Seamus on the Tube

August 21, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Looking away, not looking away –
The happenstance of what may change everything;
Those standing commuters moving off at Charing Cross
For the Bakerloo Line and then your eyes lifting

Above those seated opposite, as one does, to read
Between faster Broadband and Las Vegas –
“Where your accent is an aphrodisiac,” it says,
And where “what happens here, stays here,”

The Railway Children where in the white cups 
Of the telegraph wires a young boy knows 
That words are carried in the shiny pouches of raindrops.
Like this poem carried for you in the red and white Tube

On the Northern Line in cold January’s real freeze;
Snow is promised in the suburbs so everyone’s scarved
Against the weather. Words taking you back to the fifties
And his boyhood summers before everything changed.

Reaching Warren Street, you’ve read it 
Four or five times, absorbed the innocent wisdom 
And sense of the thing. Those people opposite 
See a crazy old man mouthing words, appearing to sing.

by Tony Curtis

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries for just one more week! Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. First Prize in both categories is £1000, with £200 for Second. The competition is open for submissions until 11pm BST/10pm GMT on 28 August 2017. Visit our website for more details and to enter, and please feel free to share news of the competition with friends and colleagues.

The TOAST Poets scheme is now open for applications until midnight on 25 August! TOAST is a professional development project for mid-career poets. It takes the form of eleven workshops over the course of a year from September 2017 – Summer 2018. Each TOAST poet is offered two, hour-long mentoring sessions with an established poet or editor to discuss their work and what steps they might take to progress. This year’s mentors are Hannah Lowe and Kayo Chingonyi. Visit the TOAST website for more details and to apply.

Notes from Seren:

Seren celebrates the 70^th birthday of the Welsh poet Tony Curtis with the publication of his From the Fortunate Isles: New and Selected Poems. This landmark book features poems from ten of his previous collections, in addition to a substantial number of new poems: marking a career in poetry fifty years in duration. This is a poet whose themes and variations remain consistent: a deep affection for his roots in West Wales, tender attachments to family, a profound interest in the wars of the last century, and an abiding fascination for all art forms, particularly painting and poetry. Writing about Tony’s poetry, the late Helen Dunmore commented: ‘The poems reverberate with present, sensuous experience, but beyond their immediacy there is a deep hinterland of public and private histories, of grief and delight.’ You can read more about the new book on the Seren website.

Tony Curtis was born in Carmarthen in 1946. He studied at Swansea University and Goddard College, Vermont, USA and is the author of a number of poetry collections and pamphlets, including: Taken for Pearls (1993), War Voices (1995), The Arches (1998), Heaven’s Gate (2001) and Crossing Over (2007). He is the editor of a number of popular anthologies on subjects ranging from war to Pembrokeshire, Snowdonia, coal, and orphans in the charitable anthology Tokens for the Foundlings (2012). His many critical books include The Art of Seamus Heaney (1982), and Dannie Abse (1985), How Poets Work (1996) and Welsh Painters Talking (1997). Curtis has won the National Poetry Competition, the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Cholmondeley Award. He is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at the University of South Wales, where he established and was Director of the MPhil in Writing, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has toured widely, reading his poetry to international audiences. You can read more about Tony’s work on his website and on his Facebook page.

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.

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.

Hurricanoes

August 14, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Fifteen years before I’d heard of King Lear I walked home
from a party through a storm, daring the sideways rain to
stop me, clenching my jaw, livid to the gills in a stretched-
arm soaking.

Turns out I’d also lost a girl, I kissed her in the disco the week
before, fell immediately to lovesickness, dry-mouthed, way
off the pace during 5th-form games, nights spent praying
to any god who’d listen that her crowd would show and I
could get to know her name, and in doing so use my tongue
again.

The late evening sun lit up the crosstown bus, but by the
time I saw her in the kitchen I’d had three ciders and the sky
outside was heavy as a boxer’s eyes.

She was sat on the stovetop wrapped around a Mod while
his Fred Perry friends stared into their vodkas and orange
squash. I remember a hot throat and a cold torso. Not the
spot for a New Romantic. Inner chatter took over.

Tearing up in the street I bated the wind, beckoned it over,
butted it for seven miles, drove into the rain with my
promontory chest, a deposed king wailed his misfortune to
the only gods left.

They ordained a fever slow to subside and the next fort-
night in bed. I no longer talk to the elements though they
often whisper in my head.

by Daniel Roy Connelly

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries for just two more weeks! Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: English as an Additional Language and Open category. First Prize in both categories is £1000, with £200 for Second. The competition is open for submissions until 11pm GMT on 28 August 2017. Visit our website to enter, and please share with fellow poets or poetry lovers!

The TOAST Poets scheme is now open for applications! TOAST is a professional development project for mid-career poets. It takes the form of eleven workshops over the course of a year from September 2017 – Summer 2018. Each TOAST poet is offered two,hour long mentoring sessions with an established poet or editor to discuss their work and what steps they might take to progress. This year’s mentors are Hannah Lowe and Kayo Chingonyi. Visit the TOAST website for more details and to apply.

Notes from Little Island Press:

At once personal and hauntingly universal, Extravagant Stranger is the compelling memoir of self-professed ‘global scalliwag’ Daniel Roy Connelly – former diplomat, theatre director, Shakespeare scholar and conscience-stricken father. Laced with international intrigue and hilarious moments of well-aimed self-scrutiny, here is a book – like the life it relates – truly without comparison. Read more about the book and hear Daniel read from his work on the Little Island Press website.

A former British diplomat, Daniel Roy Connelly is a theatre director, actor and professor of creative writing, English and theatre at John Cabot University and the American University of Rome. He has acted in and directed theatre in America, the UK, Italy and China, where his 2009 production of David Henry Hwang’s M Butterfly was forced to close by the Chinese secret police.

His writing is widely published in print and online. He was the winner of the 2014 Fermoy International Poetry Festival Prize, a finalist in the 2015 Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Prize and winner of the 2015 Cuirt New Writing Prize for poetry. Recent work has appeared in The North, The Transnational (in German), Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Moth, Acumen and Critical Survey and he has a forthcoming pamphlet from Eyewear Publishing as part of their Aviator Series. Follow Daniel’s work on his website and via Twitter.

Little Island Press is an independent publisher of fiction, poetry and essays. Founded in 2016, it publishes innovative, intellectually ambitious writing in elegant, hardback editions designed by the award-winning design studio typographic research unit. Find out more about the press on its website and follow its activities on Twitter.

The Spoonbill Tastes the New Menu

August 7, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The table was laid with tureens, deep dishes – even vases
were shaken of flowers and filled with the tasting menu
of the season: steaming broths and stews, delicate and hearty.

The visitor trod slowly among the dishes, then, stepping carefully
into each one as if testing bathwater, paddled the fragrant
silt of herbs, undissolved stock cubes, churning up the bed

of each pot. The maitre’d pursed his lips at the scaly feet
wading about in the china, his stomach rumbling at wafts
of french onion, vichyssoise, bisque (it wasn’t his idea to invite

their esteemed guest or her unorthodox methods to the table
but the chef marked noone as more adept at judging the calibre
of soups). One by one she lowered her open bill into each

tureen, waving it in an infinity sign from side to side, filtering
for morsels, pausing to hoik a crouton into her pale throat.
She made no noise, no sign of joy. The chef peered through

the porthole of the kitchen door, his brow beaded with sweat
until the last soup was uncovered: a bouillabaisse, dense
with clams and chunks of fish. The visitor raised her wings

in ecstasy and plunged her utensils straight into the broth,
grabbing at squid tentacles and shrimp, garlicky stock clagging
her feathers, then gave the only applause ever reported

in her career. A clack of spoons, like castanets, resounded
through the room, and the critic pressed oily prints
on the tablecloth in the run-up to flight: five lopsided stars.

by Jasmine Ann Cooray

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries for less than one more month! Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: English as an Additional Language and Open category. First Prize in both categories is £1000, with £200 for Second. The competition is open for submissions until 11pm GMT on 28 August 2017. Visit our website for more details.

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Jasmine Ann Cooray is a poet and therapist from London, of Sri Lankan and mixed European lineage. Spurred by a silent adolescence, she now designs and implements a variety of projects that cultivate emotional literacy through poetry. In 2013 she was Writer in Residence at the National University of Singapore and has just finished tenure as a BBC Performing Arts Fellow with Spread the Word. Her first full collection is almost complete, and she is working on a collaborative poetry and aerial arts show with Upswing about what it means to trust. To balance her frequent reclusiveness, she does an excellent line in hugs. You can follow Jasmine on Twitter, and watch her read one of her poems, ‘Ice Cream Box of Frozen Curry’, here.

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.

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.

End of the Year Blues

July 31, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The days will slowly stretch themselves,
I know, and I’ve watched many winters
come and go through different eyes.
Nothing should surprise.

Once they were those of a raw young
boy cycling home in the evening gloom
full of promise and expectation, eagerly
awaiting summer’s invitations, cricket
and tennis on seamless lawns, endless
seaside days, and, later, girls to cavort with
beneath the sun’s fading rays.

And now these eyes have become those
of an ageing man, and each turning year
another hurdle, an unkind countdown
from a time whose end, one always
thought, would never come, too young
to care, illusion’s snare.

Yet seeing dear ones vanish each fragile
year stiffens the resolve, reminds that
dark, light, dark, light is the way our world
revolves, gives you the will to fight on,
value all you have as, once more, the dark
dissolves around you, and light restores.

by Jeremy Robson

Notes from Smokestack:

After breaking a thirty-five year writer’s block with Blues in the Park, Jeremy Robson’s new collection of poems is his second book in three years. Subject Matters takes us into a world that is both contemporary and timeless. Many of these poems are personal, recalling the pleasure of a smile, a landscape or a song, and the lives of friends like Ron Moody and Dannie Abse. Others evoke scenes and subjects from an earlier era – Dick Barton, Roy Rogers, Paris in the 1950s, London jazz clubs, CND rallies, telephone exchanges with sexy names – occasionally drawing on his Jewish experience to give context to his depiction of a modern world where violence explodes with increasing fury and the sirens rarely stop. All subjects that matter. You can read more about Jeremy’s new book on the Smokestack website, and more about Jeremy’s work in this interview.

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.

Grunting Up

July 24, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Who would have thought that these great slab-sided beasts
who fall to their knees and slump belly up, 
would sing this rhythmic, grunting lullaby?

Weight drops from back and loins but
swollen, undulating glands seem added on,
like a full frill at the bottom of a skirt.

The piglets rush to their particular nipple
and plug on, tongues curling, eyes closed,
chubby fingers, lined up, reaching.

And then she begins. This low throbbing,
this song to the milk flow,
this crooning hymn.

by Ilse Pedler

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries for just one more month! Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: English as an Additional Language and Open category. First Prize in both categories is £1000, with £200 for Second. The competition is open for submissions until 11pm GMT on 28 August 2017. Visit our website for more details, and please feel free to share news of the competition with friends and colleagues.

Notes from Seren:

N.B. Grunting up is the name given to the noise a sow makes when her piglets are sucking.

Her life as a busy vet inspires the poet Ilse Pedler in her debut poetry pamphlet, the winner of the prestigious Mslexia pamphlet competition in 2015, The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels. The author uses both free verse and traditional forms like the sonnet and sestina to delve into days that can include dramatic situations with animals, both farm and domesticated species, and their human carers. A secondary theme runs throughout the collection, exemplified by the poem ‘Suturing Secrets’ – the secrets we keep as spouses or parents or from those we are close to. You can read more about the pamphlet on the Seren website.

Ilse Pedler was born in Derby in 1963 and grew up in Birmingham. A Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, she works as a vet in Saffron Walden. She has a son, stepson and a number of small and medium-sized animals. Her poems have been published in Poetry News, Orbis, The North and other journals. Writing about this collection, Helen Ivory has commented: ‘These poems point to the equality of mammals; the locked cabinets of our bodies, how a neat incision, a skilled turn of the wrist can reveal the hearts of dogs and humans alike. There is tenderness here, and a sense of wonder at the world, that scientists and artists share. This is a striking and sure-footed debut.’

The Day My Cousin Took me to the Musée Rodin

July 17, 2017March 29, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Perhaps it was the humid Paris day, perhaps
the naked glory of Le Baiser or my blatant boasts
of l’amour libre of which I knew, in fact, rien
that galvanised my cousin to try his luck with me,

but when he placed one sweaty main upon my
firm nichon and one upon my fesse, I was first
disinclined and then embarrassed. It was clear
he was quite serious, and had in mind, he said,
avec un clin d’œil, a quick and casual act of joy.

When I retorted with grammatical correctness
Je suis ta cousine!, he snorted Frenchly, flushed,
and muttered something vague about la frigidité
des femmes Anglaises, tossed his prematurely
balding tête and sauntered off into the crowd around

Sculpteur et sa Muse, leaving me abandonnée at last
to make some notes, before I took the métro home
to find him locked inside his room, his Jewish mother
elbow-deep in worry, onions and gefilte fish.

by Jacqueline Saphra

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries! Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: English as an Additional Language and Open category. First Prize in both categories is £1000, with £200 for Second. The competition is open for submissions until 11pm GMT on 28 August 2017. Visit our website for more details, and feel free to forward the link to friends and colleagues.

Notes from Nine Arches:

All My Mad Mothers explores love, sex and family relationships in vivacious, lush poems that span the decades and generations. At the heart of this collection of poems is the portrait of a mother as multitudes – as a magician with a bathroom of beauty tricks, as necromancer, as glamorous fire-starter, trapped in ever-decreasing circles and, above all else, almost impossible to grasp.

Jacqueline Saphra’s The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions (flipped eye, 2011) was nominated for The Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. A book of illustrated prose poems, If I Lay on my Back I saw Nothing but Naked Women (The Emma Press 2014), won Best Collaborative Work at the Saboteur Awards 2015. All My Mad Mothers was published by Nine Arches Press in May 2017 and A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller is due from Hercules Editions in September 2017. She teaches at The Poetry School. You can read more about All My Mad Mothers on the Nine Arches website, and more about Jacqueline’s work on her own site. You can also follow the poet on Twitter. Last month, Jacqueline appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour to talk about her new book, and the interview is available on the BBC website (listen in from 12 minutes onwards).

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets (The Terrors by Tom Chivers and The Titanic Cafe closes its doors and hits the rocks by David Hart) were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2012, Nine Arches launched the Debut New Poets Series of first collections and the press has now published more than 30 collections of poetry and 10 issues of the magazine. We continue to build a reputation as a publisher of well-crafted and innovative contemporary poetry and short story collections. Follow Nine Arches on Facebook and Twitter.

swallow

July 10, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

swallow is hirundo rustica
sings adeste, fidelis in season
swallow is a long tail streamer
has spent 20 years on the wing
swallow on intercity
not red or black but biro
swallow as fork of
erskine and brunswick
swallow feeds geraniums, tomato plants
sparrowhawks, hobbies
(beware of the sparrowhawk)
swallow on diet of bees, hoverflies
brandy butter, jelly cubes, gas mark eight
swallow as spanakopita
foraged at spar piccadilly
swallow draped over
lady chapel altar
swallow is a charm to a sailor
swallow is the mermaid of the sky
swallow on waiting room wall
swallow gave the V to me
swallow as a frozen piece of
hair snapped blue in the morgue
swallow loathes the winter
swallow will not come back

by Sarah Crewe

Notes from Sidekick Books:

Sarah Crewe is from the Port of Liverpool. Her work deals with working class feminist psychogeography. Her previous publications have included sea witch (Leafe Press, 2014) and flick invicta (Oystercatcher, 2012) She is one third of Stinky Bear Press.

She’s a Game Old Bird

June 26, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My granny

takes canary sips
from her service-station tea,
jaundiced eyes lantern-bright
as she asks, again,
who the ambulance is for.

is magpie-quick
the nurses say,
fills her knicker drawer
with plasters, rubber gloves,
someone else’s dentures.

sticks her beak in other rooms
Look at’em! Lolling!
picks over the injustice
like a pigeon
pecking at its bruised breast.

preens,
her curled fingers
clawing damp strands.
Presently, she says,
I shall ask you to leave.

sings of her cuckoo-child,
sees his father one day in me
and cups my face,
tells me I have nothing
to be sorry for.

lies in a sketch of stillness:
eyes and mouth drawn
pencil-thin.
A sense of
something flown.

by Liz Soar

Please note that the Weekly Poem will be taking a week’s break next week, but will return with another poem on Monday 10 July.

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Liz Soar (b 1976) was born in Lancashire and studied French at New College, Oxford. After completing a MSt in Women’s Studies, she spent the early part of her career on the fringes of the literary world, first with theatrical literary agent, Judy Daish, and then in Oxford with David Fickling Books, before re-training as a teacher. Liz currently teaches English at Headington School and writes for pleasure whenever she can. Her poem ‘She’s a game old bird’ was written as part of Claire Askew’s ‘Creatrix’ course with the Poetry School. She lives in Charlbury with her husband and young daughter.

‘She’s a Game Old Bird’ is one of the poems featured in Candlestick Press’s new title Ten Poems about Grandparents, which is being launched at Headington School in Oxford at 7pm on Monday 3 July. The launch will feature readings by the anthology’s student editors, as well as by pupils and the English teacher whose poems are included in the selection. All are welcome! To attend, please email info@candlestickpress.co.uk or call 0115 967 4455.

All the poems were chosen by students at the school. The pamphlet also includes poems written by some of the students, alongside others by established poets including Tiffany Atkinson, John Burnside, Vicki Feaver, Joan Johnston, Mohja Kahf, Derek Mahon, and Andrew Waterhouse. The pupils’ choices reflect the multicultural world in which they are growing up. There’s a poem in three languages about a joyful reunion with a grandparent arriving from overseas and another in which a Muslim grandmother raises eyebrows in a posh department store by washing her feet in the sink in the ladies’ room.

Candlestick Press is an independent publisher based in Nottingham. It has been publishing poetry pamphlets since 2008 – not only for people who already love poetry, but also for those who will love it but perhaps don’t know that yet. Candlestick’s ‘instead of a card’ pamphlets are designed to make an ideal alternative to a mainstream greetings card and are a small gift in their own right. Each title is supplied with a matching envelope and bookmark left blank for the purchaser’s own special message.

Candlestick prints at least 3,000 copies of each new title and its pamphlets are stocked by museums, galleries and gift shops, as well as independent and larger bookshops. In 2016 over 55,000 pamphlets were sold.

You can see Candlestick’s full range of titles on the publisher’s website. You can also find Candlestick Press on Facebook and on Twitter.

A Song of Hibernation

June 19, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I wrapped my heart in a cotton shroud,
I wound my heart in a silk cocoon,
I gave my heart to the carrion crows
who flew my heart to a lace day moon.

The moon sank into a bruise-tinged haze,
my heart slipped into the cold cold waves.
The current twisting from flow to ebb
carried my heart away away.

I trapped my sorrow behind panes of glass,
I hid my body in a pinewood shed,
I pooled my tears for marygold drink,
I stifled my sobs in spider webs.

But a money-spinner comforted me,
crawled my hand as I scrawled my hurt,
taught my lament to the screaming gulls,
scattered my anguish to pecking culvers.

I will bathe my face in the morning dew,
I will pinch off fear to feed crane flies,
I will sprinkle self-pity along the shingle,
skimming pebbles as anger dives.

My skin will absorb a radiant sunset,
my body will bask in crepuscular rays,
I will wade in the shallows when cats’ paws thrill,
I will dance with the moon’s corona display.

My heart will return when autumn is dead,
once winter is sifted and spring has sprung,
my heart will stir in its shrouding cocoon,
bloody my body, release my tongue.

My heart will return as a cormorant
lumbering silently over the sea,
oiled and preened and cruciate,
embracing others and saving me.

by Nancy Charley

Notes from Smokestack:

In 2011 Nancy Charley spent six weeks in a little blue beach hut on Tankerton Slopes, near Whitstable on the Kent coast, recording the changing tides and shifting moods of the shingle beach. Little Blue Hut is a book about weather and water, bladderwrack and gutweed, swimmers, dog-walkers and sea-anglers, cormorants and blackheaded gulls, ‘resident birds’ and ‘transient people’. And always the horizon where sky merges with sea. In the first half of the book the Water-Watcher tells her tale, exploring the mysteries and the ‘bizarreries’ of the Thames Estuary and finding, like a beachcomber, myth and poetry in the rarely noticed details of everyday life. In the second half of the book a woman is summoned by the three female genii of the coast – Luna, Marina and Hertha. Helped by the birds, she discovers who she might be, whilst berthed in the safety of the Little Blue Hut. You can read more about the book on the Smokestack website.

Nancy Charley works as an archivist for the Royal Asiatic Society. Her first pamphlet, This Woman, was published in 2012. She lives in Ashford, Kent.

Nomad Song

June 12, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Now, far from the sea
the sea-lure remains.
Come home, I say.

My hands can carry less and less.
I want you near,
but you move further away.

Your belongings come along:
a small teak stamp box,
smooth and soft in my hands.

A tiny glass hexagon
colorful parrots inside.
They swing with you in eternity
on little plastic vines.

Chatwin’s ‘Anatomy of Restlessness’,
the last book you read.
‘We are travellers from birth.’

You, too, shed things and places
like layers of skin.

Now, far from the sea
the sea-lure remains.

Come home I say,
but you move further away.

by Lynne Hjelmgaard

Join us this Saturday when we pair up with the Oxfordshire Science Festival for a celebration of poetry about science! We’ll be hearing the winning poems in the Science Festival’s school poetry competition (judged by Poetry Centre Director Niall Munro and others), and there will be a reading by Oxford-based poet Kelley Swain, recently one of the poets-in-residence at the Oxford Museum of Natural History. For more details, visit this page.

There are only a handful of tickets left for ‘moments/that stretch horizons’: an international poetry symposium, which takes place here at Brookes on 28 June. Together with colleagues from the University of Reading, and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) at the University of Canberra, we will be exploring poetry about the environment, prose poetry and the lyric, and poetry and publishing. Tickets for the day (including refreshments and lunch) cost £10 (£7.50 for postgraduates). All poets, critics, and readers of poetry are welcome, and you can sign up here.

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition, judged this year by award-winning poet Helen Mort, is open for entries! Poems are welcomed from writers of 18 years or over in the following two categories: English as an Additional Language and Open category. First Prize in both categories is £1000, with £200 for Second. The competition is open for submissions until 11pm GMT on 28 August 2017. Visit our website for more details.

‘Nomad Song’ is copyright © Lynne Hjelmgaard, 2016, and reprinted by permission of Seren Books.

Notes from Seren:

The poet Lynne Hjelmgaard has written a beautifully evocative recollection of a journey she took by sailboat with her husband across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and Europe. A Boat Called Annalise moves from scenes of risk and turbulence, of wild beauty on the open water, to visions of their dream-like destination in the West Indies. The author’s clear-eyed and tender observations are as insightful about the paradox of paradise: tropical splendor amidst local poverty, as they are about the challenges of relationships at close quarters. You can read more about the book on the Seren website.

Lynne Hjelmgaard was born in New York City and lives in London. She taught Creative Art for children in various schools and institutions before she started writing poetry. She left the States in 1990 for the second time and has been living permanently in the UK since 2011. As a result of crossing the Atlantic in a sailboat with her husband she wrote the poems that were later collected in Manhattan Sonnets. After her husband died in 2006, she received a residency grant for the Danish Academy in Rome where she wrote poems that later appeared in The Ring. Writing about A Boat Called Annalise, Dannie Abse remarked: ‘[t]he whole book is powered by the synergy of related poems. This arresting sequence is much more than that of a percipient tourist. Widowhood allows them to acquire a poignant universality.’ You can learn more about Lynne Hjelmgaard’s work on the poetry pf website.