Catullus 51 High fantasy translation

March 27, 2018April 20, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Ille mi par esse deo videtur,
ille, si fas est, superare divos,
qui sedens adversus identidem te
spectat et audit
dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis
eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi
vocis in ore,
lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures, gemina teguntur
lumina nocte.
Otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:
otio exsultas nimiumque gestis:
otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes.

Catullus 51: High Fantasy translation

In the tavern, they sat near the fire, which created a companionate halo around the small company. Food was served, with ale and mead, and they started to feel merry, though tired and shaken by the terrors of the road. Snorri was elbow height to the rider in the green cloak, whose pitted face now seemed moon-like, lit by the elf woman who sat opposite, talking and smiling. Her laughter was like purses of silver poured out liberally and pocketed by that mortal. None of it was spent on the dwarf, who sat in shadow and twice looked at her and quickly turned away as he felt flames dart along his limbs. He tried once to speak, but his tongue was lead and he knew he could not speak and look at her still. His senses eclipsed, he heard only the pounding on the worn anvil of his heart. His eyes were shut in darkness, like the closing of the doors into the mountain. Confused by these new emotions, he applied himself with greater energy to the meal. Idleness, thought Snorri, taking great bites of the bread and roast meat in his trencher. Only idleness. The idle axe rusts and the lazy smith lets his fire go out.
by Rowyda Amin

Poetry news! We are delighted to say that one of our ignitionpress pamphlets, A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan, is the Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice for Summer 2018! You can read more about the PBS selection here, and find details of all three ignitionpress pamphlets (by Mary Jean, Lily Blacksell, and Patrick James Errington) here. There are two further launches for the press in Edinburgh and St. Andrews on 11 and 12 April, where you can hear all three poets.

On Saturday 14 April, ignitionpress editor and Oxford-based poet Alan Buckley will be leading a day-long workshop for the Poetry Centre entitled ‘First, are you our sort of person? – I, you, they and us’. It will explore how writing in the second and third person and first person plural can broaden our range as writers, and enable us to write more deeply into our own experience. Participants are invited to bring two of their existing poems to be worked on by themselves and others. Tickets are £45 (£40 for Brookes students and staff). To sign up, visit our website.

Have you seen our poetry reading series schedule? We have five readings coming up – with Peter Raynard and Richard Skinner; Kei Miller; Sinéad Morrissey; Clare Pollard; and Richard Harrison – and you can book tickets here.

Finally, 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 Brechtand provocative new voices from Crisis Skylight writing workshops. You can find more information on the OFS website.

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Gaius Valerius Catullus was Ancient Rome’s most notorious scandal-monger, filthsmith and lovelorn wretch. In this interactive handbook, Bad Kid Catullus, his famously sexy, savage, tender and scurrilous poems have been transformed and mutated in myriad ways: compressed, expanded, bricolaged, Catullus in six pulp genres, Catullus as playlist – even a Catullus karma sutra. And then there are pages for you, the reader, to fill in, in your own obscene fashion. You’ll never look at a sparrow the same way again. Find out more about the book on the Sidekick Books website.

An itinerant scribe, Rowyda Amin lived in the capital until she was sent into exile in the far west for an ill-judged remark about the emperor’s hairpiece. You can read more about Rowyda’s work on her website, and follow her 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.

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 Clinic Bomber’s Mother

March 19, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The trick, she guesses, is: be seen. Offer
coffee to police, walk among the living
without thinking of the dead. Never

apologize for being his mother. Keep
his photos on the mantel, his boyhood
room the same. Bring daisies to his plot,

ignore the other graves. Who really knows
who knows. She donates blood, is comforted
that strangers wear his clothes, irons

linens for St. Paul’s, whose confessionals
have never felt so cramped. Bless me, Father,
she admits, the bathroom hook still holds

his robe. There’s little time to think or rest.
More and more, the wafer tastes like flesh.

by Shara Lessley

The Poetry Centre is delighted to say that this week’s poet, Shara Lessley, will be reading from her work in Oxford this Thursday 22 March, when she will be launching her new collection The Explosive Expert’s Wife. Shara will be reading with Yvonne Reddick, whose work we featured last week and will be reading from her award-winning pamphlet Translating Mountains. Join us for what will be a terrific evening – from 7-9pm at the Society Café. Find more details on our website. Yvonne will also be discussing her academic research about Ted Hughes earlier in the day at Oxford Brookes – contact us for more details.

Have you seen our new ignitionpress pamphlets yet? We have another launch event at the Oxford Literary Festival this Sunday 25 March. To get a taste of what’s in store, watch videos of the poets: Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington, on our ignitionpress pages, and buy the pamphlets here!

‘The Clinic Bomber’s Mother’ is excerpted from The Explosive Expert’s Wife by Shara Lessley. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2018 by Shara Lessley. All rights reserved. The poem was originally published in 32 Poems, 13.2 (Fall/Winter 2015).

‘Somewhere in the Middle / East, you sip coffee while I sleep…’ In sparse, powerful lines, Shara Lessley recalls an expat’s displacement, examines her experience as a mother, and offers intimate witness to the unfolding of the Arab Spring in her new collection, The Explosive Expert’sWife. Veering from the strip malls and situation rooms of Washington to the markets and mines of Amman, Lessley confronts the pressures and pleasures of other cultures, exploring our common humanity with all its aggressions, loves, biases, and contradictions. You can read more about Shara’s book on the publisher’s website.

Shara Lessley is a writer and teacher. The author of Two-Headed Nightingale and The Explosive Expert’s Wife, and co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, she is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Shara’s poems and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Missouri Review, and New England Review, among others. A recipient of scholarships from ArtsBridge and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Shara holds Bachelor’s degrees in Dance and English from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in Poetry from University of Maryland. She was recently awarded Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Oxford. Find out more about Shara’s work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

Above the Northeast Shoulder

March 13, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Face the flawless white
of profound frostbite,
she stoops at the porch of my tent,
pale hair brushing my forehead.
One hand touches my arm,
scaldingly cold.

She points to the western arête –
a fin with skirls of cloud
building its north face
to a shell of rime.

That night, I arrange
my oxygen bottles, hunch
under canvas, and wait
for clear sky over the Lhotse Face.
She unzips the tent-flap
and lets in a swirl of blizzard.

She sits writing
a one-cigarette poem
by torchlight, brow knitting.

As the temperature drops
she creeps into my sleeping bag –
her kiss sucks the air from my lungs.
I spend all night trying to thaw her.

In the morning,
the pad propped on her knees,
she begins a two-fag poem.
I pass her my Zippo.

by Yvonne Reddick

The Poetry Centre is delighted to say that this week’s poet, Yvonne Reddick, will be reading from her work in Oxford next Thursday 22 March. She will be reading with Shara Lessley, who will be launching her new collection The Explosive Expert’s Wife. Join us for what will be a terrific evening – from 7-9pm at the Society Café. Find more details on our website. Yvonne will also be discussing her academic research about Ted Hughes earlier in the day at Oxford Brookes – contact us for more details.

Have you seen our new ignitionpress pamphlets yet? We have another launch event at the Oxford Literary Festival on Sunday 25 March. Read and hear from the poets: Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington, on our ignitionpress pages, and buy the pamphlets here!

Notes from Seren:

Yvonne Reddick was born in Glasgow and grew up in Aberdeen, Berkshire and Kuwait. She won a Northern Writer’s Award for poetry in 2016. Her poems have appeared in magazines such as Stand and Shearsman, and been translated into Greek and Swedish. She lives in Manchester and works as an academic researcher and lecturer. Her book Ted Hughes: Environmentalist andEcopoet was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. ‘Above the Northeast Shoulder’ comes from her Mslexia-prize winning pamphlet, Translating Mountains, which features elegies to her father and a friend who both died in mountaineering accidents. You can read more about Yvonne’s work on these pages, and follow her on Twitter.

Seren has been publishing poetry for 35 years. We are an independent publisher specialising in English-language writing from Wales. Seren’s wide-ranging list includes fiction, translation, biography, art and history. Seren’s authors are shortlisted for – and win – major literary prizes across Britain and America, including the 2014 Costa Poetry Prize (for Jonathan Edwards’ My Family and Other Superheroes). Amy Wack has been Seren’s Poetry Editor for more than 20 years. You can find more details about Seren on the publisher’s website and follow Seren on Twitter and on Facebook.

When I lived alone

March 6, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

When I lived alone I was clean. Good.
I drank jasmine tea in the afternoons
working by lamplight in the gloom. At night
I read by candlelight. Drank Rooibos. Played
piano to the guitar, guitar to the piano.
Sometimes I sang, to them both, to the room,
to myself, alone. Sometimes I went out.
If I left for more than a day I’d stroke
the walls and tell the house to be good
without me. Occasionally, people came round
and made the still, contained air busy. 
Mostly though it was only me,
me and the house, being good together.
I slept curled up against the cool
stretch of its ribs like a cub. It breathed 
gently into me. How I loved
its scent of damp sandstone and old warm
wood. I loved how it touched on my mind
and shifted its light to my mood. How
it helped me be good. In the mornings
I’d sit in its eye with a pot of good black coffee,
reheating it on the hob as it cooled.

by Polly Atkin

This is a very exciting and busy week for the Poetry Centre, and we hope you’ll join us at one of our events! Tonight (Tuesday), we’ll be hosting an open mic at Oxford Brookes on the topic of identity, together with the Oxford Human Rights Festival and Oxford Brookes LGBT+ Staff Forum. All are welcome! This week also sees the launch of ignitionpress and our first pamphlets by Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington: we’re in London on Wednesday and Oxford on Thursday. Both events are free and we’d love to see you! We also have a series of readings and a workshop with Alan Buckley lined up for the coming months. Find more information about those here.

Notes from Seren:

Polly Atkin lives in Cumbria. Her second poetry pamphlet, Shadow Dispatches (Seren, 2013) won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize. In 2014 her poem ‘A Short History of the Moon’ won the Wigtown Poetry Prize, and she was awarded New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse Prize for work in progress ‘reflect[ing] a strong sense of place or the natural environment’. Her 2017 collection from Seren is Basic Nest Architecture. She has taught at the Universities of Lancaster and Strathclyde. You can read more about Polly’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Seren has been publishing poetry for 35 years. We are an independent publisher specialising in English-language writing from Wales. Seren’s wide-ranging list includes fiction, translation, biography, art and history. Seren’s authors are shortlisted for – and win – major literary prizes across Britain and America, including the 2014 Costa Poetry Prize (for Jonathan Edwards’ My Familyand Other Superheroes). Amy Wack has been Seren’s Poetry Editor for more than 20 years. You can find more details about Seren on the publisher’s website and follow Seren on Twitter and on Facebook.

I was a lightning rod salesman

February 20, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I was a lightning rod salesman
preaching copper
past the imaginary hills

settlers construct
to forsake every direction but dirt.My handshake was a bird,
all getaway
by the time knife fights traced

the sky’s nightly veins.

Between the grave of a man
persecuted for wearing his beard
and a well-governed Florida,

the thunder repeated itself
like a prizefighter who couldn’t bear to leave
a clean stage.

Would you prefer a wife
or a heap of charred offal?
I reasoned with the terrible farmers.

To demonstrate what might happen,
I tried on shivers.

To stand for the sky’s jagged flesh,
my hands turned to rain.

by Christopher DeWeese

We are delighted and excited to say that this week’s poet, Christopher DeWeese, will be visiting Oxford this Saturday 24 February, where he will be reading with the Poetry Centre’s own Andy Eaton at the Society Café. Don’t miss this wonderful chance to hear two award-winning writers! You can buy tickets on the door or book them via our website, where you can also find details of the rest of the spring series.

Our three brand new ignitionpress poetry pamphlets: A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan, Glean by Patrick James Errington, and Lily Blacksell’s There’s No Such Thing, are now on sale from the Brookes online Shop! We will be holding launch events on 7 March (at the Poetry Café in London), 8 March (at the Society Café in Oxford), and on 25 March (at the Oxford Literary Festival), and all are welcome. You can find out more about these events on our website.

Christopher DeWeese is the author of three books of poems: The Confessions (Periplum, 2017), The Father of the Arrow is the Thought (Octopus Books, 2015), and The Black Forest (Octopus Books, 2012). He is currently Associate Professor of English at Wright State University. He lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Read more about Christopher’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.

The Confessions is a book about diving bells, automatons, living insignias, detectives, garden mazes, flea circuses, murder dollhouses, Esperanto, twenty-one gun salutes, spirit photography, company towns, daredevils, forgery, circuses, turning to soap, auctioneering, fake pirates, and anarchist bullfighters.

Based out of Plymouth University’s English and Creative Writing Department, Periplum aims to publish and promote the best new poetry being written in English from around the world. The press’s most recent publication is The Confessions by Christopher DeWeese, winner of the Periplum Open Book Competition, and the next pamphlet will be by the poet and artist Heather Phillipson.

Previous authors have included Mark Ford, Peter Gizzi, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and you can watch interviews with some of the writers here. Pamphlets are between 18 and 24 pages, printed on good quality paper, and designed by members of Plymouth’s Illustration department. Periplum also runs a bi-annual poetry pamphlet competition, which is open to anyone writing in English. The winner receives £300 and publication in Autumn 2018. The deadline for submissions is Sunday 1 April 2018.

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Practice

February 14, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

As a teenager, fencing was the closest thing
I knew to desire, all the girls swapping one

uniform for another before practice, their white
dresses replaced by breeches. I thought we were

princes in a fairy tale with a twist, since
there were no princesses to be taken, wed.

As knights, we were told to aim for an imaginary
spot just above our opponent’s left breast. Often,

I left a bruise: the blade’s tip ricocheting off chest-
guards onto flesh. Just as often, I would feel yellow

blooms of ache where the girl I thought was beautiful
had pierced my heart. Hours later, I would transform.

I would head back home with a deepening
sense of dread, my bruises fading to quiet.

by Mary Jean Chan

Hear Mary Jean read the poem by clicking here

The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre is proud and delighted to introduce you to the final poet whose work our ignitionpress is publishing in our first poetry pamphlets! A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan, Glean by Patrick James Errington, and Lily Blacksell’s There’s No Such Thing, are on sale TODAY from the Brookes online Shop.

We will be holding launch events on 7 March (at the Poetry Café in London), 8 March (at the Society Café in Oxford), and on 25 March (at the Oxford Literary Festival). You can find out more about these events on our website. Visit our website to also read and hear Lily’s poem ‘Brook’ and Patrick’s ‘Still Life with Approaching Crow’, and to find out about all three poets here.

Mary Jean Chan is a poet from Hong Kong. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, such as The Poetry Review, PN Review, Ambit Magazine, The Rialto, Callaloo Journal, and Wasafiri Magazine. In 2017, Mary Jean was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, and won the Poetry Society Members’ Competition and the Poetry and Psychoanalysis Competition. In 2016, she won the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition (ESL), and was shortlisted for the 2016 London Magazine Poetry Prize, the 2016 Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition and the 2016 Resurgence Poetry Prize. Mary Jean received the 2015 University of London MA Creative Writing Prize, and is currently a PhD candidate and Research Associate in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London and Co-Editor at Oxford Poetry. In 2019, her first full collection of poetry will be published by Faber & Faber.

ignitionpress is a new poetry pamphlet press with an international outlook which publishes original, arresting poetry from emerging poets, and established poets working on interim or special projects. The Managing Editor of the press is Les Robinson, who was the founder and director of the renowned poetry publisher tall-lighthouse until 2011. You can learn more about the press on the Poetry Centre website.

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Still Life with Approaching Crow

February 7, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

There’s nothing to distinguish
this from the last three-or-so
hundred fields they pass, but
for whatever reason they call it
far enough. The engine shaking
off its sound, voices dripping
from their mouths to the ground.
When they say let’s go they won’t
mean everyone, this time. Beyond,
a field frozen solid, expression-
less, stubbled with broken grain.
They’ll leave him loose as teeth
in his life, lashed to a fencepost.
Blood gently unlacing the features
from his face and every wound
unwinding from its pain like wire.
It’ll be days before anyone can tie
the term missing to what it has
to mean. The field and his flesh
grow significance against their will.

by Patrick James Errington

Hear Patrick read the poem by clicking here

The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre is proud and delighted to introduce you to the second of the three poets whose work our ignitionpress will be publishing in our first poetry pamphlets! Glean by Patrick James Errington, together with A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan and Lily Blacksell’s There’s No Such Thing, will be on sale on 14 February from the Brookes online Shop, and there will be launch events on 7 March (at the Poetry Café in London), 8 March (at the Society Café in Oxford), and on 25 March (at the Oxford Literary Festival). You can find out more about these events on our website. Last week we shared one of Lily’s poems with you, and next week we will be showcasing work by Mary Jean.

Patrick James Errington is a writer, translator, and researcher from the prairies of Alberta, Canada. As an undergrad at the University of Alberta (2007–2011), he studied English literature and creative writing with Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. He received his MFA from Columbia University (2013–2015) in creative writing and literary translation, where he also received a Program Scholarship and a Chair’s Fellowship. He has worked as an editor or editorial assistant for magazines like The New Yorker and The Columbia Journal, and is currently the editor-in-chief of The Scores, an online literary magazine based at the University of St Andrews. Patrick is currently a George Buchanan PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews and his research, under the supervision of Professors John Burnside and Don Paterson, is in the field of poetics and hermeneutics.

Patrick’s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from: Boston Review, Copper Nickel, Passages North, Oxford Poetry, CV2, The London Magazine, Long Poem Magazine, Best New Poets 2016, The Iowa Review, Horsethief, West Branch,The Adroit Journal, Cider Press Review, DIAGRAM, American Literary Review and others. He was Commended in The National Poetry Competition 2016, and has won, among other competitions, The London Magazine Poetry Competition (2016) and the Wigtown Poetry Competition (2017). Together with Laure Gall, Patrick also translated Au creux de la main (The Hollow of the Hand), by PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy (Paris: Éditions l’Âge d’Homme, 2017).

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Brook

January 31, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It’s so easy for me to imagine it I don’t even have to try. It’s why
I lost interest in the postcard maker. I hardly needed him anymore,
with his surfboard. I think he understood. That view
is stamped on my brain already, clear as day, except the grass
in the foreground is so dark it could almost be dusk overturned.
He told me the landslides are increasingly frequent, one for every
nice drop of rain. And so the cliff slips and the houses get closer
to the edge of it and the cliff gets weaker and so it goes on, and so
I take my love and I take it down. I think my mind’s eye is in my gut.
The lifeboat house is so low now it looks like a bunker, some kind
of air-raid shelter, to be on the safe side twice over. Little does it
know. The sunset takes longer these days, of course, with
further to go and less to hide behind. I’d give a whole limb to be
there again. I’d know the right-handed cliff anywhere, with its slow
morning stretch, its curve, its crumble. Then there’s the section
where clay turns to chalk and the peregrines were nesting last time.
Elsewhere, we’d lost a good chunk of car park, and the seagulls didn’t
know where to land. Have you ever seen tarmac carried out to sea?
Like a jagged black ode to Noah’s Island? It was not good
news at all. May it never appear in a photo.

by Lily Blacksell

Hear Lily read the poem by clicking below

The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre is proud and delighted to introduce you to the first of the three poets whose work ignitionpress will be publishing in our first poetry pamphlets! Lily Blacksell’s pamphlet, There’s No Such Thing, together with A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan and Glean by Patrick James Errington, will be on sale on 14 February from the Brookes online shop, and there will be launch events on 7 March (at the Poetry Café in London), 8 March (at the Society Café in Oxford), and on 25 March (at the Oxford Literary Festival). You can find out more about these events on our website. We will be showcasing work by Mary Jean and Patrick in the next two instalments of the Weekly Poem.

Lily Blacksell is a British writer recently returned from New York, where she was working towards a poetry MFA on Columbia University’s Writing Program and also held a Teaching Fellowship. Lily writes poems for the page and the stage. Her work has appeared in Rockland Lit, Lifejacket, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Poet’s Country, Foothill and Magma Poetry. She has written reviews and interviews for Boston Review, Sabotage and Prac Crit and was herself interviewed by Columbia School of the Arts and Impakter.

Lily has performed her work at numerous venues, such as Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop, Bowery Poetry Club, and Dead Rabbits (US), and Cheltenham Poetry Festival, Battersea Arts Centre (as part of Battersea Literature Festival), Howl, Word Up, and Boomerang (UK). In 2013, Apples and Snakes commissioned a piece of original spoken word theatre from Lily, which was performed at Lit Fuse, and in 2015 she was a finalist in the Roundhouse Poetry Slam. In 2017 Lily was nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets (United States and Canada).

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Ramadasi

January 26, 2018March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Return
to me, beloved
and take me on your lap.

Undo my braid
stiff
as buffalo horn

and draw your
fingers
through my hair.

Untie my belt, open
the silk cloth
covering my waist,

let my oiled limbs, my
perfumed skin
envelop you

as the rose
swallows
the bee.

by Shazea Quraishi

News from the Centre: there are only a few weeks left before we launch our first ever poetry pamphlets through ignitionpress! There’s No Such Thing by Lily Blacksell, A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan, and Glean by Patrick James Errington will be on sale from 14 February, and there will be several launch events . More details will follow soon!

The Poetry Centre’s exciting reading series gets underway on Saturday 24 February at the Society Café in Oxford with a reading by American poets Christopher DeWeese and Andy Eaton. You can book tickets via our website , where you can also find details of the rest of the spring series.

The acclaimed Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson will be visiting Brookes on Friday 16 February to give a lunchtime reading . Although this event is aimed at Brookes staff and students, there will be places available for members of the public. If you’d like to attend, e-mail niall.munro@brookes.ac.uk

Shazea Quraishi is a Pakistani-born Canadian poet, playwright and translator based in London. Her first pamphlet, The Courtesan’s Reply, was published by flipped eye in 2012. The Art of Scratching is her first full-length collection and was published by Bloodaxe in 2015. In 2015 Quaraishi was awarded a Brooklease Grant by the Royal Society of Literature and she also received awards from the British Council and Arts Council England in the same year.

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 Sheep to Tea, Kindness, Home and Puddings. Shazea Quraishi’s poem ‘Ramadasi’ appears in Ten Sexy Poems published in January 2018 in time for Valentine’s Day. You can read more about the pamphlet on the press’ website. Candlestick Press titles are stocked by chain and independent bookshops, as well as by galleries, museums and garden centres.

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The Red Man

December 16, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Snow is falling. Who comes laughing
over the fields? Stars are falling.
Canals are freezing. Who brings
like nothing on his back
the shape of our life, the hopes
of our life, lumped
obdurate in a reindeer skin sack?

Trees are chiming in orchards of glass.
If childhood’s white and cold, then love’s
the overgrown, evergreen dark. Two rings
of apple peel, our fingers dipped in wine.
Two pale root rings from the frozen earth,
your fingers wound in mine.
Our vows we can see on the air.

by Jacob Polley

This is the final Weekly Poem of 2017! We wish you a very Merry Christmas and a lyrical start to 2018. Our poems will resume in late January – thank you for reading in 2017! As well as the launch of ignition , we have some very exciting readings planned for early 2018, so please follow us on social media , keep an eye on our website, or stay tuned to the Weekly Poem for more details!

‘The Red Man’ is copyright © Jacob Polley, 2017. It is reprinted from Christmas Garland: Ten Evergreen Poems (Candlestick Press, 2017) by permission of Candlestick Press.

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Jacob Polley was born and grew up in Cumbria. He has published four books of poems, winning the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry for his fourth, Jackself. He has also been awarded the 2013 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for The Havocs, and the Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel, Talk of the Town (2009). Jacob teaches at Newcastle University and lives with his family on the North East coast. You can find more about Jacob’s work on his website.

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 Sheep to Tea, Kindness, Home and Puddings. This year Candlestick is publishing six Christmas titles featuring newly-commissioned poems and a short story by poet Sean O’Brien. You can read more about them on the press’ website. 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 or find it on 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.

Follow the Poetry Centre on Facebook and Twitter.