The Snow Bunting

February 21, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A mason times his mallet
to a lark’s twitter
Basil Bunting Briggflatts

Big Voice Ben sings the Monday Morning song to Susie.
Finn Balor hits the coup de grace to pin Samoa Joe.
Chloe Sevigny is 41 years of age. I know Timothy Hutton
starred in The Falcon and the Snowman, which was directed
by Snow Bunting.

Two birds, one one legged, the other bipedal, sing.
One’s song operatic, the other popular.
I own no birds, and so feel terrible to find that worm
in the road, inching towards cars near Harlesden.
What waste, they need those nutrients in the Arctic.

The Snow Bunting holds a sign that says Don’t Leap.
It’s fire-born in a box, the enemy of salamanders
and as it enter the galaxy, its main thing is stolen
from the Black Library.

One day you’ll work for me says the Snow Bunting,
on the way out. So the other bird pursues,
and punches the Snow Bunting.
Why couldn’t it just have kept its mouth shut?

The Snow Bunting stars in movies with the most impossible
combination of words, like Black Dawn, Half Past Dead,
and Point Blank. It runs like a little girl covered in bees,
but you can’t say anything about that.

What’s the best cartoon to watch when you’re smoking
your home made cigarettes, Snow Bunting?
The call is the distinctive rippling whistle
of the monogamous snowflake, arctic specialist.
It’s not your friend. You don’t know anything about it.

by SJ Fowler

This weekend, three of our students will take part in The University Camarade, curated by this week’s poet, SJ Fowler. Jennifer Wong, Abigail J. Villarroel, and Christina Murphy have been paired up with other students from different universities to produce collaborative poetry that they will perform this Saturday 25 February at Rich Mix in London from 7.30pm. This promises to be a very exciting event and it is free to attend! You can find more information about it on the Rich Mix website.

‘The Snow Bunting’ is copyright © SJ Fowler, 2016. It is reprinted from Birdbook IV: Saltwater and Shore (Sidekick Books, 2016) by permission of Sidekick Books

SJ Fowler is a poet and artist. He has published five collections of poetry and been commissioned by Tate Modern, BBC Radio 3, The British Council, Tate Britain and Wellcome Collection. He is the poetry editor of 3am magazine, Lecturer at Kingston University, teaches at Tate Modern and is the curator of the Enemies project. He is a high functioning vegan bear, befriends birds and will protect their eggs with electric technologies. Currently he is writing an autobiography of the famous Hyde Park Mud Crow. Find out more about his work on his website.

Notes from Sidekick Books:

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.

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.

Lip Service, or La Haine

February 13, 2017March 30, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Kiss you, take your children.
Riotous though it is, this shit’s not for kids.

La Haine is bloating through drive-in speakers, serenading ‘68
miasma, she and Humbert staring down the barrel of the same
animal gun, wincing.

I will cross you if you come over all drunk-like,
tarantella con dolcezza with your latest organ grinder.
Find Slovenia with your head full of black, black wine
— dim donkey piñata —
an industry of collagen in scapegoat giallo.

How can I follow the winters,
archangel of interns; doubting Thomas
and his motives. Intimate metastasis
intrigues the censor, his biting wounds
inwardly glow

and Venus infers her worth from a table.
Her onus, her offending isotopes,
eyes big as gum balls, swings rapidly,
a timeshare in blazing saddles and
neat little ellipticals.

I hope, I know as you do,
we’ll settle kindly out of court;
— you form –isms like Christmas —
sweet Mary shares her sweat with an ostler,
a meek swearing cross to milk.

by Charlotte Newman

Poetry news! Award-winning Danish poet Pia Tafdrup visits the UK this week in a short tour organized by the Poetry Centre. Pia will be in Reading on Wednesday, reading with Peter Robinson, will be in discussion with Fiona Sampson in Ledbury on Thursday, and will be reading withPhilip Gross in Oxford on Friday. For more details, visit the dedicated page on the Centre’s website. To coincide with Pia’s visit, the Story Museum is running two exciting workshops for primary-age children about the work of Hans Christian Andersen (a significant source of inspiration for Pia Tafdrup). The workshops, based on Andersen’s stories ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and ‘The Princess and the Pea’ take place on Friday 17 February from 11-12.15pm and1-2.15pm, and are suitable for children aged 5-8. Visit the Story Museum website for more information and to book places. Tickets are £6.

Poet and critic Sean O’Brien is giving the Weidenfeld Lectures at St Anne’s College here in Oxford over the next few weeks. Tomorrow his lecture is entitled ‘Displacement: Irish poetry and poets of Irish descent in Britain.’ The events takes place at 5.30pm in the Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre at St Anne’s College. He will also be giving a reading with Patrick McGuinness at The Albion Beatnik on Sunday 26 February from 6pm. All are welcome to these events, and you can find more details on the St Anne’s website.

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

Trammel is a radical book of poetry for an uncertain future. Voracious in her critique of modernity, Charlotte Newman ranges across the spectra of social and sexual politics – from Brexit to the Bechdel Test via Renaissance art and vintage computer games. These poems are stylish, muscular and linguistically agile. Always driven by a musical engine, Newman weaves the hard language of politics, technology, finance, science and the law into a new lyric texture. Urbane yet uncompromising, Trammel is the powerful debut collection from a voice that demands to be heard. You can read more about the book on the Penned in the Margins website, and read a further sample here.

Charlotte Newman was born in Surrey in 1986. She read English at Selwyn College, Cambridge and holds an MA with Distinction in Modern and Contemporary Literature from Birkbeck, University of London. She won the inaugural Sabotage Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet in 2013 and was featured in The Salt Book ofYounger Poets in 2011. After a brief stint indexing the entire back catalogue of The Erotic Review, she worked as a journalist and publicist for a leading family law rm, writing articles for national newspapers while also contributing freelance reviews to The Observer, The New Statesman and Poetry Review, among others; she was shortlisted for The Scotsman’s Allen Wright Award for theatre criticism. Charlotte lives in London with her husband, the poet James Brookes, and works as a political communications consultant, specialising in healthcare. Trammel is her first full collection. You can follow Charlotte on Twitter.

Penned in the Margins creates publications and performances for people who are not afraid to take risks. The company believes in the power of language to challenge how we think, test new ideas and explore alternative stories. It operates across the arts, collaborating with writers, artists and creative partners using new platforms and technologies. Read more about its work on its website. You can also follow Penned in the Margins on Twitter and on Facebook.

To Kill a Robin

February 6, 2017April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Come January, the pair of us clarted out to pluck
the morning, feet bound in brushwood – plumage
flying out of my Mother’s mouth. It was us
or the birds. If you kill a robin on New Year’s Day,
give a feather to a rodman and he’ll always sail clear.
She would not be a widow, not yet. You could say
I had a mind for the birds, the hunch of me
hunkered in spitting distance of the river, so still
and part of everything in my brown coat, I wanted
to grab my cold breath and pull it back in.
Ma stood listening for the tek tek, a cough hanging
frayed streamers over our heads. I caught the robin
in nithered fingers I barely dared open. There,
the bird perfectly refused to have its neck snapped.
It simply stopped in the cave of my grasp, one
last trill like water rolling a silence over my hands.

by Angela Readman

News from the Centre: leading Scandinavian poet Pia Tafdrup is visiting the UK from 15-17 February in a tour organized by the Poetry Centre. She’ll be in Reading (reading with Peter Robinson), Ledbury (with Fiona Sampson), and in Oxford (with Philip Gross). More details about the tour are on the Poetry Centre website, and there are only 10 tickets left for the date in Oxford. Book via our Shop now!

Be sure to tune in to BBC Radio 4‘s In Our Timeprogramme this Thursday to hear our colleague Prof Simon Kövesi discussing the poet John Clare with Prof Jonathan Bate and Dr Mina Gorji. There’s more about Simon’s research on his webpage.

Angela Readman’s The Book of Tides is a treasure trove of luscious, visceral poems that are delightfully risky, utterly thrilling and always close to the bone. Readman’s poetry teems with the rare and beautiful, the dark seaweed sparkle of a particular strand of skewed folklore; here we encounter fishermen and mermaids, a man with a beard of bees, a Tattooist’s daughter, Joan of Arc, and Beatrix Potter’s bed – a rich swell of voices with an irresistible and peculiar power.

Salt-speckled and sea tinged, these poems possess a distinctive eye for disconcerting and uncanny details – from notes in bottles and knotted handkerchiefs, to sequin fish-scales and drowned rats. To read Readman’s poetry is to be simultaneously unsettled and enraptured, and to encounter witchcraft, murder, love and loss. As The Book of Tides unfolds, will you dare to put your ear to its seashell, tune into its siren song and cast yourself adrift on its strange and alluring current? Read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

Angela Readman’s stories and poems have appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines, including London Magazine, Staple, Ambit and Mslexia, and she has won awards including the National Flash Fiction Competition. In 2012 she was shortlisted for the Costa Short Story Award for ‘Don’t Try This at Home’ – an award she would go on to win in 2013 with the story ‘The Keeper of the Jackalopes’. Her previous collections of poetry include Strip (Salt, 2007). The Book of Tides (Nine Arches Press, 2016) is her third collection of poems. You can read more about Angela Readman on the Nine Arches blog, and follow her work on Twitter.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets (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.

Teenager

January 30, 2017April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The only thing he remembered
about the burglary was the dog
as he’d dragged it across the floor,
its claws out in resistance,
fur hooding its eyes.
His own teeth were bared
as he shook and twisted
the folds of its neck.
The dream of his father!
His mute mother
had brought him here to
join him and he’d found
a drunk, violent man
who beat her.
He knew at court, that he
had an extra punishment.
He would be deported when
the others were released.
At the time he didn’t care,
he hated this shit-hole of a country
as much as it hated him.
But inside, he found
he was good at maths,
got certificates in fitness,
reflected on his life.
But it was down in writing
that he hated his mother
so now they said he hadn’t
got family life.
He’d told them he was glad
he’d hurt the dog
so they said he had no remorse.
They told him he was now
nineteen and no longer a child
and would be deported with £46.
They asked him which airport
he wanted to go back to
but he didn’t know
what ones there were.
He’d left when he was seven.

by Caroline Smith

News from the Centre! Celebrated poet and teacher Tamar Yoseloff will be returning to Brookes to lead a workshop entitled ‘Poetry and Identity: Creating Character’. The workshop will take place on Saturday 11 February from 10.30-4.30pm and is designed to coincide with an exhibition by acclaimed French photographer Claude Cahun running in Brookes’s Glass Tank Gallery. The cost is £45 (£40 for Brookes staff and students!), and spaces are limited. There are currently only a few left. Please visit our website for more details and to book a place.

We are also excited to invite you to join us at one of the stops on a UK tour by Pia Tafdrup, one of Scandinavia’s leading writers. In a series of events from 15-17 February organized by the Poetry Centre and supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, Pia will read at the University of Reading with Peter Robinson, at Ledbury, where she will be in conversation with Fiona Sampson, and in Oxford, where she will read at Oriel College alongside T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet Philip Gross. You can find out more and book tickets via the Centre’s website. Again, places are limited!

Notes from Seren:

Vividly detailed and emotionally powerful, The Immigration Handbook is as revealing as it is timely. Here we meet with the traumatised individuals that the news stories only speak of as numbers. These are lives fraught with violence and tragedy that Caroline Smith has encountered in her work as the asylum caseworker for a Wembley MP. We journey with them through the labyrinthine government bureaucracies they must navigate to survive. With clarity and integrity she lays before us stories of stoic resilience and humorous forbearance, of kindness to others and of joy in the midst of sorrow. These are poems that step out of the headlines and into our hearts. You can read more about the book on the Seren website.

Caroline Smith was born in Ilford and grew up in Hertfordshire. She originally trained as a sculptor at Goldsmith’s College. Her first publication was a long narrative poem ‘Edith’ about a Lancashire-born woman who works as a nanny in Glasgow, but is haunted by a secret from her pre-war life. Smith’s first full collection, The Thistles of the Hesperides, is about the community of West Pilton in Scotland where Caroline lived in the 1980s when it was one of the most deprived housing estates in Europe. Published widely in literary journals, she has twice won prizes in the Troubadour Poetry Competition. Smith has had work set to music, broadcast on the BBC and is also the author of a musical play, TheBedseller’s Tale, that was performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. She lives in Wembley with her family. Find out more about Caroline’s work on her website or by following her on Twitter.

‘These poems are very moving and it’s hard to do justice to the way Caroline Smith conveys the anxieties, hopes and disappointments experienced by immigrants. She never allows the reader to forget that behind the refugee statistics there are suffering human beings; very often the victims of a seemingly insensitive and overstretched bureaucracy.’ Lord Alf Dubs (formerly a Director of the Refugee Council and Chair of Liberty. He was one of 669 Jewish children saved from the Nazis on the Kinderstransport.)

5 (from Clavics)

January 20, 2017April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

         Making of mere brightness the air to tremble
         So the sun’s aurora in deep winter
                               Spiders’ bramble
                               Blazing white floss
                               Silent stentor!—
                      Viscosity and dross
                               No more amass
                               At the centre
         The whole anatomy of heaven and earth
         Shewn as the alchemists declare it
                               Poised beyond wrath
                               Resurrection
                               Of skin and bone
                               To dispirit…
                      The day cuts a chill swath,
                               Dark hunkers down.
         I think we are past Epiphany now.
         Earth billows on, its everlasting
                               Shadow in tow
         And we with it, fake shadows onward casting.

             Trust you to be a comic poet manqué
                    Evidence too sweet to dismiss
                      See above. Well, thank you!
                                (Taking the piss,
                                      Donkey?)
                                       Confess
                                  Melancholy
                      A touch too much my thing.
                       Erasmus, In Praise of Folly:
           Grand antidote no substitute for bling
by Geoffrey Hill

We’re delighted that celebrated poet and teacher Tamar Yoseloff will be returning to Brookes to lead a workshop entitled ‘Poetry and Identity: Creating Character’. The workshop will take place on Saturday 11 February from 10.30-4.30pm and is designed to coincide with an exhibition by acclaimed French photographer Claude Cahun running in Brookes’s Glass Tank Gallery. The cost is £45 (£40 for Brookes staff and students), and spaces are limited! Please visit our website for more details and to book a place.

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

An elegiac sequence, mourning for the musician William Lawes who was killed at the Battle of Chester in 1645, Clavics is delicately constructed, each page comprised of a section made up of two stanzas, together forming the shape of a key. Before long, however, the tone makes it clear that nothing is to be taken at face value; amongst the lines are provocations and incongruities, playful references and about-turns. Clavics is a celebration of seventeenth-century music and poetry, yet is confrontational and sometimes shockingly modern. From one line to the next you may be pulled out of a potently evoked moment of history, thrust up against the wall of sexual politics and strained meaning in contemporary language, and then dropped back onto a battlefield. Read more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

From working-class Worcestershire roots, Sir Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016) became one of Britain’s most celebrated poets. In his distinguished literary career Hill published 19 books of poetry and also several books of criticism, collated in his award-winning Collected Critical Writings (OUP, 2008). In 2010 he was elected Oxford Professor of Poetry and in 2012 he was knighted for his services to literature. He previously taught at Leeds, Cambridge and Boston University, Massachusetts. His twelfth collection of poems, A Treatise of Civil Power, appeared in 2007, following on Scenes from Comus (2005) and Without Title (2006). Oxford University Press published his Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 in 2013.

‘William Blake dreamed up the original Enitharmon as one of his inspiriting, good, female daemons, and his own spirit as a poet-artist, printer-publisher still lives in the press which bears the name of his creation. Enitharmon is a rare and wonderful phenomenon, a press where books are shaped into artefacts of lovely handiwork as well as communicators of words and worlds. The writers and the artists published here over the last forty-five years represent a truly historic gathering of individuals with an original vision and an original voice, but the energy is not retrospective: it is growing and new ideas enrich the list year by year. Like an ecologist who manages to restock the meadows with a nearly vanished species of wild flower or brings a rare pair of birds back to found a colony, this publisher has dedicatedly and brilliantly made a success of that sharply endangered species, the independent press.’ (Marina Warner.)

You can sign up to the mailing list on the Enitharmon site to receive a newsletter with special offers, details of readings & events and new titles and Enitharmon’s Poem of the Month. You can also find Enitharmon on Facebook.

My Girl

January 10, 2017April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

in the nineties Aunty Ann had all eight
rooms wired into the same Sky station
but since we didn’t know we spent each night
of our weekend watching girls undress
while bored men phoned in, telling them to
climb between each other’s legs/and/or
take a nipple into a yielding/heterosexual
mouth, force a simple moan perfected in adolescence.
We had our double bed with its chintz canopy,
our newly pink hair rubbing onto the pillowcases,
the crochet eiderdown heavy upon our
satisfied bodies; she was
sometimes jealous if I looked at the TV
for too long. We’d discuss
which parts in relation to the girls’ parts were normal
or in the dull and balmy half-light of morning
through semi-drawn blinds
which parts looked beautiful

by Melissa Lee-Houghton

Two exciting announcements from the Centre! This Saturday 14 January, the Poetry Centre is privileged to present a reading by internationally-acclaimed critic and poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Forward Prize-shortlisted poet Nancy Campbell. The event will begin at 7pm at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Oxford, and all are welcome. £2 on the door. More details are available on our Facebook page.

We are also delighted to announce that celebrated poet and teacher Tamar Yoseloff will be returning to Brookes to lead a workshop entitled ‘Poetry and Identity: Creating Character’. The workshop will take place on Saturday 11 February from 10.30-4.30pm and is designed to coincide with an exhibition by acclaimed French photographer Claude Cahun running in Brookes’s Glass Tank Gallery. The cost is £45 (£40 for Brookes staff and students), and spaces are limited! Please visit our website for more details and to book a place.

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

Sunshine is the new collection from Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. A writer of startling confession, her poems inhabit the lonely hotel rooms, psych wards and deserted lanes of austerity Britain. Sunshine combines acute social observation with a dark, surreal humour born of first-hand experience. Abuse, addiction and mental health are all subject to Lee-Houghton’s poetic eye. But these are also poems of extravagance, hope and desire, that stake new ground for the Romantic lyric in an age of social media and internet porn. In this new book of poems, Melissa Lee-Houghton shines a light on human ecstasy and sadness with blinding precision. This book, which was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards, was also selected as one of the best poetry books of 2016 by both the Guardianand the Poetry School, and includes ‘i am very precious’, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2016.

You can find out more about the book on the Penned in the Margins website, where you can also read further poems from the collection.

MelissaLee-Houghton was announced as a Next Generation Poet in 2014. Her first and second collections are published by Penned in the Margins. BeautifulGirls was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her poem ‘i am very precious’ was shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She has received a Northern Writers’ Award for her fiction. She lives in Blackburn, Lancashire.

You can hear Melissa read from her work on the Poetry Archive, read more about her work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Penned in the Marginscreates publications and performances for people who are not afraid to take risks. The company believes in the power of language to challenge how we think, test new ideas and explore alternative stories. It operates across the arts, collaborating with writers, artists and creative partners using new platforms and technologies. Read more about its work on its website. You can also follow Penned in the Margins on Twitter and on Facebook.

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me

December 19, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I swooned at the large god of him, sunning.
A tooth for every day of my life.
He performed his run along the bank,
as males do. I brought my boat closer.
He took to following, at a distance.

I wasn’t taken in, knew his four-chambered heart
pumped love out and in, in and out,
knew his tongue had few good uses,
knew all about his grin. Yet whoever said he was cold-
blooded has never truly known this beast.

He brought out the prehistoric in me. I dived.
We swam, belly to belly, to where the Niles meet,
tussled as we thrashed among the weeds. After, I lay
the length of him, a limestone lilo, studs patterning
my skin. He smiled at me, often. Taught me all he knew.

Years later, when a man tried to drag me under,
I practised the force my lover had held back –
levered my small jaws open to their furthest extent,
splashed them down on the human’s arm.
My attacker still carries the mark of my smile.

by Katrina Naomi

This is the last Weekly Poem of 2016. The Poetry Centre wishes you a very Merry Christmas! We look forward to sharing more poems with you in 2017, as well as details of our upcoming readings, workshops, and events for 2017. For more initial details on those, do visit the Poetry Centre website.

Notes from Seren:

With warmth, flair and a certain ferocious wit, Katrina Naomi tears into her subject matter in The Way the Crocodile Taught Me: a childhood fraught with dislocation and violence but also redeemed by more tender memories of a sister and a kindly, although at times comically obtuse, grandmother. The tone of the work is as much tender as turbulent, reflecting the protagonist’s travails. Vicki Feaver has praised Katrina Naomi’s ‘cool voice and fierce eye’, and this pointed, lively and always entertaining book is sure to delight all those who know Katrina’s work, and undoubtedly win new fans for her courageous and unabashedly entertaining poems. You can read more about the book on Seren’s website.

Katrina Naomi has a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College. She was the first writer-in-residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, West Yorkshire and was recently writer-in-residence at Gladstone’s Library in North Wales where she wrote a sequence on the Suffragettes, published by Rack Press as Hooligans. Her debut collection The Girl with the Cactus Handshake received an Arts Council Award and was shortlisted for the London New Poetry Award. Her pamphlet Lunch at the Elephant & Castle won the 2008 Templar Poetry Pamphlet Competition and her pamphlet Charlotte Brontë’s Corset was published to acclaim by the Brontë Society. She is a Hawthornden Fellow, a tutor at Falmouth University and runs Poetry Surgeries for the Poetry Society. Katrina’s recent work has been broadcast on Radio 4 and published by the TLS, The Spectator, The Poetry Review and Poetry Wales. She received an award from the Royal Literary Fund in 2014 for her writing. She enjoys performing her poetry and collaborating with visual artists, musicians and film-makers. She recently had an exhibition at London’s Poetry Café entitled ‘The Argument: Art V Poetry’, following a collaboration with the visual artist, Tim Ridley. She is originally from Margate and lives in Cornwall.

You can find out more about Katrina’s work on her website, in this recent interview from Literature Works, and by following 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.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.

Cannibal

December 5, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Once I was so hungry, I tore the skin in strips from my feet
and ate it – a masseuse asked if I was burned?
There was protein there. I ate stories too,
tales of survival in the shell of planes.

People are said to taste like pork,
the Polynesians called white folk long pigs –
Did you know we’d all taste ourselves
all day long, if we could; that’s what poems are for.

I’d never eat a child.
I’d sooner die than eat a sibling.
Pork meat is white, fatty, fibroud
with the same strings that animate human days.

I’d like to think I could stay alive
on rain and my own dermis, beads of breast milk,
crusts of wax. My heart quietly consuming itself,
cardiac walls breaking down.

by Sarah Westcott

Today (Monday 5 December), the Poetry Centre presents a double dose of poetry from Steven Matthews, Kelley Swain & John Barnie. The three current poets in residence at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History will read from 12-1pm in JHB 208 at Oxford Brookes University, and then in the evening at The Albion Beatnik Bookshop from 7.30pm. All are welcome to either – or both! – events. You can find more details on the Poetry Centre website.

Notes from Pavilion Poetry:

In her first full-length collection, Slant Light, Sarah Westcott immerses the human self in the natural world, giving voice to a remarkable range of flora and fauna so often silenced or unheard. Here, the voiceless speaks, laments and sings – from the fresh voice of a spring wood to a colony of bats or a grove of ancient sequioa trees. Unafraid of using scientific language and teamed with a clear eye, Westcott’s poems are drawn directly from the natural world, questioning ideas of the porosity of boundaries between the human and non-human and teeming with detail.

Sarah Westcott’s debut pamphlet Inklings was the Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice for Winter 2013. Her poems have been published in journals including Poetry Review, Magma and Poetry Wales and in anthologies including Best British Poetry 2014 (Salt). Sarah grew up in north Devon, on the edge of Exmoor, and has a keen interest in the natural world. She holds a science degree and an MA in poetry from Royal Holloway, University of London. Sarah lives on the London/Kent borders with her family and, after a spell teaching English abroad, works as a news journalist. You can find out more about Sarah and her work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

Pavilion Poetry is a new contemporary poetry series from Liverpool University Press, edited by Deryn Rees-Jones, which seeks to publish the very best in contemporary poetry. Always international in its reach, Pavilion Poetry is poetry that takes a risk. Whether by new or established and award-winning writers, this is poetry sure to challenge and delight. Launched in 2015, Pavilion has already enjoyed considerable success, with Mona Arshi’s book, Small Hands, winning the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection at the 2015 Forward Prizes, and Ruby Robinson’s Every Little Sound being shortlisted for the same prize in 2016. You can read more about the series on the Liverpool University Press website.

Gavia stellata

November 21, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Who calls to the dark?

Who, when the shadows
are converted to morning,
when light pours out, when
day is turned to darkness
once more, when dark
is on the face of the sea,
who dives down, who
brings back a speck
to build on? I do. I did.

Who is the smallest
and brightest
and speckled
with stars? I am.

All things that gather
to shine I bear on my back
I raise on my wings
in the black of the waters,
in the deep vault of space.

Who dips and dives?
Dense bones take me down.

Who rose with a twin,
with another, who breasted
the face of the night, who
stitched the belt of stars
in Orion? Who speeds
without drag: bill like an awl
and flattened tarsus, neatest
and fleetest in streamlined
propulsion? Who took
Arcturus like a morsel of light,
a pinch of snuff, returned
to the surface?

Who calls to the dark;
who calls to the wind on
the surface of the water?
Who prompts the others
to dip and rise? Eyes like
seeds of garnet. Lightest
and brightest: gavia stellata,
the red-throated diver.

by Alexander Hutchison

This Thursday, Isy Mead, Head of Learning at The Story Museum here in Oxford, will launch a new monthly poetry workshop, held on the last Thursday of each month (except December). The workshop is open to anyone interested in writing poetry, from beginners to advanced. You can find more details on the Story Museum website.

And this Friday the Poetry Centre holds its International Poetry Competition awards event at Oxford Brookes, featuring readings from a number of the winning and shortlisted poets, from local young poets mentored by Kate Clanchy, and from the judge, Daljit Nagra. You can find more details of the winning and shortlisted poems on the Poetry Centre website

Notes from Sidekick Books:

With this poem we begin a 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.

Alexander Hutchison (1943-2015) was born in Buckie, lived in Glasgow, and was RLF Writing Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He published Scales Dog: Poems New and Selected (Salt Publishing) in 2007, and his first book, Deep-Tap Tree (University of Massachusetts Press, 1978) is still in print, He wrote in English and Scots – and his poem ‘Deil Tak the Hinmaist’ was more than a token dialect piece in The Best British Poetry2011. His poem ‘Gavia stellata’ comes from Birdbook II: Freshwater Habitats.

Happy Seventieth Birthday Blues, Mr Zimmerman

November 8, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I’m staring into seventy, staring at that old bad news,
Yeah, staring into seventy, staring at the rank bad news.
I’m getting slowly smashed, but it’s not the getting smashed you’d choose.

It’s a wall that’s got no garden shining on the other side,
A wall that’s got no pardon, smiling on the other side –
Just ask any angel who ever crossed that divide.

I heard the devil singing, he was singing to me long ago,
He sang me through the sixties, he sang me years and years ago –
Sang Man, if you’re a woman you just have to grow and grow.
I’m a long-born woman, and it’s the shortest straw.
I’m a long-born woman, smoking my cheroot of straw.
But I’m no damned angel, I was born to be a whole lot more.

I’m looking at the wall. Are you telling me it’s a gate?
I’m looking at a wall, yeah, he’s telling me it’s the gate.
You can find it if you’re blind, baby blue, it’s not too late.

We’re only ever twenty, we’re only ever at the start.
We’re only ever peddling that iconic parabolic start.
And there’s no wall, baby, it’s the shadow of an empty heart.

Go cruising into seventy: seventy’s a broad highway;
Cruise along at seventy, along that broad highway –
You’ll soon be doing eighty, if the angels get out the way.

by Carol Rumens

The latest Poetry Review blog review is now available! Written by Alex Wortley, who recently completed his MA by Research about Seamus Heaney at Brookes, it examines a new collection of poetry by Michelle Cahill. You can read Alex’s review here.

The awards event for the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition takes place on Friday 25 November from 6-8pm. It will feature a reading by the judge, Daljit Nagra, as well as a number of the winning and shortlisted poets. If you would like to attend, please let us know by the end of this week. Simply reply to this e-mail.

Notes from Seren:

Animal People is the new collection by distinguished poet Carol Rumens. Often inspired by and infused with the weathers of various seasons of the year, many poems also feature a strong sense of place, whether it be the dramatic mountain rock-scapes of Snowdonia or the gritty streets of London and Hull. This particular poem has also appeared in the Seren anthology The Captain’s Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob Dylan at 70 edited by Phil Bowen, Damian Furniss and David Wooley. There is a strong sense of commemoration in this collection, of time passing and of the challenges of mortality, and also a number of brilliant pieces that are influenced by translations or re-readings of classic works of literature. The title poem refers to a sequence devoted to themes inspired by autism and what it means to be ‘on the spectrum’. Read more about Animal People on the Seren website.

Carol Rumens was born in South London. She has taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury, Queen’s University Belfast, University College Cork, University of Stockholm, and the University of Hull; she is currently Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Bangor. The author of sixteen collections of poems, as well as occasional fiction, drama and translation, Rumens has received the Cholmondeley Award and the Prudence Farmer Prize for her poetry, and has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her work has appeared regularly in publications such as The Guardian, The Observer and Poetry Review, and she currently writes the hugely popular ‘Poem of the Week’ feature for The Guardian. Writing about Rumens’s work in the Times Literary Supplement, Isobel Armstrong described her as ‘a European poet whose imagination goes beyond the confines of Europe, a poet of borders and transit, and of movement across frontiers which makes both the experience of alienation and that of “home” a relative matter.’ Read more about Rumens’ work on her website.