The Last Days of August

November 29, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

After James Tate

Through gaps & crannies in
the clapboard house blows the hot wind
to quicken a ghost of a lover

& me. All day it has travelled over
the plains & now it trembles across
my cheap drapes. Is it the wind or

a lover from faraway? Like the cold
breeze that tapped on my grandmother’s
door the night Grandpa died & every night

after: the knocking. There it is again but
warm as breath, singing the blast
of the train whistle & I am nothing

if not hungry. For it is the end of August, &
I know—love is hitched to the tracks, blown
through, travelling away across America.

by Zoë Brigley

News from the Poetry Centre: we’re really pleased to say that our pamphlet press, ignitionpress, has been shortlisted for this year’s Michael Marks Publishers’ Award! Established in 2009, the Michael Marks Awards represent the main awards for poetry pamphlets in the UK, and you can tune in to the online ceremony, when the winners will be announced, on 7 December (just after our own competition event – see below!). To find out more and to register for the event, visit the Michael Marks website. We’d like to thank everyone who has supported the press this year and encourage you to check out the work of our wonderful poets!

We recently announced the winners of our International Poetry Competition, judged by Will Harris. You can find out who won and who was shortlisted in the EAL and Open categories on our website, where you can also register to attend our online awards event on 7 December. Everyone is welcome to attend! You’ll be able to hear from the winners in both categories and also from the judge, Will Harris, who will talk about judging the competition and give a short reading from his work.

‘The Last Days of August’ is copyright © Zoë Brigley, 2021. It is reprinted from Into Eros (Verve Poetry Press, 2021) by permission of Verve. You can read more about the pamphlet on the Verve website.

The poems in Into Eros consider the dangers for women in risking desire, and they tell a story about nature, trauma, and healing. Here, pumpkin flowers, poison sumac, and apple blossoms are as much persons as women are, and their experience are parallel but different. These poems register the value of love after violence. Not possessing or dominating but dwelling with people, with nature – this at last might lead to freedom, and joy. You can read more about it and buy a copy on the Verve website.

Zoë Brigley has three collections of poetry from Bloodaxe: The Secret, Conquest, and Hand & Skull – all three were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. She has also received an Eric Gregory Award, been Commended in the Forward Prizes, and listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Zoë has also published a collection of nonfiction: Notes from a Swing State: Writing from Wales and America (Parthian). She is Assistant Professor in the English department at the Ohio State University and runs an anti-violence advocacy podcast: Sinister Myth: How Stories We Tell Perpetuate Violence. You can find out more about Zoë’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Winner of both the Saboteur Award for Most Innovative Publisher and the Michael Marks Publisher’s Award, Verve Poetry Press is a Birmingham-based publisher. It is dedicated to promoting and showcasing Birmingham and UK poetic talent in colourful and exciting ways – as you would expect from a press that has grown out of the giddy and flamboyant, annual four days of poetry and spoken word that is Verve Poetry Festival, Birmingham.

Added to this is a colourful pamphlet series featuring poets who have previously performed at our sister festival and a debut performance poetry series which sees us working with the brightest rising stars on the UK spoken word scene. We also assert our right to publish any poetry we feel needs and deserves to find print wherever we find it. Like the festival, we will strive to think about poetry in inclusive ways and embrace the multiplicity of approaches towards this glorious art.

You can find out more about Verve Poetry Press on the publisher’s website, where you can also sign up to the mailing list. You can follow the press on Twitter, Instagram, and 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.

2004

November 23, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I hadn’t heard of Section 28 and how it was repealed
in November 2003 in England and Wales but I knew
that taking out the library’s only copy of Oranges Are
Not the Only Fruit would be difficult, so I tried to read
as much of the book as I could behind Harry Potter and
the Chamber of Secrets till the librarian asked what I was
reading and said do your parents know, which made me
turn the colour of my school tie. The librarian smiled like
people do in films before the scene changes to a moody shot
of the protagonist by the sea on a stormy day contemplating
whether to swim in the tidal pool full of seaweed with no life-
guard on duty and said you’re reading a book from the Adult
Section, at which point the babies who were normally crying
stopped and I thought about the Childline poster at school
which now had the word GAY graffitied across the boy on
the phone looking sort of sad with the number 0800 1111
printed in one of those typefaces that tried too hard to be
popular with teenagers and I thought about everything I’d
say if I called up but as the librarian asked me again to put
Oranges back on the shelf even Childline didn’t comfort me
much as I realised the counsellor could be someone like her

by Jo Morris Dixon

News from the Poetry Centre: we recently announced the winners of our International Poetry Competition, judged by Will Harris. You can find out who won and who was shortlisted in the EAL and Open categories on our website, where you can also register to attend our online awards event on 7 December. Everyone is welcome to attend! You’ll be able to hear from the winners in both categories and also from the judge, Will Harris, who will talk about judging the competition and give a short reading from his work.

This week’s poet, Jo Morris Dixon, will be launching her pamphlet online this evening (Tuesday) at 7.30pm alongside other Verve poets who will also be sharing new work: Zoe Brigley, Phoebe Stuckes, and Golnoosh Nour. You can sign up to attend for free. Just visit this page for the Zoom details.

Jo Morris Dixon’s debut pamphlet I told you everything reveals how poetry can function as a holding place for difficult experiences and emotions. Through language at once vivid and straightforward, Dixon skilfully addresses coming-of-age themes which are often left unexplored, even in therapy rooms. There is a keen attentiveness to form in these startling poems, ranging from the sonnet to the Golden Shovel. Urgent, complex and searingly honest, I told you everything is a fierce addition to poetry and queer writing in the UK. You can read more about it and buy a copy on the Verve website.

Jo Morris Dixon grew up in Birmingham and now lives in London. She has worked in museums and currently works for a mental health charity. Her poetry has been published in Oxford Poetry and The Poetry Review. She was longlisted for the 2015 Plough Poetry Prize and the 2020 National Poetry Competition.  I told you everything is her debut pamphlet. Read more about Jo’s work on her website.

You can find out more about Verve Poetry Press on the publisher’s website, where you can also sign up to the mailing list. You can follow the press on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Foxes

November 1, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I lie awake at night thinking of all the times I was told
to stay quiet. All the times I should have said nothing.

Listen, I am only a mangy fox among the recycling bins,
screeching to no one, chewing on my own tail. I know

I’m supposed to be checking over my shoulder
for something, but what? I keep expecting

the yellow window light of other people’s houses
to bust open like a yolk and let me in. I keep waiting

to be picked up and held until I stop shaking
but I’m difficult to touch. Even the stars

are absenting themselves to the orange dark.
I sit at home, I lick my wounds. I chose

all of this, my job, this city, I pulled it close,
over and over with my grubby little hands.

by Phoebe Stuckes

Her first pamphlet since her debut full collection Platinum Blonde sees Phoebe Stuckes’ trademark poems of high humour and hubris take on a dreamier, more abstract, quality. Perhaps the ‘wise-cracking party girl’ of her earlier work is sensing that, for a while at least, the party is postponed. There isn’t much worth staying up late for any more in these poems. Instead, our character lies awake in bed long into the night or wakes up into a pre-dawn world they barely recognise. And the strange new rural setting they wake to is inviting and also threatening and therefore not to be trusted. Read more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Verve website.

Phoebe Stuckes is a writer from West Somerset now living in London. She has been a winner of the Foyle Young Poets award four times and is a former Barbican Young Poet. Her writing has appeared in Poetry Review, The Rialto, The North and Ambit among others. Her debut pamphlet, Gin & Tonic was shortlisted for The Michael Marks Award 2017. She has been awarded an Eric Gregory Award and The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. Her first full length collection, Platinum Blonde, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2020. You can find out more about Phoebe on her website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram (and if you’d like to keep pace with her baking exploits, you can find those here).

You can find out more about Verve Poetry Press on the publisher’s website, where you can also sign up to the mailing list. You can follow the press on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

10th April 2020

April 6, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Dad has mowed the lawn two days in a row.
It explains our lives now – the pushing along

of a machine, blades with nothing to cut –
acting our lives out just to be purposeful.

I got dressed up for a zoom conference
and cried at a kind letter which landed on the doormat.

I need two witnesses who aren’t beneficiaries
to finalise my will. My lawyer suggests

I ask my neighbours to watch through the window,
because even with expected deaths the Government

aren’t changing the rules. The GP rang this afternoon
trying to talk about a DNR order. I refused,

instead told him about starlings murmurating
and all the living I have left to do.

by Hannah Hodgson

News from the Poetry Centre: our latest podcast is now available! Tune in to hear Scottish Gaelic poet Niall O’Gallagher read and discuss three poems – in Gaelic & English – and talk about issues of translation, traditional forms, and the Gaelic community in Glasgow/Ghlaschu. You can find the podcast on our website and also on the usual podcast providers – just search for ‘Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre Podcast’ – and do let us know what you think! We’re on social media @brookespoetry and you can e-mail us via the website.

‘10th April 2020’ is copyright © Hannah Hodgson, 2021. It is reprinted from Where I’d Watch Plastic Trees Not Grow (Verve Poetry Press, 2021) by permission of Verve Poetry Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and order a copy on the Verve website. Verve is offering a special bundle of all four of its recent pamphlets at a reduced price (all of which have been featured as Weekly Poems in recent instalments), and you can find out more about that offer on the Verve site.

Notes from Verve Poetry Press:

Hannah has taken her regular hospitalisations due to serious illness and made it into astonishing poetry in her pamphlet Where I’d Watch Plastic Trees Not Grow. Her world of the hospital is sometimes like a zoo, sometimes like a gallery and sometimes a crowded town square. The wards contain tigers and crows, butterflies – doctors become poets, the dead turn into an art installation, while outside, the trees are plastic – as unchanging as Hannah’s shielding days that ‘drag like a foot.’ But between the pulled curtains of these words the details of real-life amongst the terminally ill are depicted in full colour. A daughter ‘cries neatly in a corner’ while her mourning father spins ‘his wedding band around his finger.’ Nurses fill ‘carrier bags marked ‘patient’s property’,’ while ‘the industrial plastic’ crinkles as a body is lifted from bed to trolley in its bag. The poet’s eye feels unblinking at times – unable but also unwilling to blink. How could it when it has so much to show? These poems are heavy with import, but they are light with the liveliness of art that is beautifully rendered. Read more about the pamphlet on the Verve website.

Hannah Hodgson is a poet living with life-limiting illness. Her work has been published by the Poetry Society, Teen Vogue and Poetry Salzburg , amongst others. She is the recipient of a 2020 Northern Writers Award for Poetry. Her first poetry pamphlet Dear Body was published by Wayleave Press in 2018. You can read more about Hannah’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Verve Poetry Press is a Birmingham-based publisher dedicated to promoting and showcasing Birmingham and Midlands poetic talent in colourful and exciting ways – as you would expect from a press that has grown out of the giddy and flamboyant, annual four days of poetry and spoken word that is Verve Poetry Festival, Birmingham. Added to this is a colourful and prize-winning pamphlet series featuring poets who have previously performed at our sister festival and a debut performance poetry series, which has seen us working with the brightest rising stars on the UK spoken word scene. We also assert our right to publish any poetry we feel needs and deserves to find print wherever we find it. Verve was awarded the Saboteur Award for Most Innovative Publisher in 2019 and the Michael Marks Publisher’s Award 2019. Find out more about Verve Poetry Press on the publisher’s website and follow the press on Twitter and Instagram.

Clouds of Doubt

March 30, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Mother’s mouth was a story-telling flower,
painted in her favourite bougainvillea
lipstick, conjuring clouds of doubt
about where she was born.

Sometimes she’d say it was Cuernavaca,
‘the city of eternal spring’,
on the slopes of her beloved volcanoes
and the Chichinatzin mountains,

where dad would stop to buy her orchids.
Other times, she’d say we came from Mixtecs.
But she looked down on ‘indios’ and ‘prietos’,
only pointing out her skin colour

to boast how she turned chocolate in the sun.
While she resented my questions,
what else could I do? As a child,
I felt the weight she carried,

how she seemed trapped in her game
of concealing and revealing,
then sighs, quick laughter, silence.
My ancestors lie like budbursts in these tales.

by Marina Sánchez

Notes on the poem: Indios: native Indians from one of the many indigenous tribes in Mexico; Prietos: slang for someone who has dark skin.

News from the Poetry Centre: our latest podcast is now available! Tune in to hear Scottish Gaelic poet Niall O’Gallagher read and discuss three poems – in Gaelic & English – and talk about issues of translation, traditional forms, and the Gaelic community in Glasgow/Ghlaschu. You can find the podcast on our website and also on the usual podcast providers – just search for ‘Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre Podcast’ – and do let us know what you think! We’re on social media @brookespoetry and you can e-mail us via the website.

This week’s poem is taken from Marina Sánchez’s new pamphlet Mexica Mix, and you can sign up for the launch of the pamphlet tomorrow, 31 March, when Marina will be reading alongside three other poets who also have new pamphlets out with Verve: Hannah Hodgson, Jamie Hale, and Natalie Whittaker. We have shared poetry by Jamie and Natalie over the past few weeks and we’ll be featuring a poem by Hannah next week. Verve is offering a special bundle of all four of its recent pamphlets at a reduced price, and you can find out more about that offer on the Verve site,

‘Clouds of Doubt’ is copyright © Marina Sánchez, 2021. It is reprinted from Mexica Mix (Verve Poetry Press, 2021) by permission of Verve Poetry Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and order a copy on the Verve website.

Notes from Verve Poetry Press:

In her new pamphlet, Mexica Mix, Marina Sánchez, one of the most distinctive poets from the UK’s Latinx community, explores her experiences of living in Mexico, Spain and the UK. Through the arc of Family, Icons and Earth, she writes a profound, rich and well-crafted sequence of poems grappling with displacement, bilingual identity and mixed heritage, challenging cultural icons and affirming her relationship with the planet, rooted in her Indigenous Mexican ancestry. By turns lyrical, urgent, sensual and subversive, her powerful use of vivid imagery and language both voice the personal and engage the collective. You can learn more about the pamphlet on the Verve website.

Marina Sánchez is a Latinx mix of Indigenous Mexican/Spanish/British living in London. She is an award-winning poet and translator, widely published in literary journals. Her poems have been placed in many national and international competitions and then anthologised. Her debut pamphlet Dragon Child (Acumen, 2014), was Book of the Month in the poetry kit website and was featured in the British Library’s The Hidden Surprises of Poetry Pamphlets Event (2019). Some of her poems are included in Un Nuevo Sol (Flipped Eye, 2019), the first UK Latinx anthology. To find out more about Marina’s work, visit her poetry p f pages.

viii

March 18, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

the war had ended and we, the survivors
all rotten-toed and trench-tired went home safe
to the Kansas base and we had survived the war
survived the sinking mud and shells and

just when we thought the war had ended safe
and heading back home from Kansas sick, a cough
of relief we said we spread across the states
to the arms of our families coughing a bit

but just a bit we said and not that bad and then
we were dying they were dying dying and nobody
knew the flu had dogged our footsteps home
all those hungry ghosts still out there entrenched

and they say that we were the victors in coffins
and urns they say that we were the victors

by Jamie Hale

This week’s poem is taken from Jamie Hale’s new pamphlet Shield, and you can sign up for the launch of the pamphlet on 31 March, when Jamie will be reading alongside three other Verve poets who also have new pamphlets out with Verve: Hannah Hodgson, Marina Sánchez, and Natalie Whittaker, whose work we shared last week. We’ll be featuring work by Hannah and Marina as upcoming Weekly Poems.

‘viii’ is copyright © Jamie Hale, 2021. It is reprinted from Shield (Verve Poetry Press, 2021) by permission of Verve Poetry Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and order a copy on the Verve website.

Notes from Verve Poetry Press:

As the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, Jamie was told by their GP that, due to their underlying health condition, they would not be a priority for critical care treatment.

Using the compressed form of a sonnet, Jamie wrote and re-wrote the experience of facing their own mortality, sometimes in their own voice, sometimes from the perspectives of others – a nurse working during the pandemic or the first carriers of the Spanish Flu – capturing the crisis from all angles. This work became a pamphlet, Shield, 21 sonnets following Jamie through the grief of facing death while newly married, and into a place of resilience, resistance, and a commitment to creation against mortality.

Jamie Hale is an artist, curator, poet, writer, playwright, actor, and director. They create poetry, comedy, scriptwriting, and drama for page, stage, and screen. They have performed their work at the Barbican, Invisible Fest, Tate Modern, the Southbank Centre and with Graeae, and have written for publications including the Guardian and Magma. Their pandemic poetry pamphlet, Shield, was published in January 2021. They are also an expert in disability and health and social care policy: They are CEO of Pathfinders Neuromuscular Alliance, chair of Lewisham Disabled People’s Commission, and are studying for a Master’s degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics of Health at UCL.

Find out more about Jamie’s work on their website or follow them on Twitter.

tree

March 10, 2021March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

on the path to the station
there’s a tree      that marks the seasons
look baby       blossom
look baby       leaves
look baby       autumn
next year I’ll show you autumn and it will be so beautiful
the world is      so beautiful
I will show you

one day I wake up and it’s November
bare branches are faulty umbilical cords
failing to implant the sky

tree

medical students perch around the room
drawn to our rare        and bitter fruit

the consultant sketches     winter branches
in biro blue        to explain what connects

me to you      what’s not getting through

by Natalie Whittaker

This week we are very pleased to share two poems by Natalie Whittaker from her second pamphlet, Tree, which is being published by Verve Poetry Press on 15 March. These two pieces appear at either end of Natalie’s new pamphlet. As some readers will know, we published Natalie’s first pamphlet, Shadow Dogs, in 2018 through our ignitionpress, and it’s great to see Natalie continuing her publication success with this latest, very moving and powerful collection.

Do sign up for the launch of Tree on 31 March, when Natalie will be reading alongside three other Verve poets who also have new pamphlets out with Verve: Hannah Hodgson, Marina Sánchez, and Jamie Hale. We’ll be featuring work by Hannah, Marina and Jamie as upcoming Weekly Poems.

‘Tree’ and ‘Tree’ are copyright © Natalie Whittaker, 2021. They are reprinted from Tree (Verve Poetry Press, 2021) by permission of Verve Poetry Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and pre-order a copy on the Verve website.

Notes from Verve Poetry Press:

In Tree, Natalie Whittaker is writing about her personal experience of stillbirth and the mental illness that can follow such a traumatic event. It is a subject that is still rarely addressed in poetry, writing or conversation. That she is able to do so here, in eighteen intricate, carefully crafted poems, in a way that is engaging, communicative, distressing and yet also beautiful, is a testament to her abilities as a poet, her strong grasp on the power of language and the power of her imagination.

With these powers, she brings a harrowing subject close up and enables the reader to truly feel, to see, to understand, to share. It is a brave and necessary work, wonderfully and heartbreakingly realised. Read more about the pamphlet on the Verve Poetry Press website.

Natalie Whittaker is a poet and secondary school teacher from South East London. Her debut pamphlet Shadow Dogs was published by ignitionpress in 2018. Natalie is one of the London Library’s emerging writers for 2020 / 2021. Her poems have been widely published in UK magazines and anthologies; she was commended in the Verve poetry competition 2020, and won second place in the Kent and Sussex poetry competition 2020. You can follow Natalie on Twitter and Instagram.

Verve Poetry Press is a Birmingham-based publisher dedicated to promoting and showcasing Birmingham and Midlands poetic talent in colourful and exciting ways – as you would expect from a press that has grown out of the giddy and flamboyant, annual four days of poetry and spoken word that is Verve Poetry Festival, Birmingham. Added to this is a colourful pamphlet series featuring poets who have previously performed at our sister festival – Natalie’s pamphlet is the latest addition to this prize-winning series – and a debut performance poetry series, which had seen us working with the brightest rising stars on the UK spoken word scene. We also assert our right to publish any poetry we feel needs and deserves to find print wherever we find it. Verve was awarded the Saboteur Award for Most Innovative Publisher in 2019 and the Michael Marks Publisher’s Award 2019. Find out more about Verve Poetry Press on the publisher’s website and follow the press on Twitter and Instagram.

Wonderful

October 13, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Over the years they’ve climbed
to the very lip of the sash,
her fingerprints.
And where she’s knelt, bowing
upwards, a golden reed
the marks have scattered
a constellation of effort;
the hours, days, weeks,
of learning how to grow.
She loops her fingers
around my thumb,
and my heart unlocks. You see,
it’s that she’s touching
me, and whenever someone
touches me (especially
her) I want to cry.
I want to tell her
I love her. But instead
I say, mommy’s sad
today. She slips
from the bed
to the floor, walks
to her little stool:
opens the window.

by Helen Calcutt

This week’s poet, Helen Calcutt, will be launching her new pamphlet online with Verve Poetry Press on Tuesday 20 October from 7.30-8.45pm and you can join her! She’ll be reading alongside Carrie Etter, Louise Fazackerley and Shazea Quraishi, who have also recently published pamphlets with Verve. Sign up for the launch here.

Notes from Verve Poetry Press:

In September 2017, Helen Calcutt’s brother Matthew took his own life. He was 40 years old. ‘… the phone rang / and when I answered it / you’d killed / yourself, and that was the start / of you being dead.’ This is the starting point of an astonishing new pamphlet of poems by Helen Calcutt. At times harrowing; at others hopeful – always deeply felt and beautifully realised. These poems display the poise and precision of a poet already at the height of her powers, writing the un-writable, weaving the terrible into something relatable and filled with the light of understanding. How do we survive the tumultuous presence of grief? How does the trauma of losing a loved one to suicide affect, our identity, our creativity, and our ability to love? How – in a world shattered by incomparable change and severe loss – do we build a life from the wreckage? Because we do. Somehow, we do. You can read more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Verve website.

Helen Calcutt’s poetry and critical writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Huffington Post, the Brooklyn Review, Unbound, Poetry Scotland, Wild Court, Envoi, The London Magazine and others. Her debut pamphlet, Sudden Rainfall (Perdika, 2014) was a PBS Choice. Her debut collection, Unable Mother, was published by V.Press in 2018. She is the editor and creator of the anthology Eighty-Four (Verve Poetry Press, 2019) which was a Sabotage Best Anthology shortlisted title, and a Poetry Wales Book of the Year, and raised money for CALM’s prevent male suicide campaign. You can follow Helen on Twitter and find out more about her work on her website.

Verve Poetry Press is a Birmingham-based publisher dedicated to promoting and showcasing Birmingham and Midlands poetic talent in colourful and exciting ways – as you would expect from a press that has grown out of the giddy and flamboyant, annual four days of poetry and spoken word that is Verve Poetry Festival, Birmingham. Added to this is a colourful pamphlet series featuring poets who have previously performed at our sister festival – Helen’s pamphlet is the latest addition to this prize-winning series – and a debut performance poetry series, which had seen us working with the brightest rising stars on the UK spoken word scene. We also assert our right to publish any poetry we feel needs and deserves to find print wherever we find it. Verve was awarded the Saboteur Award for Most Innovative Publisher in 2019 and the Michael Marks Publisher’s Award 2019. Find out more about Verve Poetry Press on the publisher’s website and follow the press on Twitter and Instagram.

The Englishman

April 2, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The Englishman is a regular with a usual.
He has slapped a bar-top laughing.

The Englishman is a charmer and a ladies’ man.
He’s been told off by a barmaid.

Whenever there are ladies present, he says
not when there are ladies present.

We should not be jealous of the Englishman.
He simply had the foresight to buy property.

He barbecues and cooks proper English breakfasts.
He insists on carving any meat.

The Englishman is a breast, and not a leg man.
He prefers the white meat.

On forms, he writes: English, male.
He hesitates between White and Prefer not to say.

He places great significance on handshakes.
He can tell a lot by an Englishman’s handshake.

He shakes hands with children and his brother.
The Englishman kisses ladies on the hand or cheek.

In the bathroom, the Englishman has a cheeky
Punch cartoon, taking aim at the establishment,

and when he pisses, the Englishman aims
for the water, not the bowl. He splashes joyously.

The Englishman is not pissed, actually.
He can handle his drink, and his own affairs.

The Englishman has had an affair. He wears
a signet ring and not a wedding band.

The Englishman doesn’t signal when he changes
lanes on roundabouts or the ring road.

The Englishman is very sorry. He didn’t realise
you were in here, getting changed.

by Ali Lewis

The Poetry Centre is delighted to say that one of our most recent ignitionpress pamphlets, Hinge by Alycia Pirmohamed, has been selected as the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Summer 2020! You can find out more about Alycia’s wonderful pamphlet on our website (scroll down) where you can also hear her read a poem. Although we’re currently unable to post out copies of the pamphlets because of the coronavirus restrictions, any orders will be fulfilled as soon as possible.

‘The Englishman’ is copyright © Ali Lewis, 2020. It is reprinted from Hotel (Verve Poetry Press, 2020) by permission of Verve Poetry Press. You can read more about the pamphlet here.

Ali Lewis is a poet from Nottingham. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. He has a degree in Politics from Cambridge, where he received the John Dunn and Precious Pearl Prizes and was a member of the Footlights, and an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, where he was shortlisted for the Pat Kavanagh and Ivan Juritz Awards. Ali is an AHRC-funded doctoral student at Durham University and Assistant Editor at Poetry London. You can learn more about Ali and his work on his website and follow him on Twitter.

Blood is washed off a car, the earth is packed away, relationships fracture and mend. Hotel, a striking debut pamphlet from Eric Gregory Award winner Ali Lewis is a book of both close focus and great expansion. We zoom in on a snowflake’s edge and a freckled wrist, and at the same time witness the continents merge and the universe expand into something unknowable. In a collection that contends with the seeming inevitability of masculinity, of grief, and of people moving apart, Hotel shows us that we exist in rooms of similar layouts and puts a glass to the walls between so we might overhear. Find out more about the pamphlet here.

Verve Poetry Press is a fairly new and already award-winning press focussing hard on meeting a need in Birmingham – a need for the vibrant poetry scene here in Brum to find a way to present itself to the poetry world via publication. Co-founded by Stuart Bartholomew and Amerah Saleh, it is publishing poets from all corners of the city – poets that represent the city’s varied and energetic qualities and will communicate its many poetic stories. Added to this is a colourful pamphlet series featuring poets who have previously performed at our sister festival – and a poetry show series which captures the magic of longer poetry performance pieces by poets such as Polarbear and Matt Abbott. Like the festival, we will strive to think about poetry in inclusive ways and embrace the multiplicity of approaches towards this glorious art. Find out more here. In 2019 the press was voted Most Innovative Publisher at the Saboteur Awards and won the Publisher’s Award for Poetry Pamphlets at the Michael Marks Awards.

July 24th

March 26, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Eighty-six years ago today
the Serpentine opened to women
to swim without fear of arrest

I’m lost on the Heath searching
for these ponds, it’s thirty-degrees
in Hampstead, what’s with all the beards?

Two girls in front are talking
about their exes, how they’re okay
now they’re with new men

Don’t tell me fullness is found
from a man, I’ll shoot myself
or dehydrate, a more feasible option

There’s a lot of holding of hands
and leads, my palms are empty
if my mother were here she’d say

Find a good book, easy
for her with a husband and a spaniel
now I’m in the water I relish

The freedom, no one knows I’m here
I could just bob under (not
to get all Virginia Woolf about it)

At lunchtime today we spoke
on the phone, big literary things
are happening for you, how apt

I was sat in Bloomsbury Square
remember Southease, cider
along the Ouse, Monk House

All our Sussex hours? If love
was just lunchtimes of erudite chat
we would have worked completely

But I have this need to swim
with ducks and reeds, you said
it was sweet. It was wild

by Roxy Dunn

Roxy Dunn’s debut pamphlet Clowning, published by Eyewear in 2016, is their highest-selling pamphlet to date and was described by PN Review as ‘quick-fire, appealing, lit by humorous warmth.’ Her poetry has appeared in The Rialto, Orbis and Ofi Press, and a selection of her poems are also printed in the anthology Podium Poets #2, published by Nasty Little Press. She lives in North London and works as an actor and writer. Follow Roxy on Twitter.

Big Sexy Lunch is an irreverent, entertaining account of millennial philosophy and relationships. Roxy Dunn’s observational wit and reflective self-doubt muse on sex, singledom, and falling in and out of love. There’s a directness and an honesty to these poems which humorously scrutinises the conflicts and contradictions of being attached to someone and our ongoing appetite for fulfilment. Read more about the pamphlet and get hold of a copy here.

Added to this is a colourful pamphlet series featuring poets who have previously performed at our sister festival – and a poetry show series which captures the magic of longer poetry performance pieces by poets such as Polarbear and Matt Abbott. Like the festival, we will strive to think about poetry in inclusive ways and embrace the multiplicity of approaches towards this glorious art. Find out more here.

In 2019 the press was voted Most Innovative Publisher at the Saboteur Awards and won the Publisher’s Award for Poetry Pamphlets at the Michael Marks Awards.