Santa circa 2092

December 4, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

On the Eve, when tongues of hung dead bells
lay silent, smog scraped the landscape
stretched its wrath across the shivering city.

Below a growling sky, the grey track of a sleigh
lugged by a pack of nine empty dogs
weaved between mounds of bones and rust.

Like a swarthy pioneer he handled the reins
hoping for a place to slap his sack, retrieve a song
from his memory, hang a sprig of mistletoe above a hearth.

Between carcasses of once lit haunts he dug
barehanded, searching for a glint of glitter, broken shells
of decorated baubles, a wayward ring of a bell.

He swept the musty ground, tore over hills,
followed a path of fallen fern, hooked his thumbs
into his belt, bellowed until the withered trees shook.

Night after night he roamed, scraped the days
from his boots, tugged at his bedraggled beard,
listened for life under the covering of dark.

With a sag for a smile and holes for eyes, he sat
whimpering amongst the ashen landscape, there
he set himself, back to a tree, slumped for the last.

As midnight struck, a wail clogged itself to the cracks
in his heart. Hidden in an undergrowth, threadbare
and faint, a woman, swollen, ready.

by Panya Banjoko

This Friday, don’t miss our final poetry reading in this semester’s series! It features celebrated haiku and performance poet Mark Gilfillan alongside Ted Hughes Prize-shortlisted writer and translator Chris Beckett, and will take place from 7-9pm at the Society Café in Oxford. You can find more details and buy tickets here . Tickets will also be available on the door.

‘Santa circa 2092’ is copyright © Panya Banjoko, 2017. It is reprinted from Christmas Crackers: Ten Poems to Surprise and Delight (Candlestick Press, 2017) by permission of Candlestick Press.

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Panya Banjoko is a performance poet and writer whose first collection is forthcoming from Burning Eye Books in 2018. She performed at the 2012 Olympic Games and is a patron for UNESCO Nottingham City of Literature. Her work has been widely published in anthologies and by Bloodaxe Books and in 2008 she won a Women in the Arts Award for Outstanding Achievement. You can find more details about Panya’s work on her Facebook page or on her website and 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 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.

When Beasts Most Graze

November 21, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

1

left their houses weeping and became unemployed
and finally… died in poverty
and so ended their days

(Commission of Inquiry Returns, 1517)

Tenant at Will, Wharram Percy (c.1500):

They found me at Milndam, at the fish pond,
the landmaster’s men. they said
Leave your nets, William. We’re fishers of men.
Come with us to the Lord’s house. Come,
and receive the Word.
I followed,

sharp as a fox out of cover. Squire Hilton
hung like a cloud on his front step.
His smile axed at my heart.
He gave me till Michaelmas –
‘Tell the whole village the same.’

I looked up to the furlongs, the skyline
of corn. I heard children laugh
by the stream. I turned from his gate.
For Hilton a sheep-run.
For the cottar death with the plough.

Our young men wanted to fight, but
I counselled acceptance: To sever one stoat
will summon the pack. We have no rights here,
leave behind little. Our tears
like our toil will fade into the land…

We gathered below Town Field.
Swallows twitched from the church tower,
bellied the shallows. Next year
they’ll nest in the houses, singing
to idle spindles and empty hearths.

by Ian Taylor

This Friday lunchtime (24th November) from 12-1pm, join us at the launch of Steven Matthews’ new critical/creative book Ceaseless Music, a response to Wordsworth’s The Prelude.Through a series of poetic responses and critical reflections, Ceaseless Music explores the afterlives of Wordsworth’s landmark autobiographical poem in literature, philosophy and life writing, together with the insights it can offer into the writing of poetry today. Steven will be reading from the book in the Special Collections room in the basement of the Main Library, John Henry Brookes Building, where he will be joined by Paul Whitty who will be playing some of the sound recordings of the Lake District he made to accompany the book. All are welcome!

On Friday evening from 6.30-8pm at Oxford Brookes, the Poetry Centre presents its annual International Poetry Competition Awards event, featuring readings by the winning and shortlisted poets and the judge, Helen Mort. You can find more details on our website.

Notes from Smokestack:

Ian Taylor has been writing about the lost landscapes of the North for over forty years – old earthworks, ruined churches, derelict mineworkings, Neolithic barrows and deserted villages. Bringing together the best of this work in a single volume, Dusk is a book about enclosure, famine and deforestation, about bleak moorlands, sunken roads, nettles and cobwebs. Exploring between the pages of history, superstition, myth and the ‘threadbare cloak of folk tradition’, Taylor listens to the drovers, peat-cutters, ironstone miners, seasonal labourers, landless farmers and tramps in whose ‘hollow voice of loss’ he hears a renegade and still undefeated Albion, like a fox running from the ‘cleanshaven faces and privileged profiles’ of the Hunt, the Green Man still dancing in the trees. You can read more about Dusk on the Smokestack website.

I.P. Taylor was born in Shipley, West Yorkshire. He has been a forestry operative, a market gardener, a farm worker, a drystone waller and a millhand. Winner of the Stroud Festival international poetry competition and the Poetry Society’s Greenwood Prize, his publications include A Poetry Quintet, The Grip, The Passion, The HollowPlaces and Killers. He lives in York.

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.

About cows

November 7, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

They shit a lot and at first it is a warm pat
ridged with raised circles as it dries.
Water stopped in its tracks or a viscous jelly
hardening from the outside in.
I think of dying in a pool of shite,
the one my mother meant –
Go take a running leap in the slurry pit for all I care.
We had lost three cats that summer.
Seeing them stiffed, legs rigid and shining
made an art of death.
But this was to be about cows,
their lumbering walk to the gap to be milked
as if they know more together than apart.
They can smell a stream of fresh water from a mile.
They can hear grass growing under the bull.
They hold time in their four stomachs, chewing it down
till the evening milking, feeling the hours move on through.
They do not miss the calves they have had taken.
No attachment is apparent in three days.
Perhaps like the farmer in a unit of money,
they count on exchange.
Cows know their own patch but they’ll stray to graze another’s.
Swung towards the hedge in rain, heads dripping,
tail swatch taking a rest from flies.
Apparently rural but worldly wise, cows know that loss
is our only measure, expellation a passing pleasure.

by Siobhán Campbell

News from the Centre: this Thursday we are delighted to welcome this week’s poet, Siobhán Campbell, to Oxford to read with Kate Clanchy as part of the Poetry Centre’s reading series. Everyone is very welcome to hear two internationally-acclaimed writers. The reading takes place at the Society Café, St. Michael’s Street, Oxford, from 7-9pm. Tickets (£4) can be bought on the door or via the Brookes Shop.

Tomorrow (Wednesday), Oxford Writers’ House presents ‘Writing for Audio Drama and Podcasting: an Evening with Robert Valentine and Liz Campbell’. All are welcome, but places are limited! Find out more and sign up here.

On Saturday 11 November, don’t miss an Armistice Day reading with Adnan Al-Sayegh, Jenny Lewis, Peter King & Jude Cowan Montague, together with the launch of Seeds of Bullets, a book on Adnan’s work. Albion Beatnik Bookshop, Oxford, 7.30pm.

Finally, the Woodstock Poetry Festival runs from 10-12 November. A very impressive programme includes readings by the likes of Douglas Dunn and Anne Stevenson. More details here.

Notes from Seren:

Siobhán Campbell was born in Ireland and has lived in Dublin and London as well as San Francisco and Washington DC. Widely published in the USA and UK, she has won awards in the National Poetry Competition, the Troubadour International Poetry Competition, the Templar Poetry Prize and most recently was awarded the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Prize (Open category). She has an MA from the University College Dublin, a PhD from Lancaster University and has pursued postgraduate study at NYU and the New School in New York. She joined the Open University Department of English from Kingston University London where she was Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing. Heat Signature is her fifth collection of poems, and you can read more about the book on the Seren website. Find out more about Siobhán’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 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.

Bunny Says

October 30, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I’m hovered by the gate post again, waiting for Bunny
with my bag full of sour bread, just like Bunny
wanted, and jimjangled, can’t see Bunny.
Have I come dog-keen too early
Have I worn the right red boots
Have I stopped you raging Bunny
and Bunny says Bunny says Bunny says

Now we’re chasing my sister and Bunny
is joyful, but trickster and thug he is, is Bunny
he loves the way the brambles bite, does Bunny
so does she love the scramble too
so does she cry for being alive
so does she gasp for young night, Bunny
and Bunny says Bunny says Bunny says

In the garage, we unjunk some purple paint but Bunny
is not in think of plans or undead dusk. No, Bunny
charcoals out his plans for an everyoung Bunny
Will he do this thing and name it servant
Will it lollop methodically, coughing out washers
Will you will it to kill me, Rust Commander Bunny?
and Bunny says Bunny says Bunny says

by Kirsten Irving

News from the Centre! We are excited to say that this week’s poet, Kirsten Irving, will be reading alongside Caroline Smith this Thursday from 7-9pm at our new venue, the Society Café in central Oxford. (We featured ‘Teenager’, a poem from Caroline’s book The Immigration Handbook – shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award – back in January.) All are welcome to the reading, and you can buy tickets (£4) via the Brookes Shop and also on the door. We hope to see you there! Next Thursday, the Society Café hosts another reading – this time with Siobhán Campbell and Kate Clanchy, and you can find tickets for that event here.

We would also be delighted to see you at our International Poetry Competition awards evening on Friday 24 November at Oxford Brookes. The event, which runs from 6.30-8pm in the John Henry Brookes Building, will feature readings from the winners and shortlisted poets in this year’s competition, and also a reading from our judge, Helen Mort. And cake. To book a place, please e-mail poetrycomp@brookes.ac.uk

Kirsten Irving is a poet, editor, copywriter, and voice actor. Her poems have appeared widely in various online and print magazines. She has published three pamphlets – No, Robot, No! with Jon Stone, What To Do, Riotous with Jon Stone and a debut full-length collection Never NeverNever Come Back (Salt Publishing, 2012). The poem ‘Bunny Says’ is from her forthcoming collection, tentatively titled Popgun. Kirsten is also one of the founding editors of experimental poetry press Sidekick Books. You can read more about Kirsten’s work on her website, follow her on Twitter, or come and hear her read this Thursday!

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.

Catullus 51 Noir

October 25, 2017April 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: Noir

Lesbia, smoking hot in shifting satin,
a red Schiaparelli number, cut-to-kill,
spaghetti strap artfully loose on one bare
white arm. Her hooks tonight are in
millionaire Crassus. He’s slavering,
luckiest grifter in Little Italy, Straight Flush,
Full House, Jack in the Hole. Rufus,
I tell the barman, hit me with another.
Lesbia. She was Clodia back then.
The shock when she walked through
my door. Like the sizzle that twitched
Antonius. I wired him up to the factory mains.
He went pasty, his legs shook, sawdust-mouthed,
he fizzed inside, talked, and blacked out.
Catullus, I tell myself, here’s the angle:
trouble comes when there’s time to burn.
Time on your hands, Christ, you’re an animal.
Flagrant time. It’s what got Philoctetes
the Greek wasted. It did for Babylon.

by Ian McLachlan

News from the Centre: next Thursday sees the first event in our poetry reading series at our exciting new venue, Society Café in Oxford city centre. The first reading pairs two distinct voices in contemporary poetry: Kirsten Irving (also one of the editors of Sidekick Books) and Caroline Smith (whose poem ‘Teenager’ we featured back in January). Buy your tickets here and join us from 7-9pm. For future events in our reading series, including details of our reading on 9 November with Siobhán Campbell and Kate Clanchy, visit our website.

After the recent announcement of the winners of our International Poetry Competition, judged by Helen Mort, we would be delighted to see you at our awards event on Friday 24 November, which will feature readings from the winning and shortlisted poets and from Helen Mort herself. If you’d like to attend, please e-mail poetrycomp@brookes.ac.uk

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Ian McLachlan was the Republic’s favourite tragedian. Due to an unfortunate incident involving Pompey’s son-in-law and the Cloaca Maxima, Ian now lives in remote Britain where he is a student of Stoicism and an assiduous writer of curse tablets. You can follow him on Twitter.

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.

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.

This Is Not A Rescue

October 9, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I want to tell you it will not be as you expect. For years
you have hammered in stakes, handed men the rope and said
consume me with fire. Most have run – one does not burn
a witch lightly. This one is water. He’ll unbind you, take
your hands in his and say remember how you love the ocean?
Come with me. You’ll go to the beach on a cloudy day, watch
foam rise from the sea’s churn until sun appears. In turn
you’ll say let’s go in and even though he hesitates, this man
will kick off his shoes and wade to his shins. Jellyfish,
shot with pink like satin dresses, will dance between you, flash
iridescent. His body is all whorls and planes like smoothly sanded
planks used to make a boat, his ears are pale shells you hear
the waves in, he smells of sandalwood and salt, his eyes
are ocean. He’ll spot the pebbles that in secret you have sewn
into your skirts and give you his penknife to unpick them. 
You can’t swim with those. He’ll teach you to skim. The pebbles
break the surface like question marks. You’ll throw each last one in.

by Emily Blewitt

Notes from Seren:

This Is Not A Rescue is a sparkling debut collection from Carmarthen-born Emily Blewitt, featuring poems on varied subjects from being a ‘woman poet’ to the heroes of Jane Austen. There are also some winning, unusual love poems and work inspired by crows and a couple of characters from ‘Star Wars’. Read more about the collection on the Seren website.

Emily Blewitt read English Language and Literature at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and has an MA in Film and Literature from the University of York. In 2010 she returned to Wales to begin a PhD in English Literature at Cardiff University, where she specialised in poetic representations of pregnancy in nineteenth-century and contemporary women’s writing, graduating in 2016. She has published poetry widely, her work appearing in The Rialto, Prole, The Interpreter’s House, Ambit, Poetry Wales, Furies, Cheval, Nu2: Memorable Firsts, and in Brittle Star. The title poem from her debut collection, This Is Not ARescue, was Highly Commended for best individual poem in the 2016 Forward Prizes, and is published in TheForward Book of Poetry 2017 . You can read more about Emily’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Storm petrel

September 28, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A pocket. A fistful
of sky in a small
gut
lined with
water lustrated of salt.
You,
almanac,
gathering storms
under windslip wings,
a slice of
clean water, parting
miles out to sea where
oil-spills are tumbled with
algae and plastic:
gyres vast & unequivocal in their
stranglehold over tides and land –
circular, massive,
holding us fast
but you
hold steady,
pelagic (storm-driven,
waif and tendril, fluff
and beak).
Were we wise,
we might learn from you,
learn to make love at midnight,
brief and fast in the shadows
cast by stones

chikka-chikka-chikk

the trill of a warning
sharp as the sting of a lighthouse beam

a whip
of light before the sinking:

andwe walked on water as we dreamed
beyond a horizon your shadow eclipses, and eclipses.

You scavenge for rotting flesh,
swoop and dive to tenderise the chum for your
one, fluffed chick

who knows gale-swept European islands,
and the kiss of Tunisian sands
but no language. You know no language,

only storm.

by Aki Schilz

Happy National Poetry Day! We hope you enjoy celebrating with this poem by Aki Schilz, and if you’d like to read some more poetry today, why not check out previous Weekly Poems, which are all available from 2007 to the present? Just visit our website. And if you haven’t yet heard about our exciting new venture, ignitionpress, please visit this page to learn about our plans to publish poetry pamphlets, and the three poets Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington in particular.

The programme for the Woodstock Poetry Festival (10-12 November) has been announced, and features readings by a host of celebrated writers, such as Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, George Szirtes, and David Harsent. For more information and to book your tickets, visit the Woodstock Bookshop website.

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Aki Schilz is a writer and editor based in London. She is co-founder of the #LossLit Twitter writing project alongside Kit Caless, and co-editor of LossLit Magazine. Her poetry, flash fiction, short stories and creative non-fiction have been published online (And Other Poems, Mnemoscape, tNY.Press, The Bohemyth, CHEAP POP, Annexe) and in print (An Unreliable Guide to London, Popshot, The Colour of Saying, Kakania,Best Small Fictions 2015), and she is the winner of the inaugural Visual Verse Prize (2013) and the Bare Fiction Prize for Flash Fiction (2014). Aki works at The Literary Consultancy, where she is the Editorial Services Manager. She tweets micropoetry at @AkiSchilz , and you can read more about her work on her blog.

With this poem we continue our selection of poems from Sidekick Books’ four volumes of Birdbooks. In 2009, with two micro-compendiums under their belt, Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone, the editors at Sidekick, discussed the idea of a book of bird poetry – but one in which less well known species were on equal terms with the popular ones. There are dozens of poems about herons, eagles, ravens and nightingales, not so many about the whimbrel, the ruff, the widgeon or the hobby. Paper-cut artist Lois Cordelia was recruited to give the series its distinctive covers, and over 150 artists and illustrators were commissioned over six years to complete the series. The first volume is now in its second printing. Find out more about the Birdbook series on the Sidekick website.

Iohanna of Sprotburgh

September 18, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Lord, saue vs; weperischen.

Matheu, VIII: 25

Drowned thieving from fish-traps.
Gaffed to the bank
by punting bargees –
glass-eyed, gaping.

Swan-complected, scabbed with leeches,
oozing like the fen.
Maids tore weeds
and wailed to Richard.

She hiccoughed a frog;
eels squirming from her petticoats.
In Hampull’s chapel,
her guttering candle flared.

by Steve Ely

Last Friday (and as promised in last week’s Weekly Poem!), the Poetry Centre announced the launch of its new pamphlet press, ignitionpress. If you missed the announcement, you can read about the new press here , and find out about the three poets we will be publishing (Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, and Patrick James Errington) here . We look forward to sharing more details about the press indue course.

On Sunday 15 October, local poets Dorothy Yamamoto and Sarah J. Bryson will be running a poetry workshop in Kirtlington Village Hall entitled ‘Terra firma, or all at sea?’ The workshop will feature writing exercises, writing time, sharing and discussion, and runs from 10-3.30pm. All are welcome, and the event costs £25. For more details and to book a place, contact Dorothy on dorothy.mccarthy@btopenworld.com

Notes from Smokestack:

Steve Ely’s new book takes its inspiration and its title from Incendium Amoris (‘The Fire of Love’) by the fourteenth century saint and mystic Richard Rolle, ‘the hermit of Hampole’. The book offers a vision of pre-Reformation and post-industrial England through the eyes of the trespasser, the poacher, the recusant and the revolutionary, in solidarity with the swinish multitude against the landed power. Contesting language and landscape and addressing issues including carnality, class, scepticism and belief, Incendium Amoris is a peasant’s revolt against the accelerating cultural, social and environmental devastations of globalising capital, a guerrilla-pastoral prophecy of a yeoman-anarchist utopia. Read more about the book on the Smokestack website.

Steve Ely’s previous works include Oswald’s Book of Hours (nominated for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and for the Ted Hughes Award), Englaland, Werewolf and Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire; Made in Mexborough (2015). He lives in the Osgoldcross wapentake in the West Riding of Yorkshire, close to Richard Rolle’s Hampole. You can read more about Steve’s work on the Poetry International website, and follow him on Twitter.

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.

Lesser Whitethroat

September 11, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Something disappears
Is it knowledge?
Or is it something more precious?
Pressed grass where weight should have been,
a tree limb uncontrollably shaking,
leaves on their way down,
the mind rattling under a hat-brim
a cat, blank off the ground –

nightfall.

Make this the opening that you prayed for.

You can change sides,
scale the wall, distill every one of your wishes
into the bandit’s bliss. Lift yourself,

and you will flow through a thousand airs –
with each adjustment you might lose strength,
Nevertheless,
climb and take height
climb and take one story at a time.

Land light above a window, a busy kitchen
is best,
the room with the burning hearth will also do.
Take in the fragrance of daily life,
but do not take part. Your feet might walk rooftops,
but your head graces heaven
shoulder to shoulder with the incense and the graspless.

Wherever you find doorways slip in as if indigenous,
or a hole –
keep your breathing pressed,
less, lesser, less…
Yes!

You are the size of a mouse
the introverted house guest,
whether you are dressed in monk’s grey,
the dusty cloak of an old mountain hag…

if you are seen
to be a man, not a man –
your feathers remain the same.
If anyone should ask, your Western name
is Sylvia.
Do you understand?

Remember, if you are caught, you are neither
our son nor our daughter.
You are an orphan,
but you also have many kin –
in the Sahara, Arabia, India, Mongolia…
even Siberia, such ideas are comforting.

Remember everything you have accomplished
everybody you love… then drop them over the edge.
Now you are lesser,
more enlightened,
Yes?
If you should be mistaken for a common
thief, if you are about to lose your hand –
make your heart stay red,
seal your mouth and freeze your throat.
At your centre you shall hurt
until you glow
and become so beautiful.
Silence is so…
I am afraid
you will find there is nowhere else to go,
There are so many thorns in the hedgerow – the land fruitless.

The mountain pass? Impossible
under this new snow.

by Eileen Pun

The Poetry Centre has some very exciting news to announce this week, as we begin a wonderful new chapter (or stanza) in our work. Tune into our social media or check our website for details this Friday…

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Eileen Pun was born in New York, US and now lives in Grasmere, Cumbria where she works as a freelance writer, poet and artist. Her work has recently been published in several young poets anthologies, including a showcase of new Black and Asian writing in the UK: Ten, The New Wave published by Bloodaxe (2014). In 2015, Eileen was a recipient of the UK Northern Writer’s Award (England). She also received a Lisa Ullmann Travelling Scholarship (LUTSF) to China in support of her interdisciplinary work in movement and poetry. In March 2016 Eileen was invited as a guest reader for a residential to the Ted Hughes Arvon Centre, Lumb Bank for Creative Writing. Read more about Eileen’s work on her website.

from The Barrow Seven

September 4, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Walter Lewis Goodchild

Hanger-on, aged 35

Polished like brown saddle leather, the penny
he left under the pillow for his lad.
The tooth had been loose for days
and the night time groans
would stir him to nudge Lizzy
to tend to the child
and avoid a chorus.
Then yesterday, between forefinger
and thumb it took some fiddling
to loop string to incisor,
leading twine to door handle.
The fourth attempt pulled it
followed by a shrill scream
that would ring through the house for weeks.

by Karl Riordan

Notes from Smokestack:

‘The Barrow Seven’ is a sequence of poems commemorating the seven men killed in the Barrow Colliery in 1907.

Karl Riordan spent much of his late teens in a tattooist’s studio, fascinated by the declarations of love, badges of pride and intricate designs that reminded him of the Stilton legs of his grandfather, a miner tattooed by a working life spent underground. In his powerful debut collection, Riordan recalls and celebrates growing up in the South Yorkshire coalfield – holidays and haircuts, football pools and pool halls, Mackeson and Temazepam, Saturday night and Monday morning. The Tattooist’s Chair is a study in working-class history from the Barrow Colliery disaster of 1907 to the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, St Francis in a Sheffield pet shop, Connie Francis on the dansette and Charlie Williams always having the last laugh. You can read more about the book on the Smokestack website.