young woman views Chagall

June 25, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

at Blue Lovers, she is appalled
in a bright room, that storm colour
bruises her cotton suit
the shade of sloe

pictured: a face of static
lips nibbed, eyes closed
mother
it is not, in fact, paint’s pressure
filling, but the nimbus
in her own chest
a wilderness, made numb
it is I

centre right: a muted harlequin
with stiffened ruff, the mask
a blot of dusk
whom you clothed

the young woman touches her cheek
mimicking the gloved mime
who cups that of a widow

her mother’s fascinator is neat
leaves, nature hemmed
indelible as hedgerow
so I cannot speak

as though, in blackthorn
a spider wove her sack
to an iron pin
the young
never found the world
these are my gauzed hands

the room bright, her suit
hoards shadows
tissue in a blue well

by Gram Joel Davies

You can view Chagall’s 1914 painting Blue Lovers, from which this poem draws inspiration, here.

Notes from V. Press:

Gram Joel Davies grew up in Somerset in the ’80s, overlooking the valley town of Taunton, the Quantock Hills and the edge of Sedgemoor. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Magma, The Moth, Envoi and Lighthouse, and has received listings and commendations from Penelope Shuttle, Peter Oswald, Liz Berry and Carol Ann Duffy. In 2014, he and Hannah Linden won the Cheltenham Poetry Festival Compound collaboration competition. Working with Juncture 25 poets, he attends readings and festivals across the Southwest. Bolt Down This Earth (V. Press) is his first collection. You can read more about it on the V. Press website, and more about Gram’s work on his website. He is also on Twitter.

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. Find out more on the press’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.

Hare

June 18, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I kept you in bed with me so many nights,
certain I could hold the life into you,
certain that the life in you wanted to leap out, hare-like,
go bobbing off into some night-field.
For want of more eyes, more arms
I strapped you to me while I did the dishes, cooked, typed,
your little legs frogging
against the deflating dune of your first home.
Nested you in a car seat while I showered, dressed,
and when you breastfed for hours and hours
I learned how to manoeuvre the cup and book around you.
Time and friends and attitudes, too.
We moved breakables a height, no glass tables.
Fitted locks to the kitchen cupboards, door jammers,
argued about screws and pills someone left within reach.
I’ll not tell you how my breath left me, how my heart stopped
at your stillness in the cot, and who I became
when at last you moved. There is no telling
what skins of me have dropped and shed in the fears
I’ve entered. What I will say is that the day
beyond these blankets, beyond our door
is known to me now, fragile as moth-scurf,
its long ears twitching, alert,
white tail winking across the night-field.

by Carolyn Jess-Cooke

The Poetry Centre is collaborating on a one-day symposium for a second time with the University of Reading and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI), based at the University of Canberra. The symposium, entitled ‘Contemporary Lyric: Absent Presences, the Secret & the Unsayable’, will take place on Tuesday 26 June from 9.30-5pm at the Museum of Early Rural Life at the University of Reading. The event is free to attend and all are welcome but places are limited. Find out more and sign up to attend via our website

The Poetry Centre recently launched our 2018 International Poetry Competition! Open until 6 August, the competition has two categories – Open and English as an Additional Language – and this year is judged by the highly-acclaimed poet Kayo Chingonyi. You can find full details and enter here .

Finally, join Poetry in the Meeting House @ 43 St Giles Oxford on Wednesday 11 July at 7pm to hear American poet Lauren Rusk, who will be reading from and talk about her recent book of poems What Remains To Be Seen. The book is inspired by children’s art from Theresienstadt concentration camp. Everyone is welcome.

Notes from Seren:

Writing Motherhood features a chorus of voices on the wonders and terrors of motherhood and the myriad ways that a creative life can be ignited and/or disrupted by the pressures of raising children. Thought-provoking essays, interviews and poetry by high-profile writers detail experiences of creating art while engaging in the compelling, exhausting, exhilarating work of motherhood.

Editor Carolyn Jess-Cooke introduces this important anthology which re-considers ‘the pram in the hallway’ as explosively nuanced. Entries include an insightful interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Sharon Olds, excerpts from Hollie McNish’s diary, Carol Ann Duffy’s beautiful portrait of being and having a daughter, specially commissioned poems by Sinéad Morrissey, Rebecca Goss, and many others. Crime fiction fans will enjoy C.L. Taylor’s witty essay, ‘How Motherhood Turned Me to Crime’, and Nuala Ellwood’s heart-wrenching depiction of miscarriage and loss. This anthology is a vital exploration of the complexities of contemporary sexual politics, publishing, artistic creation, and twenty-first century parenting. Find out more about the anthology via the Seren website.

Carolyn Jess-Cooke is a poet who has published two collections from Seren, the most recent being Boom. She is also the author of several bestselling novels including the 2017, I Know My Name, which is being made into a television series. You can read more about her work on her website.

Follow the Poetry Centre on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

An Irishman Coaches the Beautiful Game in the American South

June 11, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Time was I was the guru of soccer,
a footie svengali in North Carolina.

I gave the Piedmont Triad the sweeper system.
Touchlines hushed to my nuggets of wisdom.

T-shirts were printed with my every word.
The European Cup was played on our road.

I took Rush and Dalglish to the Mason Dixie.
I was asked to lead grace over Domino’s pizza.

I screamed expletives till the sheriff came calling.
‘Take it down a notch, Coach, or we got a problem.’

Time was I was the guru of soccer,
a footie svengali in North Carolina.

I saw Ossie Ardiles in Oriel Park.
‘That a fact, Coach? Well bless your heart…’

I drifted to watch the immigrant workers,
the barefoot pot-bellied dribblers and jugglers

in a circle of dust, playing hooky with a ball,
displaced in a place that’s all about goals.

I watched them till dark and the troops filed past.
‘Night, Coach. Goodnight.’ We were left last.

Time was I was the guru of soccer,
a footie svengali in North Carolina.

by Conor O’Callaghan

The Poetry Centre is collaborating on a one-day symposium for a second time with the University of Reading and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI), based at the University of Canberra. The symposium, entitled ‘Contemporary Lyric: Absent Presences, the Secret & the Unsayable’, will take place on Tuesday 26 June from 9.30-5pm at the Museum of Early Rural Life at the University of Reading. All are welcome but places are limited. Find out more and sign up to attend via our website .

‘An Irishman Coaches the Beautiful Game in the American South’ is copyright © Conor O’Callaghan, 2018. It is reprinted from Eleven Poems about Football (Candlestick Press, 2018) by permission of Candlestick Press.

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Conor O’Callaghan is an Irish poet and novelist. His memoir Red Mist: Roy Keane and the Irish World Cup Blues appeared in 2005. He has published five collections of poetry with The Gallery Press, most recently Live Streaming (2017) which was shortlisted for various awards including the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Conor has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award and has taught at various universities in the United States. He divides his time between Sheffield and Dublin.

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

Follow the Poetry Centre on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Pondskater

June 5, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

From the bridge I see teams of rowers
arcross the delilium, cracks
in the eye wave-weave the nameslake.
In flagellar schememes
of diatomic cross-selling
they waterclot concentricity
unsentensing waverlengths of twisight.
This is my longtomb partnerve agile,
fragile sky is hinge to
the parallel dark, foreverending
camerangel. The river commissions
a new meadow where the last heat
in a star burns (the phantom photon
enlarges on this) as moons
are rowed and sent thithaway
trireming intimotions or slap
dashadows in noded disjointment
their mittens petaling the sandbeds.
Presisting the intelligence is
furtile when clouds are falling in.
In this way our passage through
days conjugates a lifelung
seismiotic in distorts and
waterlilt semisphere. The pond
quake cruxes into inscensible
nameslicks, tinetingles and waterrings,
as in the skyline is awrighted what
is writ on water: your name, where.

by Giles Goodland

News from the Poetry Centre: join us tonight at 7pm in the Chapel of Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford for ‘A Crack of Light: Poems of Commemoration, Reconstruction, and Reconciliation’. This event features poetry produced by the poets-in-residence of the Post-War international seminar series, co-organized by Oxford and Oxford Brookes. The poets reading will be Mariah Whelan, Sue Zatland, Patrick Toland, and Susie Campbell. There are only a few tickets remaining and they are free, but do sign up here!

The Poetry Centre is also collaborating on a one-day symposium for a second time with the University of Reading and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI), based at the University of Canberra. The symposium, entitled ‘Contemporary Lyric: Absent Presences, the Secret & the Unsayable’, will take place on Tuesday 26 June from 9.30-5pm at the Museum of Early Rural Life at the University of Reading. All are welcome but places are limited. Find out more and sign up to attend via our website.

Finally,the Poetry Centre recently launched our 2018 International Poetry Competition! Open until 6 August, the competition has two categories – Open and English as an Additional Language – and this year is judged by the highly-acclaimed poet Kayo Chingonyi. You can find full details and enter here.

Notes from Shearsman:

‘Pondskater’ comes from Giles Goodland’s new book, The Masses. It is a collection in which, as Richard Price writes, ‘the creepy-crawlies visibly teem. Adapting the sound-mutating technique Goodland perfected in Gloss, where well-known phrases are minutely changed to sly and comic effect, here the creatures which are usually only glimpsed, only imagined with a flinch, are foregrounded in phonic mutation. Amid the rich density of these playful and sometimes frightening poems are cut-back lyrics, often about fatherhood in a diminished world, and these give the book overall a sense not just of the strangeness of the fauna around us but of the strangeness of our own language nests, of the fragility of the world an older generation has ruined and is now bequeathing to the young.’ You can read more about the book and find further sample poems on the Shearsman website.

Giles Goodland was born in Taunton, was educated at universities in Wales and California, and completed a D.Phil at Oxford. He has published several books of poetry including A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001) Capital (Salt, 2006) and Dumb Messengers (Salt, 2012). He works in Oxford as a lexicographer and lives in West London.

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with a very active translation list. Founded in 1981 as a magazine, with some occasional chapbooks, the press – now based in Bristol – has grown rapidly in recent years, and is now one of the most active poetry publishers in the U.K. You can find out more about Shearsman’s work from 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.

Poem

May 28, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I let him come.
He sneaks on tiptoe
right up to my ear;
under its ribs my heart
quivers, quickens
as the excitement mounts:
first the forest appears,
then the woodland-sequel,
more mist than snow to the touch –
from the new poem’s
very first line the paper sucks up
every waif-word
and an ugliness steals in,
a cunning hungry thing
crouching there incognito,
pretending to be tame and yet so wolfish
that he’s the kernel of light
and then the noise of its cracking;
he’s lithe on the path,
doubling back on himself,
running with the pack, loping alone;
pussy-footing through the night
he trails moonlight behind him
like a mink coat.
I feel him when the hairs on my skin
lift, and in the delicious dizziness
of my private pulse –
in the midst of my writing, in my dream-life,
I slip all his clothes slowly off
and slide him down beside me.

by Maria Teresa Horta; translated from the Portuguese by Lesley Saunders. You can read the original poem on the Stephen Spender Trust website.

News from the Centre: this Friday at 7pm, we are delighted to welcome the distinguished Canadian poet Richard Harrison to Oxford. Richard is a multiple award-winning poet, essayist and editor. His latest collection, On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood, was awarded the 2017 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. You can find out more and buy tickets for the reading via our website or on the door at the Society Cafe.

The Poetry Centre has just launched its 2018 International Poetry Competition! Open until 6 August, the competition has two categories – Open and English as an Additional Language – and this year is judged by the highly-acclaimed poet Kayo Chingonyi. You can find full details and enter here.

This week’s poem was the winner of the 2016 Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation, and the 2018 Prize is currently open for entries until 6 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. There are three categories: Open, 18-and-under, and 14-and-under. The judges this year are Margaret Jull Costa, Olivia McCannon, and Sean O’Brien. You can find more details on the Trust’s website.

Lesley Saunders is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Nominy-Dominy (Two Rivers Press). She is currently working on a book of translations of selected poems by Maria Teresa Horta, one of the most revered poets of modern Portugal who has published more than twenty volumes of poetry over a lifetime’s writing career. Horta was born in 1937 and was writing before and during the revolution against the fascist Estado Novo regime; her early work was banned for being ‘an outrage to public morals’. She is renowned for her novels, short stories and journalism, but considers herself a poet first and foremost. As this particular poem indicates, Horta’s work has a syntactical compactness coupled with a psychological passion, even wildness, which makes translation a deeply pleasurable challenge. The book of selected poems in English translation, Point of Honour, will be published by Two Rivers Press in the spring of 2019. You can hear Lesley read the poem and find her reflections it on the Stephen Spender Trust’s website.

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.

Building Materials

May 14, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

If I lie on the kitchen floor,
my back shrinking from cold quarry stone,
I can see the night’s purple sky.

The roof isn’t yet fixed. He tries,
works hard against the weather,
but this is only one of many jobs.

His arms, that used to reach for me,
are always full of bricks,
his mouth full of clay.

I watch the moon through fallen tiles.
Tomorrow we must steady them
against the threat of rain.

by Claire Walker

News from the Centre: we urge you not to miss the chance to hear three of the leading poets writing in the UK when they visit us in Oxford next week. Do tell your friends! Tickets to hear Kei Miller (22 May), Sinéad Morrissey (23 May), and Clare Pollard (24 May) are free, but you do need to book. Book for Kei here, Sinéad here, and Clare here, or all three here!

These readings are part of the Think Human Festival at Oxford Brookes, during which we’re also helping to run an exciting event on 25 May called Stanza and Stand-Up, in which poetry and comedy battle it out! Tickets are available here.

Finally, tomorrow at Keble College, Stephanie Burt (US) and Hera Lindsay Bird (New Zealand) will be reading from their work at 6.30pm in the Pusey Room – full details here.

Notes from V. Press:

Claire Walker is a poet based in Worcestershire. Her work has been published in magazines and on websites including The Interpreter’s House, Prole, Ink Sweat and Tears, And Other Poems, The Poetry Shed, Obsessed with Pipework and Clear Poetry, and in anthologies such as The Chronicles of Eve (Paper Swans Press) and Crystal Voices (Crystal Clear Creators). She is a Poetry Reader for Three Drops Press, and Co-Editor of Atrium poetry webzine. Her most recent pamphlet – from which this poem was taken – is entitled Somewhere Between Rose and Black, and it was shortlisted in the Saboteur Awards for Best Poetry Pamphlet. Her first pamphlet, The Girl Who Grew Into a Crocodile, is also published by V. Press. You can read more about Claire’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Tic tacs at the track

May 2, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Peter Raynard

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

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

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

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

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

Notes from Smokestack Books:

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

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

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.

The Malvern Aviator

April 24, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

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

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

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

by Richard Skinner

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

Notes from Smokestack Books:

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

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

St Jerome and the Chaffinch

April 17, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

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

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

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

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

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

by Emily Hasler

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

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

Notes from Sidekick Books:

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

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

The last fare collector of Hiroshima

April 11, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

They found her fingers in a jelly of yen,
her skin one with the standard issue fare-bag –
a dove in a sen of silver to go to the mountains,
oh, if only she went.

I have read of a woman
who cooled her burns with figs and persimmon.
She pared away old skin for years; it was the finest paper,
writing its kanji into the papyrus sky. I wish I knew her.

In the ritual of tea-making,
I learnt how to sip from a widow’s eyes
and learn that some stories are like Hiroshima streetcars –
they always arrive on time then the hour takes them.

They found her omen in the evening crow
hopping by the river: it is time to see how atoms rise
when another survivor dies;
their story closes with their eyelids.

I have read of a God-fearing woman
who feared man so much more;
she sliced a cucumber each night for years to cool her skin
and hate had left her years ago with five generations of
fishermen
horse-breakers
librarians
mothers
fathers
fare-collector.

by Antony Owen

Sen: Old Japanese coins. The sen was taken out of currency in 1953.

Poetry news! If you’re around St. Andrews or Edinburgh, catch our ignitionpress poets (Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan and Patrick James Errington) today (Wednesday) and tomorrow as they launch their pamphlets in Scotland! Find more details on the St. Andrews reading here and the Edinburgh event here. You can buy their pamphlets here.

There are still a few places left for this Saturday’s one-day poetry workshop by ignitionpress editor and Oxford-based poet Alan Buckley. The workshop is entitled ‘First, are you our sort of person? – I, you, they and us’, and will explore how writing in the second and third person and first person plural can broaden our range as writers. Tickets are £45 (£40 for Brookes students and staff). To sign up, visit our website.

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

Finally, John Hegley is in town this Saturday with his family-friendly show ‘All Hail the Snail’, and you can find more information about the event on the North Wall Arts Centre’s website.

Notes from V. Press:

Antony Owen was born in 1973 in Coventry, and raised by working class parents. The Nagasaki Elder is his fifth collection of poetry, jointly inspired by growing up in Cold War Britain at the peak of nuclear proliferation and, more recently, a self-funded trip to Hiroshima in 2015 to hear testimonies of Atomic bomb survivors. Owen’s war poetry and haiku have been translated into Japanese and Mandarin. In recognition of his 2015 peace trip to Hiroshima, CND Peace Education (UK) selected Owen as one of their first national patrons, and he won a Peace & Reconciliation award in 2016 for Community Cohesion from his home city of Coventry. The Nagasaki Elder was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry in 2017.