Washing Plates with Edwin Morgan

April 26, 2023April 27, 2023 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

“Let the storm wash the plates”

— Edwin Morgan, ‘Strawberries’ (1968)

let the stems winch the petals

let the finch pinch the pitcher

let one cloud raise an eyebrow

let the lot love what’s left

let the red letter shopfronts

let the black flag an issue

let the blue note the effort

let the green light the pilot

let the slug soil the laundry

let the iron clap its hands

let the hands clap the irons

let the bets cook the bookie

let the child have a cookie

let the lit sleeper lie

let the dogs have their daycare

let the ghouls ride our horses

let our screws skew the bullseye

let our boots print the cosmos

let our ships breach the veil

let our throats weep their data

let the waves skim the profits

let the wind scratch its eyelid

let our mates do a runner

let the crabs do us justice

by Adam Crothers

From Say It Again: A Book of Misquotations

‘Washing Plates with Edwin Morgan’ is copyright © Adam Crothers, 2022, and is reprinted here from Say It Again: A Book of Misquotations (Sidekick Books, 2023) by permission of Sidekick Books. You can read more about the book on the Sidekick Books website.

From Say It Again: A Book of Misquotations edited by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone
Why a book of misquotations? Because what’s captured in Say It Again is the jittery, jumbled essence of truth: that wisdom and edict alike are constantly customised, iterated, adjusted. Nothing stays the same. Here are gathered the sage words of philosophers, statesmen, artists and authors alongside proverbs, sayings and scripture – all distorted with varying degrees of deliberation.

The Hipflask Series is an improvised dance of unusual forms and genres, played out across four collaborative, pocket-sized collections. Each book comprises a selection of written works that skirt close to (or cross the border into) poetic composition, revealing the dynamic relationship between poetry and other written forms.

The major theme of each is extrapolated from one or other of these key aspects of modern poetry – play, appropriation, subtext and conflict – but the result is a series that occupies its own strange niche: mutant miscellanies, oddball assortments. Good for a nip or a shot or a long, deep swig.

Quotations are used to motivate, intimidate, compel, amuse and persuade. But perhaps the quotations themselves need a little manipulation. This curious, critical, playful volume whips away carefully arranged context and sees what happens when well-known words become a little less familiar. We’re saying all the right things, but not necessarily in the right order.

Adam Crothers was born in Belfast in 1984, and works in a library in Cambridge. His books are Several Deer (Carcanet, 2016), which won the Shine/Strong Poetry Award and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize in 2017, and The Culture of My Stuff (Carcanet, 2020).

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.

Infinity Songs

April 12, 2023April 12, 2023 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Far removed, stretched out beneath the stars
I celebrate myself
and dreadful voices fill the sky,
fanning out as they pass one another.

I loafe and invite my Soul
to the endless dewy woods.

Here and there, lights crouched in groups of four
grizzle and nip at the darker shadows
and become undisguised and naked.

They rage and snatch
for every atom belonging to me.

I lean and loafe at my ease, observing:
houses and rooms are full of perfumes
from the infinite swamps and flatlands.

The dogs of autumn, of the wind.
The black evening echoes.
A spear of summer grass.

The moon sits twinned in the mirror.
It has no taste of the distillation
—it is odorless. I am in love with it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume.
It is for my mouth forever.
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

I will go to the bank by the wood,
and what I assume you shall assume;
roadways that stretch out like sails
through the shadows and horrors of the night,
as good belong to you.

by Walt Whitman / Émile Verhaeren (collage)

‘Infinity Songs’ is copyright © Walt Whitman and Émile Verhaeren, 2022, and is reprinted here from You Again: A Book of Love-Hate Stories (Sidekick Books, 2023) by permission of Sidekick Books. You can read more about the book on the Sidekick Books website.

From You Again: A Book of Love-Hate Stories edited by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone
What are the things you can’t live with or without? What can we expect from relationships that refuse to resolve themselves one way or the other? You Again collects together accounts of ruinous tension and blighted passion, mixing extracts and cut-ups from famous works with fresh slivers of contemporary writing.

The major theme of each Hipflask is extrapolated from one or other of these key aspects of modern poetry – play, appropriation, subtext and conflict – but the result is a series that occupies its own strange niche: mutant miscellanies, oddball assortments. Good for a nip or a shot or a long, deep swig.

What are the things you can’t live with or without? What can we expect from relationships that refuse to resolve themselves one way or the other? You Again collects together accounts of ruinous tension and blighted passion, mixing extracts and cut-ups from famous works with fresh slivers of contemporary writing. There’s romance, of course – but other kinds of entanglement as well, all awash with delight and frustration, rage and joy, hope and perplexity.

Émile Verhaeren (1855-1916) was a prolific Belgian poet, art critic and multiple-times nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was an influential American writer known for popularising free verse, and who was subject to censure for poems deemed obscenely sensual.

Sidekick Books is a London-based small press founded in 2010 by Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving. We specialise in collaborative books, mostly made up of poems. Our guiding ethos when we began was to explore alternatives to the single-author poetry volume, and to mix poetry with other genres and types of book. Our books have been nominated for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, been featured in The Guardian and BBC Wildlife Magazine, and won the Sabouteur Award for Best Collaboration. We’ve put on various joint readings and events with other presses and organisations, including The Poetry Society, and we’ve thrown book launches as toga parties and immersive theatre.
Read more about the press on the Sidekick Books website, and follow Sidekick Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Sedge Warbler

October 1, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

‘The sedge has wither’d from the lake;
And no birds sing.’
John Keats, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’

I live on the sedge. I sing
unseen. It is my song
you do not hear, light as air:
willowdown-dweller, reedwalker.

As a bird I have no country. I sing
there to here. Hear my song:
a ‘noisy, rambling warble’ on the air,
summerlong singer, water-neighbour.

When winter withers, it’s away I sing,
the long length of earth. My song
bends from the Arctic to warmer air:
to an Afrikaaner, Europese Vleisanger.

I am a citizen of sedge, of sedge I sing;
of the edge, the water-margin. My song
is pidgin, weird Birdish: plucking from air
English, Namlish, Suomi, Oshiwambo, Xhosa.

Shared sound of rain on reeds: I sing
low morning mist. Your songs
condense in mine. I fill the encircling air,
pale loiterer, sedge warbler.

by Sophie Mayer

Be sure to join us at Oxford Brookes on 31 October for a special event with poet Jay Bernard. Jay will be presenting Surge, an award-winning multimedia project dealing with the 1981 New Cross ‘massacre’ – a fire at a birthday party in south London which killed 13 young black people. This event is part of Black History Month at Brookes and tickets are free, but you must sign up in advance via the website!

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Sophie Mayer is a writer, curator and activist. Her recent books include Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2015) and (O) (Arc, 2015). She has also been involved in projects such as the touring programme Revolt, She Said: Women and Film After ’68 with queer feminist film collective Club des Femmes, and Raising our Game, a report addressing exclusion in the film industry with campaigners Raising Films. Her current writing projects include ‘Disturbing Words’, a tinyletter about language, and a poetry chapbook <jacked a kaddish>, forthcoming from Litmus. Find out more about her work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Sidekick Books is a cross-disciplinary, collaborative poetry press run by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone. Started in 2009 by the ex-communicated alchemist Dr Fulminare, the press has produced themed anthologies and team-ups on birds, video games, Japanese monsters and everything in between. Sidekick Books titles are intended as charms, codestones and sentry jammers, to be dipped into in times of unease. Sidekick’s latest books collect poems about bats ( Battalion ) and robots ( No, Robot, No! ). You can follow Sidekick’s work on the press’s website and via Twitter.

Mandarin Duck

July 16, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Mandarin Duck

the gold is punches
or the gold lean comes from so
much gore. the heat
down in our heels. the chase. play
what is beautiful it is childlike.
we break for what is
ugly, for lunches, boats caught
at this point in another lake.
for turtles, birds’ bills. golden mornings
from the train & my mouth purple
from all the falling over

the water in my lips.
& here it is not the root,
the first of it. we were not moving
when you hit us but moving from the first
punch. she said home is where they say duck
like hook, like come here & here i am
rotten wood, knees again. i can’t feel them
don’t worry i mean we’re golden
like the gold smudged inside your eye.

by Charlotte Geater

Our 2018 International Poetry Competition is still open for entries – 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 .

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Charlotte Geater grew up in Ipswich, moved to Oxford for university, and now lives in London. Charlotte was a submissions editor for online magazine Pomegranate, and has previously been published in The Salt Book of Younger Poets and Stop/Sharpening/Your/Knives (3) and (4). You can find her on Tumblr and on Twitter.

Sidekick Books is a cross-disciplinary, collaborative poetry press run by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone. Started in 2009 by the ex-communicated alchemist Dr Fulminare, the press has produced themed anthologies and team-ups on birds, video games, Japanese monsters and everything in between. Sidekick Books titles are intended as charms, codestones and sentry jammers, to be dipped into in times of unease. You can follow Sidekick’s work on the press’s website and via Twitter.

St Jerome and the Chaffinch

April 17, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

More usually with a lion he can’t shake off,
and always with a book – but,
sometimes, he appears with a chaffinch.

Animals love him. And it’s a symbol
of celibacy to be accompanied by a chaffinch.
The colourful male winters less far away than his mate.

He becomes known as the bachelor bird
and also the harbinger of rain.
But only sometimes does he sing for rain,

other times he sings for sun, or for his mate.
The French say gay comme un pinson
but we are not always so gay

or so serious. Bosch paints him this way.
I cannot say why he sings, only that
the chaffinch, sometimes, appears with St Jerome.

by Emily Hasler

News from the Centre! We have a number of exciting poetry readings coming up over the next couple of months, including a reading by Peter Raynard and Richard Skinner on 3 May; Kei Miller on 22 May; Sinéad Morrissey on 23 May; Clare Pollard on 24 May; and Richard Harrison on 1 June. We’re also helping to organize Stanza and Stand-Up on 25 May where poetry competes with comedy and the audience decides who wins! You can book tickets for all of these events here.

And if you haven’t yet seen copies of our ignitionpress pamphlets, including work by Lily Blacksell, Patrick James Errington, and Mary Jean Chan (whose pamphlet A Hurry of English is the Poetry Book Society’s Summer Choice), visit our website. There you can find sample poems as well as audio and video of the poets reading from their work. The pamphlets are £5 each and three for £12.

Also on our website you can read a new interview with poet and critic Yvonne Reddick, and a review of Jos Smith’s book Subterranea by Jennifer Wong.

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Emily Hasler was born in Felixstowe, Suffolk and studied at the University of Warwick. Her work won second prize in the 2009 Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition, and she won an Eric Gregory Award in 2014. She has published a pamphlet, natural histories, with Salt and writes for Prac Crit. Her first collection, The Built Environment , has just been published by Pavilion Poetry (Liverpool University Press). You can follow Emily on Twitter.

Sidekick Books is a cross-disciplinary, collaborative poetry press run by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone. Started in 2009 by the ex-communicated alchemist Dr Fulminare, the press has produced themed anthologies and team-ups on birds, video games, Japanese monsters and everything in between. Sidekick Books titles are intended as charms, codestones and sentry jammers, to be dipped into in times of unease. You can follow Sidekick’s work on the press’s website and via Twitter.

Catullus 51 High fantasy translation

March 27, 2018April 20, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Ille mi par esse deo videtur,
ille, si fas est, superare divos,
qui sedens adversus identidem te
spectat et audit
dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis
eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi
vocis in ore,
lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures, gemina teguntur
lumina nocte.
Otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:
otio exsultas nimiumque gestis:
otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes.

Catullus 51: High Fantasy translation

In the tavern, they sat near the fire, which created a companionate halo around the small company. Food was served, with ale and mead, and they started to feel merry, though tired and shaken by the terrors of the road. Snorri was elbow height to the rider in the green cloak, whose pitted face now seemed moon-like, lit by the elf woman who sat opposite, talking and smiling. Her laughter was like purses of silver poured out liberally and pocketed by that mortal. None of it was spent on the dwarf, who sat in shadow and twice looked at her and quickly turned away as he felt flames dart along his limbs. He tried once to speak, but his tongue was lead and he knew he could not speak and look at her still. His senses eclipsed, he heard only the pounding on the worn anvil of his heart. His eyes were shut in darkness, like the closing of the doors into the mountain. Confused by these new emotions, he applied himself with greater energy to the meal. Idleness, thought Snorri, taking great bites of the bread and roast meat in his trencher. Only idleness. The idle axe rusts and the lazy smith lets his fire go out.
by Rowyda Amin

Poetry news! We are delighted to say that one of our ignitionpress pamphlets, A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan, is the Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice for Summer 2018! You can read more about the PBS selection here, and find details of all three ignitionpress pamphlets (by Mary Jean, Lily Blacksell, and Patrick James Errington) here. There are two further launches for the press in Edinburgh and St. Andrews on 11 and 12 April, where you can hear all three poets.

On Saturday 14 April, ignitionpress editor and Oxford-based poet Alan Buckley will be leading a day-long workshop for the Poetry Centre entitled ‘First, are you our sort of person? – I, you, they and us’. It will explore how writing in the second and third person and first person plural can broaden our range as writers, and enable us to write more deeply into our own experience. Participants are invited to bring two of their existing poems to be worked on by themselves and others. Tickets are £45 (£40 for Brookes students and staff). To sign up, visit our website.

Have you seen our poetry reading series schedule? We have five readings coming up – with Peter Raynard and Richard Skinner; Kei Miller; Sinéad Morrissey; Clare Pollard; and Richard Harrison – and you can book tickets here.

Finally, Sphinx Theatre will presents the award winning show ‘A Berlin Kabaret’, a vibrant presentation of lyrical anti-war songs, at the Old Fire Station, Oxford on 20 and 21 April. The show features previously undiscovered and newly translated poems by Bertolt Brechtand provocative new voices from Crisis Skylight writing workshops. You can find more information on the OFS website.

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Gaius Valerius Catullus was Ancient Rome’s most notorious scandal-monger, filthsmith and lovelorn wretch. In this interactive handbook, Bad Kid Catullus, his famously sexy, savage, tender and scurrilous poems have been transformed and mutated in myriad ways: compressed, expanded, bricolaged, Catullus in six pulp genres, Catullus as playlist – even a Catullus karma sutra. And then there are pages for you, the reader, to fill in, in your own obscene fashion. You’ll never look at a sparrow the same way again. Find out more about the book on the Sidekick Books website.

An itinerant scribe, Rowyda Amin lived in the capital until she was sent into exile in the far west for an ill-judged remark about the emperor’s hairpiece. You can read more about Rowyda’s work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

Sidekick Books is a cross-disciplinary, collaborative poetry press run by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone. Started in 2009 by the ex-communicated alchemist Dr Fulminare, the press has produced themed anthologies and team-ups on birds, video games, Japanese monsters and everything in between. Sidekick Books titles are intended as charms, codestones and sentry jammers, to be dipped into in times of unease. You can follow Sidekick’s work on the press’s website and via Twitter.

Catullus 51 Noir

October 25, 2017April 20, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Catullus 51: Noir

Lesbia, smoking hot in shifting satin,
a red Schiaparelli number, cut-to-kill,
spaghetti strap artfully loose on one bare
white arm. Her hooks tonight are in
millionaire Crassus. He’s slavering,
luckiest grifter in Little Italy, Straight Flush,
Full House, Jack in the Hole. Rufus,
I tell the barman, hit me with another.
Lesbia. She was Clodia back then.
The shock when she walked through
my door. Like the sizzle that twitched
Antonius. I wired him up to the factory mains.
He went pasty, his legs shook, sawdust-mouthed,
he fizzed inside, talked, and blacked out.
Catullus, I tell myself, here’s the angle:
trouble comes when there’s time to burn.
Time on your hands, Christ, you’re an animal.
Flagrant time. It’s what got Philoctetes
the Greek wasted. It did for Babylon.

by Ian McLachlan

News from the Centre: next Thursday sees the first event in our poetry reading series at our exciting new venue, Society Café in Oxford city centre. The first reading pairs two distinct voices in contemporary poetry: Kirsten Irving (also one of the editors of Sidekick Books) and Caroline Smith (whose poem ‘Teenager’ we featured back in January). Buy your tickets here and join us from 7-9pm. For future events in our reading series, including details of our reading on 9 November with Siobhán Campbell and Kate Clanchy, visit our website.

After the recent announcement of the winners of our International Poetry Competition, judged by Helen Mort, we would be delighted to see you at our awards event on Friday 24 November, which will feature readings from the winning and shortlisted poets and from Helen Mort herself. If you’d like to attend, please e-mail poetrycomp@brookes.ac.uk

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Ian McLachlan was the Republic’s favourite tragedian. Due to an unfortunate incident involving Pompey’s son-in-law and the Cloaca Maxima, Ian now lives in remote Britain where he is a student of Stoicism and an assiduous writer of curse tablets. You can follow him on Twitter.

Find out more about the book on the Sidekick Books website.

Sidekick Books is a cross-disciplinary, collaborative poetry press run by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone. Started in 2009 by the ex-communicated alchemist Dr Fulminare, the press has produced themed anthologies and team-ups on birds, video games, Japanese monsters and everything in between. Sidekick Books titles are intended as charms, codestones and sentry jammers, to be dipped into in times of unease. You can follow Sidekick’s work on the press’s website and via Twitter.

Storm petrel

September 28, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A pocket. A fistful
of sky in a small
gut
lined with
water lustrated of salt.
You,
almanac,
gathering storms
under windslip wings,
a slice of
clean water, parting
miles out to sea where
oil-spills are tumbled with
algae and plastic:
gyres vast & unequivocal in their
stranglehold over tides and land –
circular, massive,
holding us fast
but you
hold steady,
pelagic (storm-driven,
waif and tendril, fluff
and beak).
Were we wise,
we might learn from you,
learn to make love at midnight,
brief and fast in the shadows
cast by stones

chikka-chikka-chikk

the trill of a warning
sharp as the sting of a lighthouse beam

a whip
of light before the sinking:

andwe walked on water as we dreamed
beyond a horizon your shadow eclipses, and eclipses.

You scavenge for rotting flesh,
swoop and dive to tenderise the chum for your
one, fluffed chick

who knows gale-swept European islands,
and the kiss of Tunisian sands
but no language. You know no language,

only storm.

by Aki Schilz

Happy National Poetry Day! We hope you enjoy celebrating with this poem by Aki Schilz, and if you’d like to read some more poetry today, why not check out previous Weekly Poems, which are all available from 2007 to the present? Just visit our website. And if you haven’t yet heard about our exciting new venture, ignitionpress, please visit this page to learn about our plans to publish poetry pamphlets, and the three poets Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington in particular.

The programme for the Woodstock Poetry Festival (10-12 November) has been announced, and features readings by a host of celebrated writers, such as Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, George Szirtes, and David Harsent. For more information and to book your tickets, visit the Woodstock Bookshop website.

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Aki Schilz is a writer and editor based in London. She is co-founder of the #LossLit Twitter writing project alongside Kit Caless, and co-editor of LossLit Magazine. Her poetry, flash fiction, short stories and creative non-fiction have been published online (And Other Poems, Mnemoscape, tNY.Press, The Bohemyth, CHEAP POP, Annexe) and in print (An Unreliable Guide to London, Popshot, The Colour of Saying, Kakania,Best Small Fictions 2015), and she is the winner of the inaugural Visual Verse Prize (2013) and the Bare Fiction Prize for Flash Fiction (2014). Aki works at The Literary Consultancy, where she is the Editorial Services Manager. She tweets micropoetry at @AkiSchilz , and you can read more about her work on her blog.

With this poem we continue our selection of poems from Sidekick Books’ four volumes of Birdbooks. In 2009, with two micro-compendiums under their belt, Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone, the editors at Sidekick, discussed the idea of a book of bird poetry – but one in which less well known species were on equal terms with the popular ones. There are dozens of poems about herons, eagles, ravens and nightingales, not so many about the whimbrel, the ruff, the widgeon or the hobby. Paper-cut artist Lois Cordelia was recruited to give the series its distinctive covers, and over 150 artists and illustrators were commissioned over six years to complete the series. The first volume is now in its second printing. Find out more about the Birdbook series on the Sidekick website.

Sidekick Books is a cross-disciplinary, collaborative poetry press run by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone. Started in 2009 by the ex-communicated alchemist Dr Fulminare, the press has produced themed anthologies and team-ups on birds, video games, Japanese monsters and everything in between. Sidekick Books titles are intended as charms, codestones and sentry jammers, to be dipped into in times of unease. You can follow Sidekick’s work on the press’s website and via Twitter.

Lesser Whitethroat

September 11, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Something disappears
Is it knowledge?
Or is it something more precious?
Pressed grass where weight should have been,
a tree limb uncontrollably shaking,
leaves on their way down,
the mind rattling under a hat-brim
a cat, blank off the ground –

nightfall.

Make this the opening that you prayed for.

You can change sides,
scale the wall, distill every one of your wishes
into the bandit’s bliss. Lift yourself,

and you will flow through a thousand airs –
with each adjustment you might lose strength,
Nevertheless,
climb and take height
climb and take one story at a time.

Land light above a window, a busy kitchen
is best,
the room with the burning hearth will also do.
Take in the fragrance of daily life,
but do not take part. Your feet might walk rooftops,
but your head graces heaven
shoulder to shoulder with the incense and the graspless.

Wherever you find doorways slip in as if indigenous,
or a hole –
keep your breathing pressed,
less, lesser, less…
Yes!

You are the size of a mouse
the introverted house guest,
whether you are dressed in monk’s grey,
the dusty cloak of an old mountain hag…

if you are seen
to be a man, not a man –
your feathers remain the same.
If anyone should ask, your Western name
is Sylvia.
Do you understand?

Remember, if you are caught, you are neither
our son nor our daughter.
You are an orphan,
but you also have many kin –
in the Sahara, Arabia, India, Mongolia…
even Siberia, such ideas are comforting.

Remember everything you have accomplished
everybody you love… then drop them over the edge.
Now you are lesser,
more enlightened,
Yes?
If you should be mistaken for a common
thief, if you are about to lose your hand –
make your heart stay red,
seal your mouth and freeze your throat.
At your centre you shall hurt
until you glow
and become so beautiful.
Silence is so…
I am afraid
you will find there is nowhere else to go,
There are so many thorns in the hedgerow – the land fruitless.

The mountain pass? Impossible
under this new snow.

by Eileen Pun

The Poetry Centre has some very exciting news to announce this week, as we begin a wonderful new chapter (or stanza) in our work. Tune into our social media or check our website for details this Friday…

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Eileen Pun was born in New York, US and now lives in Grasmere, Cumbria where she works as a freelance writer, poet and artist. Her work has recently been published in several young poets anthologies, including a showcase of new Black and Asian writing in the UK: Ten, The New Wave published by Bloodaxe (2014). In 2015, Eileen was a recipient of the UK Northern Writer’s Award (England). She also received a Lisa Ullmann Travelling Scholarship (LUTSF) to China in support of her interdisciplinary work in movement and poetry. In March 2016 Eileen was invited as a guest reader for a residential to the Ted Hughes Arvon Centre, Lumb Bank for Creative Writing. Read more about Eileen’s work on her website.

Sidekick Books is a cross-disciplinary, collaborative poetry press run by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone. Started in 2009 by the ex-communicated alchemist Dr Fulminare, the press has produced themed anthologies and team-ups on birds, video games, Japanese monsters and everything in between. Sidekick Books titles are intended as charms, codestones and sentry jammers, to be dipped into in times of unease. You can follow Sidekick’s work on the press’s website and via Twitter.

The Spoonbill Tastes the New Menu

August 7, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The table was laid with tureens, deep dishes – even vases
were shaken of flowers and filled with the tasting menu
of the season: steaming broths and stews, delicate and hearty.

The visitor trod slowly among the dishes, then, stepping carefully
into each one as if testing bathwater, paddled the fragrant
silt of herbs, undissolved stock cubes, churning up the bed

of each pot. The maitre’d pursed his lips at the scaly feet
wading about in the china, his stomach rumbling at wafts
of french onion, vichyssoise, bisque (it wasn’t his idea to invite

their esteemed guest or her unorthodox methods to the table
but the chef marked noone as more adept at judging the calibre
of soups). One by one she lowered her open bill into each

tureen, waving it in an infinity sign from side to side, filtering
for morsels, pausing to hoik a crouton into her pale throat.
She made no noise, no sign of joy. The chef peered through

the porthole of the kitchen door, his brow beaded with sweat
until the last soup was uncovered: a bouillabaisse, dense
with clams and chunks of fish. The visitor raised her wings

in ecstasy and plunged her utensils straight into the broth,
grabbing at squid tentacles and shrimp, garlicky stock clagging
her feathers, then gave the only applause ever reported

in her career. A clack of spoons, like castanets, resounded
through the room, and the critic pressed oily prints
on the tablecloth in the run-up to flight: five lopsided stars.

by Jasmine Ann Cooray

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries for less than 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.

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Jasmine Ann Cooray is a poet and therapist from London, of Sri Lankan and mixed European lineage. Spurred by a silent adolescence, she now designs and implements a variety of projects that cultivate emotional literacy through poetry. In 2013 she was Writer in Residence at the National University of Singapore and has just finished tenure as a BBC Performing Arts Fellow with Spread the Word. Her first full collection is almost complete, and she is working on a collaborative poetry and aerial arts show with Upswing about what it means to trust. To balance her frequent reclusiveness, she does an excellent line in hugs. You can follow Jasmine on Twitter, and watch her read one of her poems, ‘Ice Cream Box of Frozen Curry’, here.

With this poem we continue our selection of poems from Sidekick Books’ four volumes of Birdbooks. In 2009, with two micro-compendiums under their belt, Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone, the editors at Sidekick, discussed the idea of a book of bird poetry – but one in which less well known species were on equal terms with the popular ones. There are dozens of poems about herons, eagles, ravens and nightingales, not so many about the whimbrel, the ruff, the widgeon or the hobby. Paper-cut artist Lois Cordelia was recruited to give the series its distinctive covers, and over 150 artists and illustrators were commissioned over six years to complete the series. The first volume is now in its second printing. Find out more about the Birdbook series on the Sidekick website.

Sidekick Books is a cross-disciplinary, collaborative poetry press run by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone. Started in 2009 by the ex-communicated alchemist Dr Fulminare, the press has produced themed anthologies and team-ups on birds, video games, Japanese monsters and everything in between. Sidekick Books titles are intended as charms, codestones and sentry jammers, to be dipped into in times of unease. You can follow Sidekick’s work on the press’s website and via Twitter.