Miss Armstrong: Invisible woman

~ oxfordbrookesuni

After Maya Angelou

The after-office diners by the window
laugh and move in duplicate,
blonde highlights echoed by the glass. 

But I have no reflection, not a glimmer.
They have twins against the night
where I, who dine alone, have none.  

I search for traces of my movement,
lift my beer glass. It exists.
Its substance glints in recognition. 

None of me reveals itself.
The girls’ reflections leave with them
while I remain a silent shadow. 

I’m invisible, unseen,
uncertain as a ghost that plays
from time to time along the walls. 


by Kathy Gee

The Poetry Centre 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.

We also recently announced the winners of our first PoetryFilm competition in which filmmakers responded to poetry from our ignitionpress poets. You can view the winning films – by Gabrielle Turner, Marie Craven, and Jane Glennie, 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 (perhaps you heard it dramatized on BBC Radio 4 last week?), and Shara’s collection, The Explosive Expert’s Wife, has received enthusiastic reviews and award nominations. There are a few spaces left for this event 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!

‘Miss Armstrong: Invisible woman’ is copyright © Kathy Gee, 2019. It is reprinted from Checkout (V. Press, 2019) by permission of V. Press.

Kathy Gee studied history and archaeology, later turning this into a career in museums, heritage and leadership coaching. Having published books, articles and pamphlets on the local history of South Devon and National Trust properties in Cornwall, she now lives in Worcestershire and started writing poetry in 2011. Widely published online and in print, her first collection, Book of Bones, was published by V. Press in 2016. In the same year, she wrote the spoken word elements for a contemporary choral piece, Suite For The Fallen Soldier. You can hear Kathy read a poem from her new pamphlet, Checkout, here.

Poet Rhian Edwards writes that Kathy Gee’s new pamphlet ‘Checkout is a sequence of character portraits and vignettes based on the ephemeral characters that cross a corner shop’s bell-chiming threshold. Told from every side of the social spectrum, this is a play for voices, voices in verses, a cross between Under Milk Wood and Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. This is a bold and brave collection from the distinctive voice of Kathy Gee.’ Read more about the pamphlet on the V. Press website.

V. Press publishes poetry and flash fiction that is very very, with emphasis on quality over any particular style. Established with a launch at Ledbury Poetry Festival 2013 and shortlisted in The Michael Marks Publishers’ Award 2017, V. Press poetry knows what it wants to do and does it well. For more, visit the V. Press website.

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

Rise

~ 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!

‘Rise’ is copyright © Martin Hayes, 2018. It is reprinted from Roar! (Smokestack Books, 2018) by permission of Smokestack Books.

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.

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.

Back they sputter

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Back they sputter like the fires of love, the bees to their broken home
which they’re putting together again for dear life, knowing nothing
of the heart beating under their floorboards, besieged here, seeking
a life of its own. All day their brisk shadows zigzag and flicker

along a whitewashed gable, trafficking in and out of a hair-crack
under wooden eaves, where they make a life for themselves that knows
no let-up through hours of exploration and return, their thighs golden
with pollen, their multitudinous eyes stapled to a single purpose:

to make winter safe for their likes, stack-packing the queen’s chambers
with sweetness. Later, listen: one warm humming note, their night music.

by Eamon Grennan

This week’s publisher, Candlestick Press, will be launching its latest pamphlet, Ten Poems about Horses (featured in a Weekly Poem recently ), next Wednesday 19 June at Alison’s of Tewkesbury, with Alison Brackenbury and a line-up of guest poets. For more details, visit the Candlestick Press Facebook page . Sales support Bransby Horses, an equine welfare charity.

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. This is an event not to be missed! Register for a free place 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 details here !

‘Back they sputter’ is copyright © Eamon Grennan, 2019. It is reprinted from Ten Poems about Bees, introduced by Brigit Strawbridge Howard (Candlestick Press, 2019) by permission of Candlestick. You can read more about the pamphlet here.

Eamon Grennan was born in 1941 and educated at University College Dublin where he studied English and Italian. He went on to complete a PhD in English at Harvard. He has published a number of poetry collections, as well as reviews and essays including Facing The Music: Irish Poetry in the 20th Century (Creighton University, 2000). His poetry books include Wildly for Days (Gallery Press, 1983), Out of Breath (Gallery, 2007) and There Now which won the 2016 Pigott Poetry Prize for Best Collection published in Ireland. Leopardi: Selected Poems won the 1997 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Until recently he was Dexter M. Ferry Junior Professor of English at Vassar College. He now teaches on the graduate writing programmes at the Universities of New York and Columbia but spends as much time as he can in the west of Ireland. You can read more about his work here.

Candlestick is a small, independent press based in Nottingham and has been publishing its sumptuous ‘instead of a card’ poetry pamphlets since 2008. Subjects range from Birds and Cricket to Tea, Kindness, Home and Puddings. Candlestick Press titles are stocked by chain and independent bookshops, as well as by galleries, museums and garden centres. They can also be ordered online at  Candlestick’s website where you can find out more about the full range of titles. You can follow Candlestick on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. In 2018 Candlestick sold over 75,000 pamphlets.

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

The Europeans 

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I saw the Europeans drinking wine under trees.
It was August and their children seemed wise
beyond their years, moving with the dappled light.

Later the Europeans were wearing bright uniforms,
simultaneously grand and preposterous,
their cigarillos discolouring their moustaches.

When the winter came, the Europeans retreated
into forests. People were wolves or wolves
were people. These matters were increasingly unclear.

Every village had good bread, indolent officials,
its own throat-clenching hooch. Occasionally,
its peace was disturbed as love ended in some alleyway.

The Europeans were volatile or taciturn, hearty
or shiftless. Really, you could take your pick.
The only constant was the scrape and shudder of those trams

in the very early morning. In their cities,
the streets were museums. Someone had been shot
heroically on every corner. You could still put your finger

into the bullet holes in the masonry, just as a violin started
up in that apartment over the café. The Europeans
had much to say of poetry and much silence to say it into.

I became convinced they knew something
they would not tell me, but I did not dare
to ask the veterans on the parched square.

by David Clarke

The deadline for our PoetryFilm competition is this Friday (7 June)! Respond in a short film to a poem by one of our award-winning ignitionpress poets and win prizes and screenings! You can find the poems and more about how to enter here.

The Poetry Centre has also just 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 two 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. This is an event not to be missed! Register for a free place 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.

‘The Europeans’ is copyright © David Clarke, 2019. It is reprinted from The Europeans (Nine Arches Press, 2019) by permission of Nine Arches Press.

Notes from Nine Arches:

David Clarke, winner of the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2013, returns with his second collection, The Europeans. Simultaneously close to home and looking outward beyond these shores, these wry and perceptive poems revel with form and encompass journeys, ideas of nationhood and national identity, and the optimism of a time when Europe and the UK enjoyed a quite different ‘entente cordiale’. They are a warning against nostalgia, a lucid and prescient exploration of how we see ourselves and how we are seen. Read more about the collection on the Nine Arches website. 

David Clarke was born in Lincolnshire. His first pamphlet, Gaud, won the Michael Marks award in 2013. His first collection, Arc, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2015 and was longlisted for the Polari Prize. Another pamphlet, Scare Stories, was published by V Press in 2017 and was named a Poetry School ‘Book of the Year.’ His poems have appeared in magazines including Magma, Tears in the Fence, Long Poem Magazine and The Interpreter’s House. You can follow David on Twitter.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2017, All My Mad Mothers by Jacqueline Saphra was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Our titles have also been shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize, and in 2016 David Clarke’s debut poems, Arc, was longlisted for the Polari Prize. To date we have now published over seventy poetry publications, and 20 issues of Under the Radar magazine (and counting). Follow Nine Arches on Facebook and 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.

After Seven Photographic Portraits of a Grey Connemara Pony

~ oxfordbrookesuni


You will know a pony by its ears:
            Listening out for weather forecasts and love songs.

By its mane:
            Tossed over its eyes like a witch’s broom.

By its coat:
            Always buttoned up, tight-fitting, dusty and well-worn.

By its eyes:
            That look at you, then look at you again to take you in.

By its hooves:
            Made for dancing, and so are worn at the tips.

By its mouth:
            That loves to eat words given with pats of the hand.

By its nose:
            That knows you, and lifts the pony’s head to let it know you’re coming.

By its tail:
           That conducts the symphony of birdsong, lake-song, light-song.
           That is the bog underfoot, here above the village of Roundstone.

  

by Tony Curtis

Candlestick Press will be launching its latest pamphlet, Ten Poems about Horses, on Wednesday 19 June at Alison’s of Tewkesbury, with Alison Brackenbury and a line-up of guest poets. For more details, visit the Candlestick Press Facebook page . Sales support Bransby Horses, an equine welfare charity.

Don’t forget to register for the exciting reading with Ilya Kaminsky and Shara Lessley on 26 June, the symposium ‘Our Poetry and Our Needs’ on 9 July, and the launches of our latest ignitionpress pamphlets on 22 and 23 July. There are more details about all of these events here .

Finally, if you’re keen on filmmaking and poetry, why not enter our filmpoem competition! Choose a poem by one of our ignitionpress poets, respond to it in a short film, and win prizes and screenings! The deadline is 7 June, and there are more details on our blog .

‘After Seven Photographic Portraits of a Grey Connemara Pony’ is copyright © Tony Curtis, 2019. It is reprinted from Ten Poems about Horses, selected and introduced by Alison Brackenbury (Candlestick Press, 2019) by permission of Candlestick. You can read more about the pamphlet here.

Tony Curtis was born in Dublin in 1955. He studied Literature at Essex University and Trinity College Dublin. An award-winning poet, Curtis has published ten warmly received collections. His most recent are: Folk (Arc Publications 2011); Pony (Occasional Press 2013) with drawings and paintings by David Lilburn; Approximately in the Key of C (Arc Publications 2015). He has been awarded the Varuna House Exchange Fellowship to Australia and the Irish National Poetry Prize. In April 2018, the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, Minnesota, awarded Curtis the 22nd Lawrence O’Shaughnessy prize for poetry. He has read his poetry all over the world to great acclaim. May 2019 saw the publication of This Flight Tonight – a book that celebrates the lives of Alcock & Brown and their incredible flight from a field in St. John’s, Newfoundland, to a bog in the west of Ireland in June 1919. He is a member of Aosdána. Read more about Tony’s work here.

Candlestick is a small, independent press based in Nottingham and has been publishing its sumptuous ‘instead of a card’ poetry pamphlets since 2008. Subjects range from Birds and Cricket to Tea, Kindness, Home and Puddings. Candlestick Press titles are stocked by chain and independent bookshops, as well as by galleries, museums and garden centres. They can also be ordered online on the Candlestick website, where you can find out more about the full range of titles. You can follow Candlestick on Twitter and  Facebook. In 2018 Candlestick sold over 75,000 pamphlets.

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.

Nearing Warminster

~ oxfordbrookesuni


Salisbury, solitary, sings as if Isaiah in her –

All Along the Watchtower edge and ridge of plain they ride for Warminster.

Anger, broken in her, iron age, stone age, bone and barrow, is as if her
Father yet not father photographed before the war
Unfathomed by her –

Anger of another relatively new to her beside her now
Like coulter – plough-hard, harrow-hard –
Would break the clod of her

For what is yet unheard in her is hoard
It is for him to bare.

As if the solitary village in her, commandeered, were Imber
Unrestored –

As if the word abide with me were loud and overlord in her.


by Gillian Allnutt 

Imber, a village on Salisbury Plain taken over by the army in 1943, is still uninhabited today.
We are delighted to say that this week’s poet, Gillian Allnutt, will be reading in Oxford this evening (Monday) in an event organized jointly by the Poetry Centre and the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture. Spaces for this event are limited, so please register here.

Looking forward, don’t forget to register for the exciting reading with Ilya Kaminsky and Shara Lessley on 26 June, the symposium ‘Our Poetry and Our Needs’ on 9 July, and the launches of our latest ignitionpress pamphlets on 22 and 23 July. There are more details about all of these events here.

Finally, if you’re keen on filmmaking and poetry, why not enter our filmpoem competition! Choose a poem by one of our ignitionpress poets, respond to it in a short film, and win prizes and screenings! The deadline is 7 June, and there are more details on our blog.

‘Nearing Warminster’ is copyright © Gillian Allnutt, 2018. It is reprinted from wake (Bloodaxe Books, 2018) by permission of Bloodaxe Books.

Gillian Allnutt was born in London but spent half her childhood in Newcastle upon Tyne. She is the author of nine poetry collections. Nantucket and the Angel and Lintel were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and poems from these collections are included in her Bloodaxe retrospective How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems (2007), which draws on six published books plus a new collection, Wolf Light, and was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her most recent collections, both from Bloodaxe, are indwelling (2013) and wake (2018). Since 1983 she has taught creative writing in a variety of contexts, mainly in adult education and as a writer in schools. In 2009/10 she held a writing residency with The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (now Freedom From Torture) in the North East, working with asylum seekers in Newcastle and Stockton. She lives in County Durham. Gillian Allnutt was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2016 in February 2017. You can find out more about Gillian’s work on the Bloodaxe website.

Bloodaxe Books was founded in Newcastle by Neil Astley in 1978 and has revolutionised poetry publishing in Britain over four decades. Internationally renowned for quality in literature and excellence in book design, our authors and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry, from the T.S. Eliot Prize and Pulitzer to the Nobel Prize. And books like the Staying Alive trilogy have broken new ground by opening up contemporary poetry to many thousands of new readers. Find out more about Bloodaxe on the publisher’s website.

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

Landscape 

~ oxfordbrookesuni

there is no turf where I’m from
no sponge fertile ground
my landscape is a tarmacadam road
at the foot of the Dublin Mountains
my childhood home a four-bed semi 

I remember the progression
of cars 

Montego
          Peugeot
                    Renault
                               Prius 

and the day my mom arrived
with her very own
ancient Opel Bluebird
the same colour as the Loreto nuns
and the same age as me
in my final year of secondary school 

I sat up front with her
pleased as punch not to be biking home
past the throngs of teenage boys from the other school
in my brown skirt
and long gabardine coat 

when we pulled up to the drive-thru
my heart sang for a cheeseburger
we sat on woolly seats
munching fries in the car park
of a suburban shopping mall 

unaware of the blue-grey tint
poised by the mountains
just behind our backs

by Julie Morrissy 

This week’s poet, Julie Morrissy, will be launching her new tall-lighthouse collection, Where, the Mile End, on Monday 20 May at the Poetry Café in London alongside another tall-lighthouse poet, Brendan Cleary, whose book Do Horses Fly? is inspired by the images created by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Find out more about the event here.

If you happen to be in Oxford rather than London on Monday (20 May), join the Poetry Centre and the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture as we welcome acclaimed poet Gillian Allnutt to Oxford. Spaces for this event are limited, so please register here.

Looking forward, don’t forget to register for the exciting reading with Ilya Kaminsky and Shara Lessley on 26 June, the symposium ‘Our Poetry and Our Needs’ on 9 July, and the launches of our latest ignitionpress pamphlets on 22 and 23 July. There are more details on all of these events here.

Finally, if you’re keen on filmmaking and poetry, why not enter our filmpoem competition! Choose a poem by one of our ignitionpress poets, respond to it in a short film, and win prizes and screenings! The deadline is 7 June, and there are more details on our blog.

Julie Morrissy is an Irish poet, academic, and critic. She is a recipient of the Next Generation Artist Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. Her debut pamphlet I Am Where (Eyewear, 2015) was shortlisted for Best Poetry Pamphlet in the Saboteur Awards. She earned her PhD in Creative Writing at Ulster University, and she is the Newman Fellow in Creativity at University College Dublin. 

Where, the Mile End, publishedin conjunction with Book*hug Press, Canada, sees tall-lighthouse return to publishing under its original owner/director, Les Robinson. This is poetry with an edge, employing an energetic lyric that follows the poet through Europe, the US, and Canada. Morrissy introduces a deft awareness of image, rhythm, and poetic realisation. The poems intimately link the vitality of two continents, tightly holding the reader to the snow, the streets, and the sensual memories embroidered throughout. Find out more about the book here.

tall-lighthouse has a strong reputation for publishing new talent, and was the first in the UK to publish Helen Mort, Sarah Howe, Liz Berry, Ailbhe Darcy, Adam O’Riordan, Rhian Edwards, Emily Berry, Vidyan Ravintharan, Kate Potts and many others. Find out more on the tall-lighthouse website, or find the press on Facebook and 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.

This Last Year

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Between those Alps and Apennines
on a walk towards the Po,
there are tall, spaced, roadside poplars,
planted fields of silver birch…
At sunset, here, church cupolas
interrupt surrounding darkness
streaked with red hopes for good weather;
but then a so-called super moon
emerges from horizon trees—
their fragile threads of branches
like violent scratch-marks on a ruddy face. 

We’re threading through an after dusk
along the wide, slow-flowing river,
are lost in conversation
on wherever best to live
late days, or else discreetly wonder
about a greener charm in distance
on the far bank’s fertile side,
or at whatever may appear
over deepened skylines this last year. 

Higher, whiter, blurred in mist
floated from warm earth, that moon
might be the common coinage
of our coming separation—
but breaking up is hard to do,
and the best part’s even harder
now migrants go on envying
rights to be taken at the border
closing ahead as we pace on. 

Ahead, through twilight, can you see
outlines of their fainting country?
Where, next year, they’ll good as tell you
not to lament that loss of value
others envy? Abandon rage, outrage
at shames come from a muddy spring?
And why? Because, sans everything,
you’ll reach that other country, age?

2 January 2018


by Peter Robinson

This week’s poet, Peter Robinson, is one of the speakers at an exciting symposium, ‘Our Poetry and Our Needs’, which is being held at the University of Reading on Tuesday 9 July. The event features an international group of poets and academics, is open to all and free to attend. To see the provisional programme and to register, please visit the Eventbrite page here.

Also coming soon, don’t miss the chance to hear the acclaimed poet Gillian Allnutt in Oxford when she reads for us on Monday 20 May in an evening co-organized with the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture. Tickets are free, but register here. 

Finally, look up our Eventbrite listings to find readings by Ilya Kaminsky and Shara Lessley on 26 June and our three ignitionpress poets who will be launching their new pamphlets on 22 and 23 July.

‘This Last Year’ is copyright © Peter Robinson, 2019. It is reprinted from Ravishing Europa (Worple Press, 2019) by permission of Worple Press.

Ravishing Europa, Peter Robinson’s eleventh collection, marks a wholly unexpected development in the poet’s work, prompted, as evident throughout, by the fissures exported from a political party to an entire country and beyond by the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union. Its consequences cast crucial events for this poet, both personal and public, into unforeseen fresh lights. Prompted by a televised debate to wonder in the title poem upon what impulse the founding European myth is based, Robinson’s new poems search through his individual and cultural memory to offer, as the book unfolds, an answer. Read more about the book on the Worple website. 

Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953, and grew up mainly in Liverpool. He co-edited the magazines Perfect Bound and Numbers while helping organize various Cambridge Poetry Festivals and a Poetry International at the South Bank Centre. His many volumes of poetry include a Collected Poems, 1976-2016 (2017), Ghost Characters (2006) and The Look of Goodbye (2008). He was awarded the Cheltenham Prize for This Other Life (1988). Both The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems (2002) and The Returning Sky (2012) were recommendations of the Poetry Book Society. A translator of poetry, mainly from the Italian, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni (with Marcus Perryman) appeared in 2006. Other publications include his aphorisms, Spirits of the Stair (2009), five volumes of literary criticism, the most recent being The Sound Sense of Poetry (2018), various edited collections, anthologies, The Complete Poems, Translations & Selected Prose of Bernard Spencer (2011) and The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2013). A collection of essays on his work, The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson edited by Adam Piette and Katy Price, appeared in 2007. Peter is also the poetry editor for Two Rivers Press and Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. You can read more about Peter’s work on his website.

Worple Press was founded by Peter and Amanda Carpenter in 1997 and publishes books by new and established poets: collections, pamphlets, works in translation, essays, interviews. Early authors included Iain Sinclair, Joseph Woods, Beverley Bie Brahic, Kevin Jackson and the acclaimed American nature poet Peter Kane Dufault. Recent collections include Andy Brown’s Bloodlines, The Tree Line: Poems for Trees, Woods, and People, edited by Michael McKimm, Rockabye by Patricia McCarthy, and The Watching Stair by Diana Hendry. More information can be found at the publisher’s website, and on Facebook and 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.

Cat in an empty apartment

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Dying – one doesn’t do that to a cat. 
For what can a cat do
in an empty apartment.
Scratching against the walls. 
Rubbing on the furniture.
In a way, nothing here was changed, 
and yet it has been altered.
In a way, nothing was moved,
and yet it has been confused.
In the evening, the light burns no more. 

Footsteps heard on the stairway,
but not those.
The hand, which lays fish on the plate, 
is too not the one, that did it once. 

Something does not begin here 
at its usual time.
Something does not happen here 
as it should.
Someone was, and was here 
then at-all-once disappeared 
and now he’s persistently gone.

It peered into all the cupboards.
Scampered across the shelves.
Wedged itself under the rug, investigated. 
Even went against the rule
and scattered the papers.

What else is there to do. 
Sleeping, waiting.

Let him dare return,
let him dare show himself.
Right away he’ll learn,
that one doesn’t do this to a cat. 
There will be a stroll in his direction 
as though utterly begrudging,
little by little,
on most offended paws.
And no leaps or chirps at first.


by Wisława Szymborska; translated by Amelia Sodhi

Kot w pustym mieszkaniu 

Umrzeć – tego się nie robi kotu. 
Bo co ma począć kot
w pustym mieszkaniu. 
Wdrapywać się na ściany. 
Ocierać między meblami.
Nic niby tu nie zmienione, 
a jednak pozamieniane. 
Niby nie przesunięte,
a jednak porozsuwane.
I wieczorami lampa już nie świeci.

Słychać kroki na schodach,
ale to nie te.
Ręka, co kładzie rybę na talerzyk, 
także nie ta, co kładła. 

Coś się tu nie zaczyna 
w swojej zwykłej porze. 
Coś się tu nie odbywa 
jak powinno.
Ktoś tutaj był i był,
a potem nagle zniknął
i uporczywie go nie ma. 

Do wszystkich szaf się zajrzało.
Przez półki przebiegło.
Wcisnęło się pod dywan i sprawdziło. 
Nawet złamało zakaz
i rozrzuciło papiery.
Co więcej jest do zrobienia.
Spać i czekać.

Niech no on tylko wróci, 
niech no się pokaże.
Już on się dowie,
że tak z kotem nie można. 
Będzie się szło w jego stronę 
jakby się wcale nie chciało, 
pomalutku,
na bardzo obrażonych łapach.
O żadnych skoków pisków na początek.


by Wisława Szymborska 

News from the Centre: in celebration of Jazz Appreciation Month, the Poetry Centre is thrilled to bring together contemporary jazz band Wandering Wires and our Beatin’ the Blues competition winners to create a fusion performance of jazz and poetry on Sunday 28th April from 8-9pm at Cafe Tarifa, Cowley Road, Oxford. Book your tickets (only £5) here.

Then on 30 April, we’re at Waterstones to host four Canadian poets (Chad Campbell, James Arthur, Stephanie Warner, and Jim Johnstone) and celebrate the recent publication of an exciting new anthology of Canadian poetry. Sign up to attend here.

And on 20 May we are collaborating with the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture to bring the acclaimed poet Gillian Allnutt  to Oxford – don’t miss her!

Find out more about these and other upcoming events, including a reading by Ilya Kaminsky and Shara Lessley and the launch of three new ignitionpress pamphlets on our Eventbrite page.

This is the second of two poems we are featuring to celebrate the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation, whichis currently open for entries until Friday 12 July. Translate any poem from any language, ancient or modern into English, and be in the running for a cash prize and publication by the Stephen Spender Trust. The categories for the main prize are 14-and-under, 18-and-under and Open (adult), and will be judged by the Poetry Centre’s own Mary Jean Chan, Margaret Jull Costa and Olivia McCannon. For the second year, the Trust is also running a ‘Polish Spotlight‘, with workshops in schools and a special prize for translation from Polish in the categories 10-and-under, 14-and-under and 18-and-under. You can find more details on the Trust’s website.

The winner of last year’s Polish Spotlight in the 18-and-under category was Amelia Sodhi. Writing about her translation of Wisława Szymborska’s poem ‘Cat in an empty apartment’, Amelia says: ‘There are many poems on grief, but never from a cat’s perspective. When I was looking for a poem to translate, ‘Kot w pustym mieszkaniu’ stood out to me. Szymborska captures a beautiful melancholy in this poem, through simplicity, repetition, and notably through the more subjective narration in the last stanza. She is able to recreate a certain feeling of grief that, so far, I have struggled to find in other poems; her illustration of the pain of loss isn’t something over the top but something small, and hence, even more potent.’

The Stephen Spender Trust was established in 1997 to honour Stephen Spender’s achievements as poet and translator of poetry, and as champion of the rights of creative artists and writers to free expression. Founding members who have since died include Valerie Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Czesław Miłosz, Harold Pinter and Natasha Spender. Inspired by Stephen Spender’s literary interests and achievements, the Stephen Spender Trust aims to widen appreciation of the literary legacy of Stephen Spender and his contemporaries and to promote literary translation. You can find out more on the Trust’s website.

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

Love Song for the Ordnance Survey

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Love Song for the Ordnance Survey

            What measure of time is sluicing
through the dappling rings of immortal hills?

            What weight the hollow-hearted burial mounds,
Saxon naves, felled steeples, tribal hill-forts,
ventilation mine-shafts, brick-born water towers,
analogue Cold War transmitters, pillbox viewpoints?

            What radius the boundary arcs,
the stamina of forests’ greened retreat
beaten back at the speckled blots of settlement,
the shaded/sloped river ruts, the symmetry of hangars?

            What current the canals, descending the lock’s silent-shift,
coal boats and Staffordshire china rising in the hulls
and sidelined, quickened by the railways
rising beside motorways, rising onwards? 

            What depth the medicinal baths, restoring spas
sought by new townsfolk, the tumulus of mill races
gone save for great unworking gears turning nothing
in damp summering fields?

            And what volume the settlements,
slumbering in bracketed old-world italics,
inherited after-other names, lost or erased,
the monikers of places declassified?

            What velocity the shifting coastlines
vanishing faster than any paper can skip a heartbeat to?
(and the winter peaks absolved in mists that can neither
be seen or heard, let alone measured?)

            Of all the demarcations multiplied
kept in their latitudinal squares, of each known
and unknown quantity, let us sing
of detail and capacity, the map’s measured love.

by Jane Commane

If you’re a student, don’t forget to enter our Beatin’ the Blues competition, for which we are asking you to respond in poetry to a song by Oxford-based jazz/electronic band Wandering Wires. If you’re one of the winners, we’ll invite you to read your work at a concert alongside the band! For more details, visit our website. The deadline for entries is this Friday!

More news! The Centre has teamed up with IF Oxford Science and Ideas Festival and poet Kate Wakeling to run another poetry workshop for families on 15 April in Oxfordshire County Library. We’ll be encouraging participants to write brand new poems, ready for the  IF Oxford Poetry of Science Competition . So if you know anyone aged 6-16 who is keen on poetry and science, please bring them along! You can sign up here.

Then on 30 April, we’re at Waterstones to host four Canadian poets (Chad Campbell, James Arthur, Stephanie Warner, and Jim Johnstone) and celebrate the recent publication of an exciting new anthology of Canadian poetry. Sign up to attend here.

And on 20 May we are collaborating with the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture to bring the acclaimed poet Gillian Allnutt to Oxford – don’t miss her!

Find out more about these and other upcoming events on our Eventbrite page.

‘Love Song for the Ordnance Survey’ is copyright © Jane Commane, 2018. It is reprinted from Assembly Lines (Bloodaxe Books, 2018) by permission of Bloodaxe Books.

Assembly Lines asks what it means to be here and now, in post-industrial towns and cities of the heartlands that are forever on the periphery. From schools and workplaces and lives lived in ‘a different town, just like this’, these poems take a historical perspective on the present day from the ground upwards – whether the geological strata that underpins a ‘dithering island’ or the ever-moving turf under a racehorses’ hooves.

Jane Commane was born in Coventry and lives and works in Warwickshire. Her first full-length collection, Assembly Lines, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. Her poetry has featured in anthologies including The Best British Poetry 2011 and Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam and in numerous magazines. Jane is editor at Nine Arches Press, co-editor of Under the Radar magazine, co-organiser of the Leicester Shindig poetry series, and is co-author (with Jo Bell) of How to Be a Poet, a creative writing handbook and blog series. In 2017 she was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. You can hear Jane talk about and read from her book Assembly Lines on the BBC’s ‘Start the Week’ programme here and read more about her on her website.

Bloodaxe Books was founded in Newcastle by Neil Astley in 1978 and has revolutionised poetry publishing in Britain over four decades. Internationally renowned for quality in literature and excellence in book design, our authors and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry, from the T.S. Eliot Prize and Pulitzer to the Nobel Prize. And books like the Staying Alive trilogy have broken new ground by opening up contemporary poetry to many thousands of new readers. Find out more about Bloodaxe on the publisher’s website.

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