The Red Aeroplane

April 25, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

From the oratory window I witness
mid-air doom, a slew of concentric
swirls, a trail of forge-sparks,
and that’s it. A vermilion two-seater
stagger-wing loops earthbound,
so much depending upon centrifugal
drive. Slivers of toughened glass
spangle the outer stone sill,
the vacant co-pilot seat
is plummeted deep in rosebed mulch.

I question now if the red bi-plane
ever was, the way sureties tilt
and untangle from any one freezeframe
to its sequel. Maybe I was glimpsing
that two-seater red pedal car
– injection-moulded plastic –
collected one Christmas Eve night
for a fevered child? Or conflating
the replica cherry-red sixty-three
we’d toyed with, tinkered with, briefly
on a tinsmith’s covered stall
that drenched Saturday?
What can’t be
cast in any doubt is the wreckage,
a fragmentary scattering,
the mangledness on the far side
of glass. And how a Galway blue
skyscape proves ineluctably
the exponential function of tangents.

by Anne-Marie Fyfe

Irish literature expert (and former Director of the Poetry Centre) Dr Eóin Flannery, and Dr Donal Lowry, who has published widely on Irish foreign policy, are leading a one-day short course on Saturday 14 May at Oxford Brookes: ‘One Hundred Years On: 1916–2016. The Easter Rising: its History and Literature, Then and Now’. All are welcome. For more details, visit the Brookes website.

Don’t miss Modern Poetry in Translation‘s 50th anniversary study day in ‎Oxford on 14 May. A really spectacular programme is on offer with writers and translators like Patrick McGuinness, Karen Leeder, David Constantine, Jamie McKendrick and Sasha Dugdale. There will be another translation day in Cambridge on 30 April.

‘The Red Aeroplane’ is copyright © Anne-Marie Fyfe, 2015. It is reprinted from House of Small Absences (Seren, 2015) by permission of Seren Books.House of Small Absencesfollows Fyfe’s popularUnderstudies: New and SelectedPoems. Her new collection serves as an observation window into strange, unsettling spaces—a deserted stage-set, our own personalised ‘museum’, a Piedmontalbergo,underground cities, Midtown roof-gardens, convent orchards, houseboats, a foldaway circus, a Romanian sleeper-carriage—the familiar rendered uncanny through the distorting lenses of distance and life’s exigencies, its inevitable lettings-go. Youcan read more about the book on theSeren website, and more about Anne-Marie’s work and forthcoming appearances onher own site. Anne-Marie is alsoon Twitter.

Anne-Marie Fyfe, poet, creative-writing teacher, arts-organiser of the Troubadour Coffee House poetry events and former Chair of the Poetry Society, (2006-2009), was born in Cushendall in the Glens of Antrim and now lives in West London. She has read and performed her work worldwide.

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.

Denominations

April 18, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You’ll paint me gross –
gripping my shins,
retching silver coins.

Let me put you straight.
All I’ve got’s loose change
for late-night kofta stands

outside the Lions’ Gate,
where tote-bag tourists
sip tart tamarind

from paper cups.
On Friday night I saw the city
wane and wax to pixels

on the screens of untold
mobile phones. From unbuilt
minarets, muezzins hoistthe pale Passover moon
above the gospel

of the Separation Wall.

by Damian Walford Davies

Don’t miss Modern Poetry in Translation‘s 50th anniversary study day in ‎Oxford on 14 May. A really spectacular programme is on offer with writers and translators like Patrick McGuinness, Karen Leeder, David Constantine, Jamie McKendrick and Sasha Dugdale. There will be another translation day in Cambridge on 30 April.

Damian Walford Davies is Professor of English and Head of the School of English, Communication & Philosophy at Cardiff University. He has published two previous collections with Seren. A literary critic, theorist, and editor as well as a poet, he has published widely on Romantic-period literature and culture and on the two literatures of Wales.

Writing about Damian Walford Davies’ book, Judas, Tiffany Atkinson comments: ‘An apocryphal tour de force, Damian Walford Davies’s Judas is a long-overdue mythobiography of the infamous Iscariot. With dazzling linguistic precision, mordant wit and unflinching humanity, these poems turn the familiar story inside out, exposing not just the many facets it has accrued from two thousand years’ telling, but how the veil between past and present, love and betrayal, magic and miracle is fine, and easily torn. Walk with this shadowy figure past the tombs, soldiers and late-night kofta stands of a shimmering, timeless Jerusalem, and be prepared to hear the other side.’ You can read more about Judas on the Seren website, and an interview with Damian Walford Davies here.

Pinball Electra

April 11, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You and your robot bride, I scoff
(the sport of waking her, waking her),
cold metal clattering to fleshen
out the supine girl, evince
that throaty laugh’s ideal
appreciation of your skill.

You ribbed me back –
how I, Electra-like, keep
harping on my theme.
And I dream a dark arcade,
where the pinball king
has made a game of genius,

to make him breathe, if
I play it right. Shake the cabinet
with the volleys, flippers
to defibrillate the dormant heart,
a silver hail on whitened skull.
Make him turn and see.

No cheat codes for this level,
a hall of earnest girls play on.
Coinfall after coinfall,
the expectation of that crucial voice,
shattering the case’s glass.
Make him speak to me.

by Isobel Dixon

This Thursday lunchtime, the Poetry Centre invites you to join us in a celebration of ‪Shakespeare’s Sonnets in this special year commemorating the 400th anniversary of his death. A dozen students and staff will be reading their favourite sonnets, and the event will begin with a short introduction by Dr Katharine Craik, an expert on Shakespeare and his work. It will take place from 12-1pm in T.300 (Tonge Building), Gipsy Lane campus.

‘Pinball Electra’ is copyright © Isobel Dixon, 2013. It is reprinted from Bearings (Nine Arches Press, 2016) by permission of Nine Arches Press. ‘Pinball Electra’ was originally published in Coin Opera II, edited by Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving (Sidekick Books, 2013).

In her fourth collection Isobel Dixon takes readers on a journey to far-flung and sometimes dark places. From Mumbai to Hiroshima, Egypt to Edinburgh, the West Bank and beyond, these poems are forays of discovery and resistance, of arrival and loss. Bearings sings of love too, and pays homage to lost friends and poets – the voices of John Berryman, Michael Donaghy, Robert Louis Stevenson and others echo here. And there is respite for the weary traveller – jazz in the shadows, an exuberant play of words between the fire and tremors. In this wide-ranging collection Dixon explores form and subject, keeping a weather eye out for telling detail, with a sharp sense of the threat that these journeys, our wars and stories, and our very existence pose to the planet. Isobel Dixon will be launching the collection at the London Book Fair on Wednesday 13 April at the Globe Theatre, 5B140 in the Great Hall from 5-6pm, and also at the Wenlock Poetry Festival, together with Abegail Morley and Julia Webb on Sunday 24 April.

Isobel Dixon grew up in South Africa, where her debut, Weather Eye, won the Olive Schreiner Prize. She studied in Scotland and now works in London, returning frequently to her family home in the Karoo. Her further collections are A Fold in the Map and The Tempest Prognosticator and she co-wrote and performed in the Titanic centenary show The Debris Field (with Simon Barraclough and Chris McCabe). Mariscat will publish a pamphlet, The Leonids, in August 2016. You can read more about Isobel’s new book on the Nine Arches website, and more about her work on her own site.

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.

The Museum of Bus Stop Queues

April 4, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Bowling pins holding on to small suns.

Almost all of their work
addresses the theme of retaliation.

They sip time through a straw.

Their book has all the symptoms
of a forgotten ice cream.

‘Our main weakness is probably the universe.’

What of their best quality?

They look upstream.

They are always looking upstream.

by Claire Trévien

This is the final poem from a special trio featuring work by poets who are appearing at one of the two Poetry Centre events in the Oxford Literary Festival. Claire Trévien will be reading alongside Sarah Hesketh and Harry Man tomorrow (Tuesday 5 April) at 4pm. There are more details on the Oxford Literary Festival website. We hope to see you there!

‘The Museum of Bus Stop Queues’ is copyright © Claire Trévien, 2016. It is reprinted from Astéronymes (Penned in the Margins, 2016) by permission of Penned in the Margins.

Astéronyme, n. (French). A sequence of asterisks used to hide a name or password. In this follow-up to her acclaimed debut, The Shipwrecked House, Trévien becomes curator of imaginary museums, indexing objects and histories with a quixotic energy. The stunning central sequence recounts a journey across the Scottish island of Arran, where myths are carved into remote caves and a mountain hides behind a ‘froufrou of gas’. Formally inventive and intricately composed, Astéronymes is a book of redactions – and an elegy for places and people that have been ruined by time, erosion or neglect.

Claire Trévien is an Anglo-Breton poet, editor, reviewer, workshop leader and live literature producer. She is the author of the pamphlet Low-Tide Lottery and of The Shipwrecked House, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. She edits Sabotage Reviews, and in November 2013, she was the Poetry School’s first digital poet-in-residence. Her second collection, Astéronymes, has just been published. You can read more about the book on the Penned in the Margins website, and more about Claire on her own site.

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.

The Last Words of the Love-Sick Time Machine Pilot

April 1, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

And would you ever know if I had
snatched the keys from under the mat,
and unlocked the nucleus of our parents’ old Astra
with its quarks of petrol and spent Silk Cut packs

and taken my younger self for a spin
past the shutters lit blue from within –
the freezer light of Kennedy’s fishmonger’s
not Frankenstein’s lab after all – sorry,

and told you, Donny, this one’s important:
do what you were going to do and ask Susie Whitlow
on a date— yes, like last Wednesday when you tried
at Latchmere slides, feeling doubly sick from the height

and your nerves on the ladder to the diving board –
I shouldn’t remind you – but in ten years’ time,
over a bottle of wine, she’ll tell you she’s got
a new boyfriend, whose name, you joke, sounds

like a make of saucepan, which isn’t so funny
for you, so much as a blow but sometimes
a little hurt is worth a heartful – like baking
with Dad while nursing a broken foot

from that casserole dish you failed to lift,
and don’t leave for Dover without matches,
and put a couple more quid on Little Polveir
at the Grand National this year, but still

slip the winnings into the lining of Mum’s Dorla purse
like you were planning and when pulling up home again
I say, this is my last visit, I’m restoring the timeline,
so you should go and tip-toe inside and pause for a beat

on the third stair, and when the past’s within walking distance
try not to startle all three of your selves on the landing,
or you’ll wake everyone up and we won’t make it,
and Mum wants answers and Dad gets sick

and don’t recall our talk to anyone,
over time it will blur, and merge;
let’s call me the best of a good conscience
and say these things, and only these things

meaning when you test the Tipler core in Culham
after the press conference, you keep curious,
stride into the temporal displacement unit,
feeling in your atoms you might never know?

by Harry Man

This is the second of a special trio of poems being posted this week by writers who are featuring in one of the two Poetry Centre events in the upcoming Oxford Literary Festival. Harry Man will be reading alongside Sarah Hesketh and Claire Trévien on Tuesday 5 April at 4pm, whilst Helen Mort and Alan Buckley will be performing their poetry show ‘The Body Beautiful’ on Sunday 3 April at 2pm. We hope to see you there!

Harry Man was born in Buckinghamshire in 1982. He won the 2014 Struga Poetry Evenings UNESCO Bridges of Struga Award, and his pamphlet, Lift, was shortlisted for the ‘Best Pamphlet’ in the 2014 Saboteur Awards. Harry has taught Creative Writing workshops in a wide-range of settings. His poetry has appeared in many publications, including New Welsh Review, Fuselit, Poems in the Waiting Room, And Other Poems, as well as in Anthologies such as Coin Opera 2 and Rewiring History.

Harry has collaborated with the dancer & choreographer Jennifer Essex on a production for the London College of Fashion, with Kirsten Irving for ‘Auld Enemies’ curated by SJ Fowler, and with illustrator Sophie Gainsley on Finders Keepers, which examines Britain’s disappearing wildlife. Harry also narrates children’s books for HarperAudio and was selected to be the voice of many of Michael Morpurgo’s children’s books. In 2016, Harry was Poet-in-Residence at the StAnza Poetry Festival. Harry Man’s first pamphlet of poems, Lift (2013) is published by Tall Lighthouse in English and by Struga Poetry Evenings in Macedonian. You can read more about Harry on his website, more about Lift on the Tall Lighthouse site, and follow Harry on Twitter.

Tall Lighthouse is an independent publishing house in the UK, established in 1999 by Les Robinson. It publishes full collections of poetry as well as pamphlets, and has featured work by Maurice Riordan, Hugo Williams, Daljit Nagra, Helen Mort, Roddy Lumsden, and Sarah Howe, amongst others. The press has established itself as a leading light on the small press poetry scene, and its pamphlet publications have received the Poetry Book Society‘s Pamphlet Choice Award on a number of occasions. The current Director and Editor of the press is Gareth Lewis, who took over after Les Robinson stepped down from those roles in 2011. You can read more about the publisher on its website.

This Place

March 28, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

When my time comes
and I ask you
again and again where I am
you’ll be able to tell me, truthfully
that this place is a train
that I know quite well

Calling at:
Warrington Bank Quay
Wigan Northwestern
Preston

Calling at:
Wigan Northwestern
Warrington Bank Quay
and London Euston, where this journey terminates

Calling at:

by Sarah Hesketh

This is the first of a special trio of poems to be posted on the list over the next week from poets who are featuring in one of the two Poetry Centre events in the upcoming Oxford Literary Festival. Sarah Hesketh will be reading alongside Harry Man and Claire Trévien on Tuesday 5 April at 4pm (there are more details on the Oxford Literary Festival website), whilst Helen Mort and Alan Buckley will be performing their poetry show ‘The Body Beautiful’ on Sunday 3 April at 2pm; more details on the OLF website. We hope to see you there!

In 2013 poet Sarah Hesketh spent 20 weeks visiting a residential care home for people with dementia. The result is The Hard Word Box, a book of poems and verbatim interviews that takes the reader on a surprising and enriching journey through memory and imagination.

The agility of Hesketh’s poetic voice channels moments of tenderness, suffering and humour, revealing dementia as a negotiation with language and silence. The Hard Word Box is an inventive and compassionate meditation on the things that will be lost. Read more about – and further samples from – the book on the Penned in the Margins website.

Sarah Hesketh obtained an MA in creative writing from UEA. Her first full collection of poetry, Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf, was highly commended in the Forward Prize 2010. In 2013 she was poet-in-residence with Age Concern, working with elderly people with dementia, and in 2014 she published The Hard Word Box, a collection of poems and interviews inspired by this experience. In 2015, she was commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust to produce ‘Grains of Light’, a sequence of poems based around the story of Holocaust survivor Eve Kugler. You can read more about Sarah’s work on her website.

The Muntjac

March 21, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

reflects our headlights in his eyes; 
his scrubby body disappears into the hedge

now white with May, 
tar and fern on his delicate hooves

and all at once the road reverts 
to emptiness, but something of his presence

stays, an apparition on the verge: 
fugitive from walled estates that favoured

curiosities, alien tropics quick and rank,
snaking beyond the boundaries, laying roots.

The road curves past Darks Dale floodlit,
 a tractor ploughing furrows, past New Broke Ups,

Wrong Land; and beyond, a tangle of forest,
oaks hunched like old men against the night.

by Tamar Yoseloff

News from the Centre! Tonight at 7pm, the Poetry Centre hosts an exciting poetry reading at the Albion Beatnik in Oxford with visiting US poet Leah Umansky and local poet Penny Boxall. Leah is the author of the dystopian-themed chapbook, Straight Away the Emptied World, the Mad-Men inspired, Don Dreams and I Dream, and the full-length collection Domestic Uncertainties. Penny is Education Officer at Oxford’s University Church. Her debut collection, Ship of the Line, was published by Eyewear in 2014, a year in which she also won second prize in the Jane Martin Poetry Prize and had her poem, ‘What You Mean to Me’, commended in the Forward Prize. For more details of the reading, visit our Facebook event page.

Tamar Yoseloff’s A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems includes dazzling new work as well as selections from her print collections and pieces from collaborations with artists. The title poem was commissioned by the Hayward Gallery for their 2013 exhibition ‘Light Show’ and is based on an installation by the Welsh Artist Cerith Wyn Evans. The poems in this collection are also concerned with heavenly presences, as well as evil spirits, explorations of light and dark.

Writing about the book, Martyn Crucefix has commented: ‘A Formula for Night is a major collection and career summary and really ought to be both on your wish list and on prize shortlists in the coming 12 months.’ Read more about A Formula for Night on Seren’s website.

Tamar Yoseloff is the author of four poetry collections, including Sweetheart, a PBS Special Commendation and the winner of the Jerwood Aldeburgh Festival Prize. Her most recent collections are The City with Horns and Formerly, a chapbook incorporating photographs by Vici MacDonald, which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. As well as other projects with artists, Yoseloff has also edited A Room to Live In: A Kettle’s Yard Anthology. She has been Reviews Editor for Poetry London and Poetry Editor for Art World. Yoseloff lives in London, where she is a freelance tutor in creative writing. She explores the intersection between poetry and visual art on her blog Invective Against Swans.

Seren is an independent publisher based in Wales. Founded in 1981 to publish poetry discovered by the then-editor of Poetry Wales magazine, Cary Archard. Under Managing Editor Mick Felton the press now publishes a broad range of fiction, non-fiction, and criticism. Amy Wack has been Poetry Editor at Seren for over 20 years. During that time, poets published by Seren have won or been shortlisted for the Costa, Forward, T.S. Eliot and Aldeburgh Prizes. ‪You can find out more 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.

Blackberries

March 14, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It’s dark by nine, stoats have been seen
on the dry stone wall by the sun-room,
and I have a feeling the blackberries need to be picked.When I set off with my grandmother’s hat, her stick and basket,
children run after me, thistles lie down,
the cows make way at the gateand even the insects seem to disperse
more respectfully, leaving their eggs
in the crop’s black best as if that might stop me

simmering the lot of them tomorrow
in the big aluminium pan. Somewhere in an outbuilding
jars of ten-year-old overboiled jam

recrystallise slowly (I should throw them away)
while the good stuff sits on a shelf in London
where no one has time for toast and tea.

No one else will put up with so many scratches,
wade into rosebay willowherb six foot high
or chance it with the stinging nettles,

bitten and burnt and aching all over,
filling the basket with little black blind spots,
berry-sized bruises that float in the eye.

This summer again, in patches of scrub
at the back of my mind, such fruit has been ripening
red from green and green from white

that somebody has to pick it, some sweet thing
of the sweetness of August’s August rain
be preserved.

by Kate Bingham

Join us on Monday 21 March for an exciting poetry reading at the Albion Beatnik in Oxford with visiting US poet Leah Umansky and local poet Penny Boxall. Leah is the author of the dystopian-themed chapbook, Straight Away the Emptied World¸ the Mad-Men inspired, Don Dreams and I Dream, and the full-length collection Domestic Uncertainties. Penny is Education Officer at Oxford’s University Church. Her debut collection, Ship of the Line, was published by Eyewear in 2014, a year in which she also won second prize in the Jane Martin Poetry Prize and had her poem, ‘What You Mean to Me’, commended in the Forward Prize. For more details, visit our Facebook event page.

Kate Bingham’s Infragreen is her eagerly-awaited third collection of poems. Her subject matter can be deceptively simple: rain, the school run, a conversation, but these poems are full of subtle emotional power and wrought with dazzling patterns. Quicksand Beach, her Forward Prize-nominated previous book, was admired by The Guardian for its ‘urgent interrogation of the ways in which we love.’

According to Poetry Review, ‘Nothing is taken for granted in the intellectual universe of these poems: instead they draw strength from going on creating in the face of mystery… Infragreen is full of sensuous, imaginative and beautifully accomplished work.’ Read more about the book on the Seren website.

Kate Bingham is a poet, novelist, and filmmaker who lives in London. Her previous collections are Cohabitation and Quicksand Beach. ‘On Highgate Hill’ was nominated for the Forward Prize Best Single Poem in 2010. Find out more about Kate’s work on her website.

Parapluie

March 7, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

For P & ZG)

I do not want to be made of blue velvet;
I want to be blue velvet. With a handle of silver
shot lace, made by a consumptive old
Romanov who sips her remittance from tall
thin glasses of sweetened black tea.

It is an understatement to say I wish
to shimmer; that I’m quietly reflective
of colour. Selective colour.
I do not want to reflect grey.

I want to be crafted with unprecedented
patience by a slender man who has no
English and fabulous hands. I want to stand
alone, without the icy compromise of a solitary
walk in St Petersburg. I want to lie;

lie beautifully within the fabrication
of my fabric. I want to spread, not just my folds
but myself, on the edge of a shelf of mahogany or
a complex inlay of cherry.

I will be complete but not
undone by a ribbon of magenta. I will be warmed
by dry fired irons and the only creases that fall
from me will be creases that are not
part of the truest part of me.

I will be held by a thin frame of teak, picked
from a clearing in Burma. It has been
rosined with cinnamon and dipped in a resin
of smoked cane sugar.

I will hear the wind before it blows through
the gap in a sash window of a fifth floor
rent-controlled apartment on the west side
of Wenceslas Square. I will contemplate only
the nature of rain.

If I am left in the maze of second hand shops
that runs under Rue de Rivoli; if I’m thrown on a bonfire
at the end of no particular week, my combustion
will form a distraction of radiance.
I will show you the origin of red.

by Rosie Shepperd

Tomorrow at the Old Fire Station in Oxford, poet & theatre-maker Hannah Silva presents her solo show ‪‎Schlock! Produced by Penned in the Margins , Schlock! sees Hannah rip up her copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and with the help of radical punk-pirate Kathy Acker, she attempts to put the female body back together.You can find out more on the OFS website .

The Poetry Centre has programmed two events at the upcoming Oxford Literary Festival . Helen Mort and Alan Buckley perform their show ‘The Body Beautiful’ on Sunday 3 April , and then Claire Trévien, Harry Man, and Sarah Hesketh will read on Tuesday 5 April . Come along!

Rosie Shepperd’s debut poetry collection, The Man at the Corner Table , is a feast of delights. Its grace and precision charm us, and then beguile us into a world that is vital and unsettling. Sheenagh Pugh says: ‘Rosie Shepperd looks aslant at the everyday until it becomes uncommon. She explores sadness through humour and emotion via the silence of white space. Her voice is singular, engaging, unmistakable.’

Rosie Shepperd trained as an economist and worked in financial journalism and then banking in London and New York until 2004. She studied Creative Writing at London University’s Birkbeck College and at the University of South Wales and has a PhD from London University’s Goldsmith’s College. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and she has won a number of competitions and was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, which was read on stage by Juliet Stevenson. Stevenson observed: ‘Rosie Shepperd’s poems read like miniature films. The intensity of the moment she captures in each is framed with such vivid imagery, shot through with sensuality and wit. And her rhythms have the rigour and restlessness of really good jazz… Hers is a startlingly original voice. I so enjoyed reading this collection.’

Seren is an independent publisher based in Wales. Founded in 1981 to publish poetry discovered by the then-editor of Poetry Wales magazine, Cary Archard. Under Managing Editor Mick Felton the press now publishes a broad range of fiction, non-fiction, and criticism. Amy Wack has been Poetry Editor at Seren for over 20 years. During that time, poets published by Seren have won or been shortlisted for the Costa, Forward, T.S. Eliot and Aldeburgh Prizes. ‪You can find out more 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.

Oystercatchers

February 29, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

We were too far away
and walking too slowly
to have spooked them.
So then why did they rise,
flicker to life,
like something uplifting
for the butler to see,
with a crow in their midst
like a small dog with many small masters,
shuffling their repertoire
with a conjuror’s flair,
slow flurry of arrows,
falling in sprinkles
on the skin of the shore
further away?

And then why rise again,
and then handbrake turn
not screeching like swifts,
to swirl their way back
to return to exactly
the point where they started.
To settle again,
piping down, down, down?
Why else but the sheer
species élan
of being alive?

by Phil Madden, with illustrations by Paul L. Kershaw

‘Oystercatchers’ is copyright © Phil Madden, 2015, and the illustrations are copyright © Paul L. Kershaw. It is reprinted from The Amphibious Place (Grapho Editions, 2015) by permission of Grapho Editions.

Phil Madden has worked with Paul Kershaw on two other limited-edition works: Wings Take Us (2009) and Paths (2013). Both are published by Grapho Editions. He has also produced limited-edition works with the engraver Peter Lazarov: The Urban Moon (2009) and The Puppeteer and the Puppet (2012), published by Pepel Press. Phil has had exhibitions of concrete poetry in Brussels and the UK and won the Cinnamon Press Concrete Poetry Competition in 2012. The Tea Way (Gean Tree Press) was published electronically in 2012.

After many years as a printmaker specialising in wood engraving, during which time he has become recognised as one of the country’s leading wood engravers, Paul Kershaw has extended his interests towards the design, printing and publishing of handmade books in small editions. The three books created in collaboration with Phil Madden have been printed using hand presses, on fine-quality paper and display a variety of graphic techniques to find new ways of combining text and image. Paths received a Judges’ Choice Award at the 2013 Fine Press International Book Fair in Oxford. The Amphibious Place was also chosen for this award in the 2015 Book Fair, as well as receiving the Toby English Prize for the most original book.

The Amphibious Place (215 x 175mm, 20pp, published by Grapho Editions, October 2015; price: £125, plus postage & packing). The book is printed on Atsukuchi and Kozuke paper, using an Albion handpress and a cylinder press. There are 60 copies in the edition. The setting is Magma. It is cloth bound with a stab binding and housed in a matching slipcase. This book has as its theme the seashore, the space shared by sea and land. Both text and image are centred horizontally along a single line, and the in/out cycle of the tides has inspired various structural pairings and dualities. The binding style, which doesn’t allow the book to lie open, is in part intended to suggest restless motion.

Phil Madden’s poem ‘Oystercatchers’ is divided between two pages, a recto and the following verso, using one sheet of thin paper folded at the fore edge. The inner face has been printed as well as the outer one so that is possible to see through the paper to the layers underneath. To learn more about the book and see further pages from it, visit Paul Kershaw’s website.

You can also get in touch with Paul via e-mail: plkershaw@mac.com