Security Alert

August 26, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Before you read this
I have to ask you some questions:
Could you tell me if you are any of the following:
migrant, immigrant, refugee, asylum seeker, émigré,
clandestine, sans papiers, foreigner,
or a son or daughter of any of the above
or if you LOOK like as if you could be any of the above?
In which case please
state your name, date of birth
height, weight, inside leg measurement, blood group, hospital records,
skin colour, income,
preferred sandwich type.

Are you in receipt of any loans or any imported meat products?
Do you intend to stay in this country longer than two minutes?
Do you intend to study anything that is not maths?
Do you have a wife, husband or both?
Please sing the national anthem when I say the word ‘Queen’
And answer the following questions:
why is Britain great?
why is everywhere else not so great?
what is the Anglo Saxon word for great?
do you wear red, white and blue underwear?

Please step this way.
To see if you have answered all these questions truthfully,
we need to do a rectal examination.

by Michael Rosen

There are just a few weeks left to enter our International Poetry Competition! We’re delighted to say that our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson. As always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners in each receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visit our website.

Our latest podcast, with American poet Maya C. Popa, is now live! You can find it on our website and via the usual podcast providers – just search for brookespoetry. Maya discusses her exciting new collection, American Faith (Sarabande Books, 2019), and you can find the poems she reads and talks about on our Podcasts page.

Notes from Smokestack Books:

‘Poetry can stick up for the weak’ according to Michael Rosen, or it can ‘mock the mighty’; it can ‘glorify our rulers or it can dissect them. You choose.’ In these powerful new poems Rosen is clear about his own choices. Listening to a Pogrom on the Radio is a book about anti-Semitism, racism, fascism and war, Trump, Le Pen, and the Tory assaults on the NHS and education – the stupid and the sinister, the ridiculous and the revolting. In his first collection for grown-ups since Don’t Mention the Children (2015), Michael Rosen confirms his reputation as the heir to Jacques Prévert, Ivor Cutler and Adrian Mitchell. Few poets writing today can move so effortlessly between childishness and childlike seriousness, or dare to ask, like the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, why the silly emperor is not wearing any clothes. Read more about the book and buy a copy on the Smokestack website.

Michael Rosen was born in North London in 1946. After university he worked for the BBC on Play School and Schools TV. He has written and edited over 140 books, including Mind Your Own Business, Wouldn’t You Like to Know, Mustard, Custard, Grumble Belly and Gravy, You Tell Me, No Breathing in Class and Quick Let’s Get Out of Here. You Can’t Catch Me! won the Signal Poetry Award. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, won the Smarties Prize. He currently presents Radio Four’s long-running Word of Mouth. His most recent books include The Disappearance of Emile Zola, The Author, Workers’ Tales, Reading Rebellion and So They Call You Pisher! He was Children’s Laureate from 2007-2009 and is Professor of Children’s Literature at Goldsmith’s, University of London. Find out more about Michael’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.

Smokestack is an independent publisher of radical and unconventional poetry run by Andy Croft. Smokestack aims to keep open a space for what is left of the English radical poetic tradition in the twenty-first century. Smokestack champions poets who are unfashionable, radical, left-field and working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority. Smokestack is interested in the World as well as the Word; believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society; argues that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry. Smokestack’s list includes books by John Berger, Michael Rosen, Katrina Porteous, Ian McMillan, Steve Ely, Bertolt Brecht (Germany), Gustavo Pereira (Venezuela), Heinrich Heine (Germany), Andras Mezei (Hungary), Yiannis Ritsos (Greece) and Victor Jara (Chile). David Cain’s Truth Street, an epic-poem that is part oral history and part documentary theatre, draws on eye-witness testimonies of the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium Disaster and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019. You can find Smokestack on Facebook and on Twitter.

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

Ear of Wheat

July 15, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Ear of wheat arches
over the pitfalls of the dark
listening keenly to voices
gone by, to calls
drifting from afar,

ear of wheat bends
silent with weight
in front and back
silent with our weight of hours
with no before
with no after
and all around nothing
but the curt jitters and shivers in sun,

ear of wheat tosses in wind
sweating in calm
in narrow straits
teeming with yet far-reaching length and width,
golden ear laden
listening
up to the highest prominence
and, unaware,
through the petals of the night
the only friend of man
plowing through the evening,
of woman carrying the morning in her arms.

by Reja-e Busailah

The Poetry Centre has launched its International Poetry Competition for 2020! We’re delighted to say that our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson. As always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners in each receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visit our website.

Notes from Smokestack Books:

In his ninetieth year, Reja-e Busailah looks back in Poems of a Palestinian Boyhood on growing up in a small Palestinian town in the 1930s until the turbulent upheaval of 1948, when over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes by the Israelis, and the author was forced to join the Death March from Lydda. Although blind since infancy, Busailah recalls with stunning detail a boyhood shaped by disability, education, family and friends, British soldiers and Zionist settlers. Poems of a Palestinian Boyhood is an extraordinary book: unapologetic, unflinching, raw and beautiful. You can find out more about the book on the Smokestack website and read a review of the collection on the website of World Literature Today.

Reja-e Busailah was born in Jerusalem in 1929. He was educated in Hebron and at the Al-’Amiriyyah School in Yafa. He studied English at Cairo University and received a PhD in English literature at New York University. For thirty years he taught English at Indiana University. In 1953 he helped found a school for the blind in Kuwait. From 1967 to 1991 he directed the Palestinian children’s charity, Project Loving Care. His books include The Ordeal: Poems of Anguish, Resistance, and Hope (with Dennis Brutus, Ved Vatuk and Tawkiq Zayyad) and We are Human Too: Poems on the Palestinian Condition and In the Land of My Birth (winner of the 2018 Palestinian Book Award for memoir). He lives with his wife in Kokomo, Indiana. Watch Reja-e Busailah read some of his poems on his YouTube channel and find him on Facebook.

Rise

June 19, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

the job grinds people down
until they feel like bits of dust,
the job they have to keep hold of
like a dying sparrow in their hands
grinds people down

all of the hours spent dipping their shoulder
and charging at the sun
carrying this dying little sparrow
in their hands
has made them feel bone-tired,
they are exhausted
and close to giving up
the dying little sparrow has almost killed them,
the bills the CCJ’s
the rent arrears utility bills dentist bills internet payments
food roof beer shoes shirts, all of it,
has almost killed the very centre of them

the fear of losing everything
has made them supple enough
to accept
almost anything

but only almost
because the holding of hands with a woman under a blood-red sun
and the wine that drips down from rib to rib
to form puddles in the gut
and the music
that lifts sparrows up
back onto their feet,

makes them want to rise, burst out of hands,
head towards the sun, sit
on wires tin roofs chimney pipes
to sing sing sing
about that unconquerable little bit of them,
how that will never die
like a little sparrow in a pair of hands
however tightly they squeeze it

by Martin Hayes

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

Finally, don’t forget about the final few events in our academic year: firstly, there’s our final reading in the current series on Wednesday 26 June at Waterstones in Oxford, which features Ilya Kaminsky and Shara Lessley. Ilya has been receiving extraordinary acclaim in the US and UK for his latest book, Deaf Republic, and Shara’s collection, The Explosive Expert’s Wife, has received enthusiastic reviews and award nominations. Spaces for this event are full, but you could add your name to the waiting list here. Then join us and an international group of poets and critics for ‘Our Poetry and Our Needs’, a symposium at the University of Reading on Tuesday 9 July. More details here. Finally, we’re launching three new ignitionpress pamphlets by Jennifer Lee Tsai, Joanna Ingham, and Sarah Shapiro on 22 and 23 July. More information here!

Notes from Smokestack Books:

Martin Hayes’s new collection is a roar of frustrated rage and pain at the way we live and work in the twenty-first century. It’s a book about 11-hour shifts, sick-days, lay-offs, computer systems crashing and the joy of Friday afternoons. Dermot, Stacey, Shaq, Big Bri, Dexter the old-timer, Antoine, Mohammed, Jim the Letch and Harry the head supervisor work for Phoenix Express couriers, located somewhere ‘between Stockholm Street and Syndrome Way’, making money for other people and trying to make themselves heard above the roar of an economic system that ‘has us in its mouth and is shaking us about in its teeth’. Find out more about the collection on the Smokestack website.

Unspoken Conversations

December 4, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The fate of words is
to emulate the river.
I had seen her there before,
the Asian woman by the weir,
rapt in a greyhooded shawl,
watching the water go over.

Police posters faded
on lamp-posts and trees.
A body washed up
nine miles away and I flinched,
shamed by the figure
of a drowning thought.

She had hired an afternoon taxi
to take her from roads and rooms.
She had a secret to keep
and disappeared like footprints
across a snow-black wood.
Would talking have helped?

They tried to fathom her,
all those unspoken conversations.
The river she embraced
swept her away and then forgot.
Each day is an unopened letter
behind the Town Hall clock.

by Jim Greenhalf

Notes from Smokestack Books:

Breakfast at Wetherspoons is a meditation on the idea that ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chainstores.’ It’s a book about freedom and necessity, mortality and time, Tolstoy, Diogenes and Jihadi John. It’s a book about poetry and comradeship, and old friends like Sebastian Barker, Barry MacSweeney and David Tipton. It’s a late-flowering 40-year old love story. And it’s a kind of bleak Bradford noir, in which Greenhalf explores life among the Struldbrugs queuing in the Co-op, stays too long in the Hard Day’s Night Hotel and catches the last train to Skipton. And at the end of Dead Pan Alley there is always a view of Salts Mill and the green hill rising steeply to Baildon, where John Wesley preached love’s holy connexion on the eve of the French Revolution. Read more about the book on the Smokestack website.

Jim Greenhalf was born in 1949 and grew up in East London. A news and feature writer for the Bradford Telegraph & Argus for almost forty years, he has written eighteen books of poetry, including The Dog’s Not Laughing, The Unlikelihood of Intimacy in the Next Six Hours, Hinterland, Blue on Blue, Grassington’s Reflex and The Man in the Mirror. He lives in Saltaire, West Yorkshire.

On les tue par le feu, l’eau, l’électricité

July 9, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

On les tue par le feu, l’eau, l’électricité
Eux qui vécurent loin des sources
Et rêvant d’eau toute leur vie
Eux qui grelottaient, sans charbon
Au soleil glacé du Mouloud.
Eux qui veillaient sans lumière
Au fond d’un bidonville obscur.

La première fois qu’il vit
De près
Une baignoire
Fut le dernier jour de sa vie.

by Madeleine Riffaud

They kill them with fire, water, electricity

They kill them with fire, water, electricity
Those who lived far from springs
Dreaming of water all their life
Those who shivered, without coal
In Mouloud’s frozen sun.
Those who lay awake in the dark
Buried in a gloomy slum.

The first time he saw
A bath
Close up
Was the last day of his life.

by Madeleine Riffaud, translated by Alan Dent

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.

We also just released our latest Poetry Centre podcast, in which Niall Munro talks to the award-winning Canadian poet Richard Harrison on his recent visit to Oxford. You can listen to the conversation via the Poetry Centre website.

‘They kill them with fire, water, electricity’ is copyright © Madeleine Riffaud. It is reprinted from Poets and the Algerian War, edited by Francis Combes and translated by Alan Dent (Smokestack Books, 2017) by permission of Smokestack Books.

The Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) was one of the bloodiest post-1945 liberation struggles. Characterised by civilian massacres and the widespread use of torture, it led to the death and displacement of two million people. It was also the first major conflict since the Spanish Civil War to mobilize a generation of writers and artists to protest against the conduct of the war, most notably in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earthand Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. In 1960 many of France’s leading writers and intellectuals – including Simon de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, Pierre Boulez, François Truffaut and Marguerite Duras – signed Le Manifeste des 121, calling on the French government to renounce the use of torture in Algeria. Many writers found themselves on the front-line. The Algerian writer Mouloud Feraoun was assassinated by the OAS in 1962. They tried, unsuccessfully, to kill Madeleine Riffaud (the author of this week’s poem), who reported on the war for L’Humanité. There were two attempts on Sartre’s life.

This anthology, edited by Francis Combes and translated by Alan Dent, features some of the French poets who opposed the war, including Louis Aragon, Jacques Gaucheron, Madeleine Riffaud, Pierre Seghers, Henri Deluy and Guillevic, as well as Algerian poets like Jean Sénac, Kateb Yacine, Bachir Hadj Ali, Noureddine Aba, Messaour Boulanouar, Mohammed Dib, Omar El Bernaoui and Mohamed Saleh Baouiya. It also includes a remarkable series of poems written in memory of Maurice Audin, a young university lecturer and member of the Algerian Communist Party who was murdered by the French authorities. These poets are important, but not only as historical witnesses to a terrible war. They remind us of the possibilities and of the responsibilities of poetry in our own times. You can read more about the anthology on the Smokestack website.

Tic tacs at the track

May 2, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

They stood out beaconed on their boxes.
I could only see them from the shoulder up:
White gloves weaving those magic odds
out the ear, top of the head, or on the nose.

Punters would follow their semaphore to see
an Up-the-arm, an Ear’ole, or a Major Stevens
flying overhead. Dad joked they were sending
messages to the deaf. The odd time a Double Carpet

flew past the line by a short head, the bookies
cracked a smile, plus the punter whose pin
had pricked the right spot for once. The serious
men, long coated with cigars in hand, strode
up with bags of sand to take on a short one;

if it wasn’t odds on it’d be straight up,
a shoulder maybe, a bottle max. I’d watch them
walk back like cons, pick out their bins and scan
the track like Churchill overseeing the troops.

My old man had less money but no less sense.
He often lost me amongst the legs when putting
on his bet, laying a sky diver or cock and hen – lowest
he took was top-of-the-head, carpet, or Burlington Bertie,

up to a cockle. If a top jockey was on a macaroni
he’d drop a couple on. Each way he wasn’t going to win
enough for a long coat. He always tried to leave though
with a cigar, blowing smoke all the way home.

by Peter Raynard

News from the Centre: we have a number of exciting poetry readings coming up over the next couple of months, including a reading by this week’s poet, Peter Raynard, who will be with Richard Skinner tomorrow (3 May) at the Society Café in Oxford from 7pm. All are welcome! Tickets (£4) are available here or on the door. For more details, visit our website.

We will also be hosting (as part of the Think Human Festival): Kei Miller on 22 May; Sinéad Morrissey on 23 May; and Clare Pollard on 24 May. We’re also helping to organize Stanza and Stand-Up on 25 May where poetry competes with comedy and the audience decides who wins! Don’t miss these exciting events! You can book tickets here.

Next week, join psychoanalyst and critic Adam Phillips at Keble College for the latest in his seminar series entitled ‘The Poet’s Essay’. The seminar takes place on Wednesday 9th May at 4.30pm in the Pusey Room at Keble, and you can find full details 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.

‘Tic tacs at the track’ is copyright © Peter Raynard, 2018. It is reprinted from Precarious (Smokestack Books, 2018) by permission of Smokestack Books. An earlier version of the poem was published in the Morning Star in February 2015.

Notes from Smokestack Books:

Peter Raynard’s debut collection Precarious takes questions of masculinity, class, mental health and work head on; issues that many people, especially men and boys, find difficult to address. Rosa Luxemburg, Orgreave, 11-plus failures, tic-tac men, a priest from central casting and a man who only eats sandwiches – it’s a book about precarious times, hard lessons and fragile lives, a defiant celebration of British working-class life and the people ‘who make the wheels go round’, provocative, funny, poignant and bloody angry.

Peter Raynard is the editor of Proletarian Poetry: poems of working class lives. His debut collection, Precarious, was published by Smokestack Books in April 2018. He has also completed a poetic coupling of The Communist Manifesto, to be published by Culture Matters in May 2018.

The Malvern Aviator

April 24, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My father’s watch. One of only a few hundred.
Dark blue face, Arabic numerals.
It keeps terrible time. I wear it now
only to counterweigh the days,
the equinoxes and leap years.

When there is an odd jump in time
(the clocks going forward),
it even-keels me, like bike stabilisers,
swimming wings.
I do not fall down, I do not drown.

But if I were to take it off and abandon it
by my large granite basin,
its hands would fail with the iron
and I would venture out in the world,
ending up as a heap of ashes.

by Richard Skinner

We have a number of exciting poetry readings coming up over the next couple of months, including a reading by this week’s poet, Richard Skinner, who will be reading with Peter Raynard on 3 May at the Society Café in Oxford. Book tickets here.

Notes from Smokestack Books:

In language that is both precise and strange, Richard Skinner’s poems tip certainties on their heads, making familiar objects in the world unfamiliar: a mountain is not what it seems, a skull contains a universe. Alongside this process of ‘making-strange’ lies a deep connection with sound, colour, temperature and scent that brings the poems fully to life. Questions of faith run through many of these poems, with subjects ranging from the Lollards and Buddhist Bardos to Saint Fabiola. There are personal poems too: a summer affair, family narratives about his grandmother’s difficult marriage and his mother’s time abroad as a young au pair. These poems engage with form – the cento, the cinquain, the unrhymed sonnet, cut-ups and free verse – in enigmatic, other-worldy ways that constantly surprise and please. Find out more about The Malvern Aviator on the Smokestack website.

Richard Skinner has published three novels with Faber & Faber and three books of non-fiction. His previous books of poetry, the light user scheme and Terrace are both published by Smokestack. His work is published in eight languages. He is Director of the Fiction Programme at Faber Academy. You can read more about Richard’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.

When Beasts Most Graze

November 21, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

1

left their houses weeping and became unemployed
and finally… died in poverty
and so ended their days

(Commission of Inquiry Returns, 1517)

Tenant at Will, Wharram Percy (c.1500):

They found me at Milndam, at the fish pond,
the landmaster’s men. they said
Leave your nets, William. We’re fishers of men.
Come with us to the Lord’s house. Come,
and receive the Word.
I followed,

sharp as a fox out of cover. Squire Hilton
hung like a cloud on his front step.
His smile axed at my heart.
He gave me till Michaelmas –
‘Tell the whole village the same.’

I looked up to the furlongs, the skyline
of corn. I heard children laugh
by the stream. I turned from his gate.
For Hilton a sheep-run.
For the cottar death with the plough.

Our young men wanted to fight, but
I counselled acceptance: To sever one stoat
will summon the pack. We have no rights here,
leave behind little. Our tears
like our toil will fade into the land…

We gathered below Town Field.
Swallows twitched from the church tower,
bellied the shallows. Next year
they’ll nest in the houses, singing
to idle spindles and empty hearths.

by Ian Taylor

This Friday lunchtime (24th November) from 12-1pm, join us at the launch of Steven Matthews’ new critical/creative book Ceaseless Music, a response to Wordsworth’s The Prelude.Through a series of poetic responses and critical reflections, Ceaseless Music explores the afterlives of Wordsworth’s landmark autobiographical poem in literature, philosophy and life writing, together with the insights it can offer into the writing of poetry today. Steven will be reading from the book in the Special Collections room in the basement of the Main Library, John Henry Brookes Building, where he will be joined by Paul Whitty who will be playing some of the sound recordings of the Lake District he made to accompany the book. All are welcome!

On Friday evening from 6.30-8pm at Oxford Brookes, the Poetry Centre presents its annual International Poetry Competition Awards event, featuring readings by the winning and shortlisted poets and the judge, Helen Mort. You can find more details on our website.

Notes from Smokestack:

Ian Taylor has been writing about the lost landscapes of the North for over forty years – old earthworks, ruined churches, derelict mineworkings, Neolithic barrows and deserted villages. Bringing together the best of this work in a single volume, Dusk is a book about enclosure, famine and deforestation, about bleak moorlands, sunken roads, nettles and cobwebs. Exploring between the pages of history, superstition, myth and the ‘threadbare cloak of folk tradition’, Taylor listens to the drovers, peat-cutters, ironstone miners, seasonal labourers, landless farmers and tramps in whose ‘hollow voice of loss’ he hears a renegade and still undefeated Albion, like a fox running from the ‘cleanshaven faces and privileged profiles’ of the Hunt, the Green Man still dancing in the trees. You can read more about Dusk on the Smokestack website.

I.P. Taylor was born in Shipley, West Yorkshire. He has been a forestry operative, a market gardener, a farm worker, a drystone waller and a millhand. Winner of the Stroud Festival international poetry competition and the Poetry Society’s Greenwood Prize, his publications include A Poetry Quintet, The Grip, The Passion, The HollowPlaces and Killers. He lives in York.

Smokestack is an independent publisher of radical and unconventional poetry run by Andy Croft. Smokestack aims to keep open a space for what is left of the English radical poetic tradition in the twenty-first century. Smokestack champions poets who are unfashionable, radical, left-field and working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority. Smokestack is interested in the World as well as the Word; believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society; argues that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry. Smokestack’s list includes books by John Berger, Michael Rosen, Katrina Porteous, Ian McMillan, Steve Ely, Bertolt Brecht (Germany), Gustavo Pereira (Venezuela), Heinrich Heine (Germany), Andras Mezei (Hungary), Yiannis Ritsos (Greece) and Victor Jara (Chile). You can find Smokestack on Facebook and on Twitter.

Iohanna of Sprotburgh

September 18, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Lord, saue vs; weperischen.

Matheu, VIII: 25

Drowned thieving from fish-traps.
Gaffed to the bank
by punting bargees –
glass-eyed, gaping.

Swan-complected, scabbed with leeches,
oozing like the fen.
Maids tore weeds
and wailed to Richard.

She hiccoughed a frog;
eels squirming from her petticoats.
In Hampull’s chapel,
her guttering candle flared.

by Steve Ely

Last Friday (and as promised in last week’s Weekly Poem!), the Poetry Centre announced the launch of its new pamphlet press, ignitionpress. If you missed the announcement, you can read about the new press here , and find out about the three poets we will be publishing (Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington) here . We look forward to sharing more details about the press indue course.

On Sunday 15 October, local poets Dorothy Yamamoto and Sarah J. Bryson will be running a poetry workshop in Kirtlington Village Hall entitled ‘Terra firma, or all at sea?’ The workshop will feature writing exercises, writing time, sharing and discussion, and runs from 10-3.30pm. All are welcome, and the event costs £25. For more details and to book a place, contact Dorothy on dorothy.mccarthy@btopenworld.com

Notes from Smokestack:

Steve Ely’s new book takes its inspiration and its title from Incendium Amoris (‘The Fire of Love’) by the fourteenth century saint and mystic Richard Rolle, ‘the hermit of Hampole’. The book offers a vision of pre-Reformation and post-industrial England through the eyes of the trespasser, the poacher, the recusant and the revolutionary, in solidarity with the swinish multitude against the landed power. Contesting language and landscape and addressing issues including carnality, class, scepticism and belief, Incendium Amoris is a peasant’s revolt against the accelerating cultural, social and environmental devastations of globalising capital, a guerrilla-pastoral prophecy of a yeoman-anarchist utopia. Read more about the book on the Smokestack website.

Steve Ely’s previous works include Oswald’s Book of Hours (nominated for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and for the Ted Hughes Award), Englaland, Werewolf and Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire; Made in Mexborough (2015). He lives in the Osgoldcross wapentake in the West Riding of Yorkshire, close to Richard Rolle’s Hampole. You can read more about Steve’s work on the Poetry International website, and follow him on Twitter.

from The Barrow Seven

September 4, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Walter Lewis Goodchild

Hanger-on, aged 35

Polished like brown saddle leather, the penny
he left under the pillow for his lad.
The tooth had been loose for days
and the night time groans
would stir him to nudge Lizzy
to tend to the child
and avoid a chorus.
Then yesterday, between forefinger
and thumb it took some fiddling
to loop string to incisor,
leading twine to door handle.
The fourth attempt pulled it
followed by a shrill scream
that would ring through the house for weeks.

by Karl Riordan

Notes from Smokestack:

‘The Barrow Seven’ is a sequence of poems commemorating the seven men killed in the Barrow Colliery in 1907.

Karl Riordan spent much of his late teens in a tattooist’s studio, fascinated by the declarations of love, badges of pride and intricate designs that reminded him of the Stilton legs of his grandfather, a miner tattooed by a working life spent underground. In his powerful debut collection, Riordan recalls and celebrates growing up in the South Yorkshire coalfield – holidays and haircuts, football pools and pool halls, Mackeson and Temazepam, Saturday night and Monday morning. The Tattooist’s Chair is a study in working-class history from the Barrow Colliery disaster of 1907 to the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, St Francis in a Sheffield pet shop, Connie Francis on the dansette and Charlie Williams always having the last laugh. You can read more about the book on the Smokestack website.