Echavarren.

Notes from Shearsman:

Named in homage to Isidore Ducasse, the Uruguayan-French poet who wrote Maldoror under the name Comte de Lautréamont, and with a knowing nod to John Ashbery’s book of the same title, Hotel Lautréamont is the first major English-language survey of contemporary Uruguayan poetry for some 40 years. It features the work of Roberto Appratto, Nancy Bacelo, Amanda Berenguer, Selva Casal, Marosa di Giorgio, Roberto Echavarren, Eduardo Espina, Gustavo Espinosa, Silvia Guerra, Circe Maia, Eduardo Milán and Idea Vilariño. The volume is bilingual. You can find out more about the book from Shearsman’s page dedicated to it, and read further selections from the volume here.

Marosa di Giorgio (1932–2004) was born in Salto in Uruguay to Italian immigrant parents. After she studied law and briefly acted in a professional theatre company, she took a job in Salto’s municipal government and devoted her free time to reading extensively and writing fifteen books of poetry, three books of short stories and one novel. She is increasingly considered to be one of Latin America’s greatest poets of the 20th century. You can learn more about Marosa di Giorgio at the official website for her work here (in Spanish, but with a translation option), and hear her read from her work at this link (in Spanish).

Susan Briante is the author of two collections of poetry: Pioneers in the Study of Motion (Ahsahta 2007) and Utopia Minus (2011). Her translations of Latin American writers have appeared in Bomb, Translation Review, and Reversible Monuments (Copper Canyon Press) among others. From 1992–1997, she lived in Mexico City where she worked for the magazines Artes de México and Mandorla.

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with an active translation list. You can learn more about the publisher here, and find Shearsman on Facebook here.

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.

on nomenclature

~ oxfordbrookesuni

father knew his place
it was near the north gate
of the auxiliary winter capital
in the quarter of the middling sort

I climbed it for both of us
the mountain of graduated merit
to the thud of plummeting bodies
I examined away my youth
in the hall of indelible nightmares
to the accompaniment of terminal sobbing
then it was farewell happy father

my first posting was an assistantship
in the region of windswept borders
where I gave good calligraphy
in the third war of pointless encroachment

later in the capital
I enjoyed prestigious posts
keeper of the library of unlearned lessons
and later the first curator
of the burnt library museum
yes interesting times

when I was installed on
the committee of unthinkable thoughts
under the prince with the bees in his bonnet
a new title seemed to beckon me
till all that free-form thinking
triggered the great autumn purge
resulting in five uncomfortable days
in the chamber of extruded truth
before a ceremony-free award
of the brown fan of early retirement
second class

where I live now
the locals will direct you to
the famous mountain hut
of the retired administrator
but I’m always careful to point out
it’s really just my dwelling
that I’ve haven’t got round
to calling anything fancy
and my garden is not defined
by willows or chrysanthemums
or that big mountain it clings to

what I’ve learned I think is
how everything under language
slips and slides and bites
and how in the end
language makes its excuses
and leaves for the beach
where every wave is new and gone

and I sit late
night rises from the valley
and one by one the lights come on
like memories and stay
wavering like memories

and later one by one go out
like names

by Alasdair Paterson

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Copyright © Alasdair Paterson, 2010. ‘on nomenclature’ is taken from the volume On the Governing of Empires by Alasdair Paterson, published by Shearsman Books, 2010. It is reprinted here by permission of Shearsman Books.

Notes courtesy of Shearsman Books:

Alasdair Paterson was born in Edinburgh and now lives in Exeter. He won an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry in 1976; On the Governing of Empires is his first collection for more than 20 years. The intervening time was spent directing the work of academic libraries in Britain and Ireland, and travelling to Samarkand, Salonika, Stamboul, Siberia, Swaziland, San Francisco, Sidmouth and many other places not beginning with an S. You can read more selections from his latest volume here and here, and keep up with him via his blog, ‘return of the crane’, here.

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with an active translation list. You can learn more about the publisher here.

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.