On the Fjord

April 2, 2019March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The night I left you
the fjord lay so still and clear
as if the water itself
had lost all substance
It was like rowing in empty air

Through a night so infinitely clear
that I suddenly knew
I had to live without shadow
Up against the edge of sleep
away from the reach of your dreams

The sound of years
in starless water. Like rowing
in one’s own heart
through a sorrow as deep and cold
as death itself

On the banks of the starlit shores
along the strait, the houses lay
and shone
with your face in every window
And you did not see me

by Stein Mehren; translated from the Norwegian by Alice Fletcher

På fjorden

Den natten jeg forlot deg
lå fjorden så stille og gjennomsiktig
som om selve vannet
hadde mistet all substans
Det var som å ro i tomme luften

Over en natt så uendelig klar
at jeg plutselig visste
jeg måtte leve uten skygge
Helt nær søvnens skillelinje
utenfor rekkevidden av dine drømmer

Lyden av årer
i stjernløst vann. Som å ro
i sitt eget hjerte
over en sorg så dyp og kald
som døden selv

Ved de stjerneklare breddene
langs sundet, lå husene
og lyste
med ditt ansikt i alle vinduer
Og du så meg ikke

– Stein Mehren

The Centre has teamed up with IF Oxford Science and Ideas Festival and poet Kate Wakeling to run two poetry workshops for families on 9 and 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.

This week’s poem was the winner of the 2018 Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation in the Open category, and the 2019 Prize is 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. The Trust is also running a ‘Polish Spotlight‘ for the second year, 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 winning translator last year was Alice Fletcher. She writes: ‘I have translated ‘På fjorden’ by Stein Mehren because I think it is a perfect example of a typically Norwegian poem; the language is clean, crisp, and deceptively simple, while also being very evocative. As with so much Norwegian literature and poetry, it is deeply connected to nature, as can be seen from the title itself. The language of Mehren’s poem is simple but so poignant, and I think it is a poem that really makes one stop and think. Moreover, it is a poem about love, however tragic, which I think really brings the poem to life for readers.’ You can read more of Alice’s reflections, and find out more about the other prizewinners for 2018, here.

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.

The New Violin

March 26, 2019March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Total eclipse, May–November 1919

Empires have fallen
and birds hold their breath
as discs embrace in a darkness
that questions the weight of light.
Principe Island: Through cloud. Hopeful.
Sobral, Brazil: Eclipse splendid.

The data speak and Moses descends
from the mountain with a paradigm
carved in Riemannian stone.
Only twelve people understand it
and the public has begun to doubt
that two times two still equals four.

The data speak and starlight bends
to the will of strange geometries,
the language of tensor calculus.
Newton is dragged into the light,
fails to compete with the prophesies
of the Suddenly Famous Dr Einstein.

At forty, the way ahead is clear,
a new wife walking at his side.
To celebrate, he buys another violin
and glances back, half-expecting to glimpse
Mileva limping a few steps behind.
He sees only admirers.

by Martin Zarrop

News! The Centre has teamed up with IF Oxford Science and Ideas Festival and poet Kate Wakeling to run two poetry workshops for families on 9 and 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.

Thenon 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.

Martin Zarrop is a retired mathematician who wanted certainty but found life more interesting and fulfilling by not getting it. He started writing poetry in 2006 and can’t stop. His pamphlet No Theory of Everything (2015) was one of the winners of the 2014 Cinnamon Press pamphlet competition. His first full collection Moving Pictures was published by Cinnamon Press in October 2016. Read more about Making Waves 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. Read more about the press on the website.

Tailoring Grief

March 20, 2019March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The tailor says you have to get measured
to make sure grief fits right on your body.
If grief fits too tight it will suck movement out of you,
make you as still as the dead you are mourning.
I once wore grief so tight on my body my ribs tangled into a bow.
The tailor also says wearing an oversized grief will turn you
into a tripping hazard. There is only so much a body can take,
even a plane has weight limits.
We lined up at the tailors to get measured
for my grandfather’s funeral. The women for their Aso-oke,
the men for their Agbada. The orange material draped on the table.
It is our culture to celebrate in colour coordination.
I handed the tailor a torn page from Genevieve magazine
and pointed out the style I wanted.
Imagine if Mary wore a Gele for the funeral of Jesus,
tied it so tight she was dizzy
enough to feel absent from her body.
I picked up my cloth from the tailor on the seventh day.
The off-shoulder dress exposed my neck
so my dented collarbones could collect my tears.
At the funeral my grandmother wore a dress
with sleeves puffed like swollen lungs.
I held her, the tassels at the end of my dress dangled
like a rain of breathing tubes.
From afar our orange dresses looked like saliva dripping
from the gaping mouth of the sun.
The whole village watched in holy envy:
envy is only effective from afar, does not see the layers
of blood-stained threads that sew this body together.
Give me a culture that requires grief to be sewn
delicately on the body, I’ll take it any day.

by Theresa Lola

We have a number of exciting Poetry Centre events coming up! They are all free, but please register via these links. Firstly, on Monday 25 March, join us, TORCH, and Paris Lit Up for a discussion about cultural diversity in literature, featuring authors Elleke Boehmer, Karin Amatmoekrim, and Malik Ameer Crumpler. A showcase from Paris Lit Up and an open mic will follow.

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 events page, and remember that in addition to this Weekly Poem e-mail, you can also follow our work on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We look forward to seeing you soon!

Notes from Nine Arches:

Theresa Lola’s debut poetry collection In Search of Equilibrium is an extraordinary, and exacting study of death and grieving. Where the algorithms of the body and the memory fail, Lola finds the words that will piece together the binary code of family and restart the recovery program. In doing so, these unflinching poems work towards the hard-wired truths of life itself – finding hope in survival, lines of rescue in faith, a stubborn equilibrium in the equations of loss and renewal. You can read more about the collection on the Nine Arches website.

Theresa Lola is a British Nigerian Poet, born in 1994. She was joint-winner of the 2018 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2017 Bridport Poetry Prize. In 2018 she was invited by the Mayor of London’s Office to read at Parliament Square alongside Sadiq Khan and actress Helen McCory at the unveiling of Millicent Fawcett’s statue. She has appeared on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, and ASOS Magazine with Octavia Collective among others. She is an alumni of the Barbican Young Poets Programme. Find out more about Theresa’s work on her website and follow her 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.

Beech Wood

March 13, 2019March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Stopped on the track mid echo of screams −
mewls of hawks, clipping the tree tops −
not for that, but for gaps in what’s read as a wood
(could be roe deer, muntjac or the loaded
breath of the dead and rotted-down
held to itself, weighing down),
we hear quiet restored to leaves drifting,
bloating one creak, a snap; that instant relief
from gold bars twinkling.

by Kate Behrens

News from the Poetry Centre! We have a number of exciting events coming up over the next few months and hope you’ll be able to join us for some or all of them! Please book spaces via the links below.

On Tuesday 19 March from 7-9pm we’re helping to host an open mic evening for LGBTQ+ History Month and the Oxford Human Rights Festival. Then on Monday 25 March, join us, TORCH, and Paris Lit Up for a discussion about cultural diversity in literature, featuring authors Elleke Boehmer, Karin Amatmoekrim, and Malik Ameer Crumpler. A showcase from Paris Lit Up and an open mic will follow. And finally (for now!), 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!

Notes from Two Rivers Press:

In Penumbra, Kate Behrensʼ third collection, the poems are linked by themes of dislocation and heredity. If the dead are ever-present here, so is love: the absence of, rewards and longing for it, the endurance and effort of it. We are led from the poetʼs bohemian childhood to the complex grief, in middle age, that followed the death of her painter father, and on to individual animals, people, and even trees that are differently uprooted or burdened. Everything is haunted here, but the boundaries of death and love are permeable, nature full of revelation. Read more about Kate’s book on the Two Rivers website.

Kate Behrensʼ two earlier collections, The Beholder and Man with Bombe Alaska were published respectively in 2012 and 2016 by Two Rivers Press. Other poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Blackbox Manifold, Mslexia,The Arts of Peace, an Anthology of Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, The High Window and Stand.

Two Rivers Press has been publishing in and about Reading since 1994. The brainchild of Peter Hay (1951-2003), one of the town’s most creative champions, the press grew out of his delight in this under-loved town and its recessed spaces. Nearly two decades of publishing and over 70 titles since its inception, Two Rivers Press has been described as ‘one of the most characterful small presses in the country.’ The Press is strongly rooted in the local community and has close links with Reading University, Poets’ Café, RISC, MERL and other local groups. Its contribution to Reading’s culture won for it a Pride of Reading award in 2008. Read more about the press on its website, or follow it on Twitter.

Toaster

February 18, 2019March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Each Sunday morning
the bread would often get stuck
or launch itself high

across the kitchen
where dad would catch it, juggling
each flapping bird with

blackened wings. His dance
made us laugh. Tea, marmalade,
homemade jam, honey –

again and again
we would wait for its metalled
cough, to watch salmon

leaping through currents
of sun. I ate six slices
one weekend, enthralled

with how happiness
was the colour of butter,
best eaten hot. Toast.

I believed I could
save each tiny crumb of you,
thinking aged just four

that every Sunday
would stay like this, love landing
soft, the right way up.

by Olga Dermott-Bond

News from the Poetry Centre! We’re delighted to be hosting MacGillivray and Niall McDevitt at Waterstones, Oxford on Tuesday 5 March as they launch their new books. Join us from 6.30-7.30pm to hear from two uniquely powerful voices. Tickets are free, but space is limited. Sign up via Eventbrite.

In addition to this Weekly Poem e-mail, don’t forget that you can follow our work on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We look forward to seeing you there!

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Olga Dermott-Bond is originally from Northern Ireland and lives in Warwickshire. A former Warwick Poet Laureate, she has had poetry and flash fiction published in a range of magazines including Rattle Magazine, Under the Radar, Magma, Ink Sweat and Tears and Paper Swans Press. In 2018 she was commended in both the BBC Proms Poetry and Against the Grain poetry competitions, and was shortlisted in The Poetry School’s Primers competition. She is a teacher and has two daughters. Follow her on Twitter.

Candlestick Press 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 Rivers 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 where you can find out more about the full range of titles. Follow Candlestick on Twitter or find it on Facebook. In 2017 Candlestick sold over 70,000 pamphlets.

Ymir’s skull

December 19, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Scraped clean of its skin, the ice-white skull
of Ymir, first and greatest of the frost giants,
still rinsed in a thin wash of sunset blood,
was shoved and shouldered like blue stone and sarsen;
rigged over the earth like a bone awning.

This brain-hall filled quickly with bright guests;
the go-cart sun; the hospital-trolley moon
wheeled through on its cast-iron casters;
planets like wandering lute players;
shoals of stars swimming in circles.

Some, the sources note, evolved to live
further from earth in the thinnest air.
Polaris, the North Star, say the sagas
is furthest of all, as it moves least –
a piece of false but plausible logic

held like a hand towel over this tall tale
to lend it some shreds of specious sense
perhaps. Or perhaps to counterpoint the truth
that we are as ephemeral as thoughts
bubbling and bursting under a bone sky.

by Ross Cogan

News! The Poetry Centre is delighted to announce three new ignitionpress poets, whose work will be appearing in 2019. They are: Joanna Ingham, Jennifer Lee Tsai, and Sarah Shapiro, and we’re excited to share their poetry with you soon! You can find out more about these three writers on the ignition press pages.

To coincide with the publication of this week’s poem, our Brookes colleague Brian McMahon (an expert on Old Norse), has written a review of Ross Cogan’s Bragr, and you can read it on our blog.

This is the final Weekly Poem of the year. We wish you a very happy and poetical Christmas and look forward to sharing more poems with you in 2019. Thank you for reading!

Notes from Seren:

Ross Cogan studied philosophy, gaining a PhD from Bristol University and, in 1999, received a Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. He has published two collections, Stalin’s Desk (2005) and The Book I Never Wrote (2012) and his verse play Achyncourt was performed at several literary festivals and broadcast on radio. Bragr is the Norse God of Poetry and this book is inspired by readings of Norse myth. Ross now works as a freelance writer/editor, as well as being Creative Director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival and an Associate Tutor at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Widely published, he has won first place in The Exeter Prize, The Staple Open Poetry Competition, The Frogmore Poetry Prize, The Crabbe Memorial Prize, and The Cannon Poets Sonnet Competition and second prize in the Troubadour International Poetry Competition. Ross takes a keen interest in environmental matters and is semi-self-sufficient, growing most of his own vegetables, raising goats, ducks and chickens, and brewing his own mead.

Whether it’s myth intended to explain the constellations, the secret of eternal life, or the bloodthirsty tale of the mead of poetry, Ross Cogan’s collection Bragr (meaning ‘poetry’ in Old Norse) is a reimagining of Norse mythology for our times. In particular, the collection focuses on environmental concerns. The earth’s incredible beauty seems all the more fragile in the face of habitat loss and global warming. Read more about the book on the Seren website, and read an assessment of the poems in Brian McMahon’s review.

Seren is Wales’ leading independent literary publisher, specialising in English-language writing from Wales. Many of our books are shortlisted for – and win – major literary prizes across the UK and America. At the heart of our list is a good poem, a story told well, or an idea or history presented interestingly or provocatively. We’re international in authorship and readership, though our roots remain here in Wales, where we prove that writers from a small country with an intricate culture have a worldwide relevance. Amy Wack has been Poetry Editor since the early 90s. Our aim is not simply to reflect what is going on in the culture in which we publish, but to drive that culture forward, to engage with the world, and to bring Welsh literature, art and politics before a wider audience. Find out more on the Seren website and via Twitter 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.

I Am My Own Parent

December 13, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I love my red shoes,
all of the shoes I have loved,
they are.

I swing my legs against the wall,
scuffing them slightly.
My Dad is not here to pick them up

by the scruffs of their dirty necks
and leave them shining in the morning.
Instead, the arc of my swing

not quite so high,
the shoes every day a little duller.
At night I leave them in the hall like hope.

In the morning,
absentmindedly dreaming of old loves
and reading poetry until it hurts,

I spring out of bed and decide
to roll up my life into a fist,
smelling of patchouli and roses, and then

unroll it; and to my surprise
it becomes a snail’s yellow shell,
unravelling. On and on it goes,

I tap tap my red shoes,
find I’m already home.

by Deborah Alma

Deborah Alma’s debut poetry collection Dirty Laundry is raucous, daring and honest, drawing contemporary women’s lives and those of our foremothers into the spotlight. It voices bold, feminist songs of praise: of persistence, survival, adventures of sexual rediscovery, each reclaiming the space to speak its mind and be heard and seen. A perfect remedy for the heartsick and weary, Alma’s intimate and particular poems are resolute enchantments, a form of robust magic.The collection brims with poems which are unafraid of airing secrets, desires and untold stories. From growing up mixed-race and learning to survive as a woman in the world, to tales of the countryside and themes of escape and finding joy, this book of poems is as vivid as it is frank and fearless. There’ll be no need for any tears, it’ll all come out in the wash… Read more about the collection on the Nine Arches website.

Deborah Alma was born in North London, has lived on the Welsh/ Shropshire borders for the last 25 years where she brought up her 2 sons and she lives with the poet James Sheard. She teaches creative writing, works with people with dementia and at the end of their lives and is the Emergency Poet in her 1970’s ambulance. She edited The Emergency Poet: an anti-stress poetry anthology and The Everyday Poet: Poems to Live By (Michael O’Mara Books) and was the editor of the landmark #MeToo poetry anthology, published by Fair Acre Press. Her first poetry pamphlet True Tales of the Countryside was published by The Emma Press. She is currently Honorary Research Fellow at Keele University. You can follow Deborah on Twitter.

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.

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.

Out of Range

November 25, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Up here there is no signal;
it died at the cattle grid
where even the trees can’t pass.

In the listening station of these hills
bracken has its own system
to intercept the clandestine

wavelengths of streams and airs;
and the rain’s dark radiance
registers its impressions

on stonewalls and grey rocks
where highly sensitive mosses
gather the information of the stars.

At night, in the pitch black
of the wrong side of the moon
I stand with my fading torch

in the last phone box on earth,
a windowed coffin, a haunted mini-crypt
where a spider’s devised seven webs

then died inside the phone;
for down this cold receiver
which smells of strangers, mouth to mouth,

your voice is five thousand miles away;
so I shout can you hear me? I love you, I love you
until I hear through the rush-hour babble

of horns, airbrakes and squawking parrots
your delayed echo I love you too
while here I stand

in this crazy dark, feeding my last coins
to the insatiable seconds
counting down to silence.

by Nick Drake

News from the Centre: we are delighted to be involved in two exciting events this week in Oxford – do join us if you can! On Tuesday 27 November, our ignitionpresspoet Belinda Zhawi will be reading from her work and discussing critical issues in contemporary African poetry and publishing alongside TORCH visiting professor and esteemed poet, editor and writer, Kwame Dawes. They will be joined by authors JC Niala and Nana Aforiatta-Ayim. The panel discussion, from 5.30-6.30pm, will be followed by the launch of the African Poetry Book Fund exhibition. You can register for the event on Eventbrite. This event is part of Prof Dawes’s week-long visit to Oxford, which also includes the wonderful opportunity to attend a poetry workshop with him on Saturday 1 December. You can find the full listing of events here.

Then on Thursday 29 November from 6.30-7.30pm at Waterstones Oxford, we will be helping to launch the poetry anthology Wretched Strangers: Borders, Movement, Homes, edited by JT Welsch and Ágnes Lehóczky. For the Oxford launch of this book, which is designed to mark and celebrate the contribution of non-UK born writers to the country’s poetry scene, we will be joined by both editors, and poets Mary Jean Chan, Iris Colomb, and Jennifer Wong. To register, visit this link.

Notes from Bloodaxe Books:

Nick Drake’s fourth collection, Out of Range, explores the strange interconnections and confronting emergencies – the signs, wonders and alarms – of the early 21st century. Here are elegies for the Whitechapel Fatberg and incandescent lightbulbs; the life stories of plastic bottles and ice-core samples; portraits of those living on the margins of the city streets, and of Voyager 1 crossing the threshold of the solar system. Here too are poems registering the shock and impact of ‘Generation Anthropocene’ on Earth’s climate and ecology. Above all, the poems seek to tune in to what is out of range; the dark matter of mystery, wonder and deep time at the edge of our senses, at the back of our heads, which poetry makes visible.

Nick Drake was born in 1961. He lives and works in London. His first book-length collection, The Man in the White Suit (1999), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and was selected for the Next Generation Poets promotion in 2004. His collection From The Word Go was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2007. His recent projects include stage plays and adaptations, screenplays, and a trilogy of historical novels about Egypt (including Nefertiti, shortlisted for CWA Best Historical Crime Novel). In September 2010 he was invited to join Cape Farewell’s trip to the Arctic to explore climate change, and poems inspired by that visit appear in his collection The Farewell Glacier (2012). Nick worked as a librettist in a collaboration with the composer Tansy Davies and director Deborah Warner on Between Worlds, a 2015 opera inspired by the events of 9/11. A new music theatre collaboration with Tansy Davies followed, Cave, performed at Printworks London in June 2018.

Christmas Lights

November 15, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

They’re putting up the lights strung out on poles
along the harbour wall, the dark young lads
in oily overalls; and there’s a tree
built out of creels out at The Point, as though
a pagan pendant on a flimsy string
of beads, defiant, and alluring as
the Sirens’ phantom lighthouse.
And upstairs
in dim bedrooms the girls undress and dress;
the boys smirk at the mirror mouthing chat-
up lines from movies.
Now the village is
en fête: dressed for a party in the dark,
across the fields, along uneven paths,
a low-roofed barn with steamed-up windows and
a fiddler and her band. And Christmas lights.

by Stephen Keeler

News from the Centre: this evening we are excited to host the prizewinning and shortlisted poets from this year’s International Poetry Competition, judged by Kayo Chingonyi. You can find the winning poems and the shortlist here. Everyone is very welcome to attend; just visit this page for more details.

On Thursday 29 November at Waterstones in Oxford we will be helping to launch a new poetry anthology called Wretched Strangers. Featuring work by an exciting range of contributors, the anthology – edited by JT Welsch and Ágnes Lehóczky – marks the vital contribution of non-UK-born writers to this country’s poetry culture. You can find more information and register to attend the event here, and find out more about the book here.

Feeling festive? This week’s poem comes from the brand new pamphlet Christmas Lights: Ten Poems for Dark Winter Nights published by Candlestick Press. Candlestick has also just published another Christmas pamphlet, Ten Poems about Robins.

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Stephen Keeler worked in educational publishing and international education for 35 years before moving from London to ‘the edge of the map’, to write, in 2010. He won the first Highland Literary Salon Poetry Prize in 2012 and a Scottish Book Trust New Writing Award in 2015. His poems have appeared in Northwords Now, South Bank Poetry, the Glasgow Review of Books, Gutterand The Poets’ Republic. He was shortlisted for the 2018 Winchester Poetry Prize. His pamphlet While You Were Away(2018) is published by Maquette Press. A full-length collection will be published by Red Squirrel early in 2020. You can follow his work on Twitter.