In That Year

~ oxfordbrookesuni

And in that year my body was a pillar of smoke
and even his hands could not hold me.

And in that year my mind was an empty table
and he laid his thoughts down like dishes of plenty.

And in that year my heart was the old monument,
the folly, and no use could be found for it.

And in that year my tongue spoke the language
of insects and not even my father knew me.

And in that year I waited for the horses
but they only shifted their feet in the darkness.

And in that year I imagined a vain thing;
I believed that the world would come for me. 

And in that year I gave up on all the things
I was promised and left myself to sadness. 

And then that year lay down like a path
and I walked it, I walked it, I walk it.  


by Kim Moore

News from the Centre: the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition awards event took place last Friday. If you couldn’t make it, you can watch the ceremony (and hear readings from the winning poets, local poets, and by Hannah Lowe) on the Brookes website . The event begins about 14.30 into the film.

Dr Niall Munro, Director of the Centre, appeared with Prof Langdon Hammer on the Dan Schneider Video Series to discuss American poet Hart Crane recently. You can watch the discussion via YouTube .

‘In That Year’ is copyright © Kim Moore, 2015. It is reprinted from The Art of Falling (Seren, 2015) by permission of Seren Books.

The Art of Falling is Kim Moore’s keenly-anticipated debut poetry collection. A young poet from Cumbria, she writes with a compelling directness and power, as inspired by her life as a music teacher, as she is by the lives of ‘my people’ ancestors, poets and musicians. A case of domestic violence features in the cathartic central section. ‘In That Year’ is the opening poem of that section and was nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Poem of 2015. 

Poetry London has commented that ‘there is a real menace and a compelling sense of the narrator’s urgent struggle to escape her abuser in this sequence, with the cycling back of repeated words reflecting the circular non-logic of a woman trapped in a violent relationship.’

Kim Moore lives in Barrow, Cumbria. Her poems have been published in the TLS, Poetry Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere. She regularly appears at festivals and events, and her prize-winning pamphlet, If we could speak like wolves (Smith-Doorstop), was chosen as an Independent Book of the Year in 2012 and was shortlisted for other prizes. Moore won an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2010. You can read more about her book on the Seren website, and more about Moore’s work on her own site. You can also follow her on Twitter.

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.

Studio Flat

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Socks hang like bats from a skylight.
They may be dry in time for the moon.
The camp site owner’s water-feature
drains more blood from the sun.

Cars queue for the narrow bridge.
Birds catch their pulses and fly.

I am suddenly old. What’s an attic
but a bungalow in the sky.

And where are you, my sons?

I heard your voices in the bells

of snowdrops pulled by the wind.
These tulips have lost their smell.

Perhaps I could tell you, one day

where the snowdrops went, why old men
dry their socks on the moon, and what
darkened the skylight, just then.

by Paul Henry

This Friday from 6-8pm in the John Henry Brookes Lecture Theatre, the Poetry Centre presents its inaugural International Poetry Competition awards event, which will include readings by the winners and by the judge, Hannah Lowe. More details can be found on the Centre’s website.  All are welcome, but RSVP asap please to poetrycomp@brookes.ac.uk

‘Studio Flat’ is copyright © Paul Henry, 2015. It is reprinted from Boy Running (Seren, 2015) by permission of Seren Books.

Boy Running is the artful new collection of poems by Paul Henry and the first to follow his widely praised: The Brittle Sea: New and Selected Poems. Also a singer-songwriter Henry is known for his precise lyricism, intimate tone and a cast of characters inspired (like Dylan Thomas) by his childhood by the sea in Aberystwyth, West Wales. Commenting on Henry’s work, Hugo Williams has written: ‘With the purity of a sixteenth-century poet, Paul Henry lets fall his beautiful lyrics like cloaks in the mud of every day. Effortless epiphanies and images gradually break open, releasing a strange power, a dark ocean of longing and loss. His poetry deepens our perception of the world.’ Read more about Boy Running on Seren’s site, and more about Henry on his own website.

Paul Henry came to poetry through songwriting. He has read and performed his work at literary festivals across Europe, Asia and the USA. A popular Creative Writing tutor, Henry has lectured at the University of South Wales and led courses at writers’ centres in the UK and France. Also a broadcaster, Paul Henry has written and presented arts programmes for BBC Radio Wales, Radio 3 and Radio 4.

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.

Historia

~ oxfordbrookesuni

                 

                   moving on or going back to where you came from

        

                                               Amy Clampitt

  

                   it is not the substance of a man’s fault

                   it is the shape of it

                   is what lives with him, is what shows

 

                                               Charles Olson

                      

a room crammed with sharp toys                              

                                     

a field zesty with fire   

                  

                   history as historia        

 

        cool as a shot to the mouth    

  

                            *

  

                                      in pinched shoes  

                                               cataleptic            

                                              

                            merely to show up

                  

                   the birdlime viscidity of the garden

                   the scalpel-like finger

                              of a shriveled leaf—                     

                  

                   not accusatory   

                                               shadowed only

                                                         by itself

                   not pointing

         towards a balance-act 

                                             but balancing         

                 

                            *

                   

I was six and made of violins

                                               stumped

                            by metronomic light 

        

I wanted to energise him away

         like glucose

                   globed

         into whiteness—

 

         a voice spoken slantwise

                            but faraway—    

        

                                      sleeping it off

                  

                   I traveled in the dark

                   so as not to be seen    

  

                            *

  

         dusk-nervousness

         in what is             unclaimed

 

I wait and fail      

         paying off warders

                   at your door—    

 

                                               the thrillbox

                                               of birthdays

                                              

                   whalecalls from waterclotted

                            condensation

 

                                      the gazebladed kitchen 

 

                   the uplander silences of television

 

                                      blackish fingernails

                                                         from window-mould

                           

                            eyes goggled

                                      towards a lit hearth 

                                               fringe fraying

                                                                 

                            or cupping at the curtain frame

                                      fearful of fire 

                                               on the domestic zodiac

 

bees cried in their flower-coats

                   collecting honey

  

                            *

  

                   how the air divides      

                            like cutting a loaf—

 

         as much childed           

                   as fevered

 

                                      left alone

                            in the dry season         

                           

         to feed from the day’s nutrients—

 

                                                                  naphtha mirage 

                                                                            over the wheatfield

                                                                                              at sunset

 

                                               foxfur grinning on a spidersweb

                                                                 

                                                                  dialysis of rain

                                                                            inside a garden well     

                                                                 

                                                                  equal to breath             

  

                            *

  

         —to hear the substance of the earth

                                      to know its shape        

 

                   blessèd as an egg

   and yet—

 

                   and yet bombarded

                            by the radio impulse

                                      of survival

                                              

                   the whistlework of money—

        

her ivied hair       

                   trenched at the oven or

         admonished at the fire-grate

  

                            *

  

shuffle-worn cards

                                      blanked-out letters

                                               from the on-dead 

 

how life tickles the palm         at twenty

  

                            *

  

                   dreaming up worser devils

 

thinking the lesser disease might be

                                               loneliness—

 

no-one to ignite

                   the red-eyed bird

                            of your mind

 

no-one told you why

                                        love

                                               blunts

  

                            *

  

if the bones sing          

 

if chaos is chaos         

         returned—          

 

                                               no atom nuclei

                   no definitive cure         

                                                           

*

  

enter fortune

 

         a ransacked house   

                   half-emptied—   

 

that which remains

preserved in boxes

 

                   now bulges

         like a museum   

  

                            *

  

baffled voices     vow trounces

         —as if from any archive—

  

I lean over and touch my ear

         to the grid complex—

 

                            like hearing ritual cannibalism

                                      in the byways of a river

 

by James Byrne

Please join us on Friday 19 February from 6-8pm here at Oxford Brookesto celebrate the prize-winning poets of the ‘Open’ and ‘English as a Second Language’categories in our inaugural International Poetry Competition. The event willinclude readings from the winners, as well as an exciting showcase of work fromlocal young poets, mentored by award-winning writer, Kate Clanchy. Lightrefreshments will follow. If you would like to attend, please let us know viae-mail: poetrycomp@brookes.ac.ukby 10 February. 

‘Historia’ is copyright © James Byrne, 2015. It is reprinted from White Coins (Arc Publications, 2015) by permission of Arc Publications.

James Byrne’s most recent poetry collection Blood/Sugar, was published by Arc Publications in 2009. Byrne is the editor of The Wolf, an internationally-renowned poetry magazine, which he co-founded in 2002. He won the Treci Trg poetry festival prize in Serbia and his Selected Poems: The Vanishing House was published in Belgrade. Byrne lives in Liverpool and is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. His poems have been translated into several languages including Arabic, Burmese and Chinese and he is the International Editor for Arc Publications.

White Coins rewards the reader with a nomadic poetry for the 21st century; one that mingles personal, social and historical spaces whilst celebrating, at all times, linguistic versatility and innovation. Read more about the book on Arc’s website, and hear James read from his work on the Archive of the Now site.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.

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.

Tercets on love—The lovers

~ oxfordbrookesuni


See how those cranes fly arcing through the sky!
The clouds they have for company on their way
Were there already when they had to fly

From one life to another far away.
Together at the selfsame height and pace
It seems an almost casual display.

That crane and cloud just chance to share the space
Of the wide skies through which they pass so briefly
So neither one may linger in this place

And all they see is one another slightly
Rocking on the wind in loose accord
Who now in flight lie side by side so lightly

The wind may carry them off into the void.
If they remain themselves, and hold on tight
They can be touched by nothing untoward

It doesn’t matter if they’re driven out
Threatened by gunshots or by stormy weather.
Indifferent to the sun and moon’s pale light

They journey on, besotted with each other.
What are you fleeing from?
          —The world.
                     —Where to?
                                    —Wherever.
You ask how long now have they been together?

Not long.
          —And when they’ll part?
                    —Oh, soon enough.
So love appears secure to those who love.
by Bertolt Brecht; translated by Tom Kuhn

Please join us on Friday 19 February from 6-8pm here at Oxford Brookes to celebrate the prize-winning poets of the ‘Open’ and ‘English as a Second Language’ categories in our inaugural International Poetry Competition. The event will include readings from the winners, as well as an exciting showcase of work from local young poets, mentored by award-winning writer, Kate Clanchy. Light refreshments will follow. If you would like to attend, please let us know via e-mail: poetrycomp@brookes.ac.uk by 10 February.

‘Tercets on love—The lovers’, which was originally published in German in 1930 as “Terzinen über die Liebe—Die Liebenden”, is translated by Tom Kuhn. Copyright © 1930 by Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag, from Love Poems by Bertolt Brecht, translated by David Constantine and Tom Kuhn, and published by Liveright Publishing Corporation (2015). It is used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

This poem is the last in our series featuring work from collections shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize 2015, judged by Olivia McCannon and Clare Pollard, and supported in 2015 by the British Council. The winner of the competition was Iain Galbraith, who translated Jan Wagner’s book Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015). You can find out more about the competition and all the shortlisted books on the Poetry Society website. Many thanks to the Poetry Society, and in particular Sophie Baker, for providing us with this year’s selection.

Tom Kuhn teaches at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He works on twentieth-century drama and German exile literature and has been, since 1996, editor of the main English-language Brecht edition. There is more information about Tom’s work on the Oxford University website.

Bertolt Brecht is widely considered the greatest German playwright of the twentieth century, and to this day remains best known as a dramatist, the author of Mother Courage, The Threepenny Opera, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, among so many other works. However, Brecht was also a hugely prolific and eclectic poet, producing more than 2,000 poems during his lifetime—indeed, so many that even his own wife, Helene Weigel, had no idea just how many he had written. Written between 1918 and 1955, these poems reflect an artist driven not only by the bitter and violent politics of his age but, like Goethe, by the untrammeled forces of love, romance, and erotic desire. Read more about the book on the Norton website.

Liveright Publishing Corporation is an imprint of W.W. Norton, that is a home for outstanding works that define and redefine our culture, and that continue to provoke interest and inspire readers around the world. Find out more about Liveright here.

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.

He was easy to get…

~ oxfordbrookesuni


He was easy to get.
It was possible on the second evening.
I waited till the third (and knew
I was taking a risk).
Then he said, laughing: it’s the bath salts
Not your hair.
But he was easy to get.For a month I left him straight aftermaking love.
Every third day I stayed away.
I never wrote.
But store up snow in a pot
It gets dirty all the same.
I did more than I could
When it was already over. I threw out the bitches who weresleeping with him

As though I didn’t mind
I did it laughing and crying.
I turned on the gas
Five minutes before he arrived, I
Borrowed money in his name:
It did no good.

But one night I slept
And one morning I got up
I washed myself from head to toe
Ate and said to myself:
That’s it now.

Truth is:
I slept with him twice more
But by God and my mother
It was nothing.
Like everything else
It passed.


by Bertolt Brecht; translated by David Constantine

‘He was easy to get …’, which was originally published in German in 1960 as ‘Es war leicht ihn zu bekommen…’, is translated by David Constantine. Copyright © 1960 by Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag, from Love Poems by Bertolt Brecht, translated by David Constantine and Tom Kuhn, and published by Liveright Publishing Corporation (2015). It is used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

This poem is the penultimate one in our series featuring work from collections shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize 2015, judged by Olivia McCannon and Clare Pollard, and supported in 2015 by the British Council. The winner of the competition was Iain Galbraith, who translated Jan Wagner’s book Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015). You can find out more about the competition and all the shortlisted books on the Poetry Society website.

David Constantine is a freelance writer and translator. His most recent volume of poetry is Elder (2014); his fourth collection of short stories, Tea at the Midland, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2013. You can read more about his work on the Poetry Archive website.

Bertolt Brecht is widely considered the greatest German playwright of the twentieth century, and to this day remains best known as a dramatist, the author of Mother Courage, The Threepenny Opera, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, among so many other works. However, Brecht was also a hugely prolific and eclectic poet, producing more than 2,000 poems during his lifetime—indeed, so many that even his own wife, Helene Weigel, had no idea just how many he had written. Written between 1918 and 1955, these poems reflect an artist driven not only by the bitter and violent politics of his age but, like Goethe, by the untrammeled forces of love, romance, and erotic desire. Read more about the book on the Norton website.

Liveright Publishing Corporation is an imprint of W.W. Norton, that is a home for outstanding works that define and redefine our culture, and that continue to provoke interest and inspire readers around the world. Find out more about Liveright here.

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.

01 43 15 50 67

~ oxfordbrookesuni

for Fabienne

By the time we finished talking it has snowed
We’d laughed and sighed like a pair of sisters
Can you see this caribou from your window it’s a cloud
A moose an ermine little moving fox
It changes every moment changes to sky-blue-sky
If the night has stars in it it’s a promise of blue
Have you checked out the chimney-stacks the great she-bears
We ought to see oceans more
We shouldn’t need a second glance to make out a giraffe
All white white white white where you are as well?
A squid a cuttlefish an octopus might add a splash of ink
All white white white without red rabbit eyes
We mustn’t make each other late time’s getting on I’d better go
There are some in dotty frocks and some in geometric shapes
And oh I almost forgot
Old things float up and new ones too
A slotted spoon a convalescence or a precious stone
Jewel of sleeping water there was a cat called that
It was
Drowned jewel
Clouds don’t miaow though jewellery can trickle down
When we stopped our oneversation we came down as snow

by Valérie Rouzeau; translated by Susan Wicks

This is the final Weekly Poem of 2015. The poems will return to your inbox on 11 January. A very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all our readers!

‘01 43 15 50 67’ is copyright © Valérie Rouzeau; translated by Susan Wicks, 2013. It is reprinted from Talking Vrouz by Valérie Rouzeau, published by Arc Publications (2013).

This poem continues our series featuring work from collections shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize 2015, judged by Olivia McCannon and Clare Pollard, and supported in 2015 by the British Council. The winner of the competition was Iain Galbraith, who translated Jan Wagner’s book Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015). You can find out more about the competition and all the shortlisted books on the Poetry Society website.

Susan Wicks, poet and novelist, was born in Kent, and has lived and worked in France, Ireland and America. She is the author of six collections of poetry including House of Tongues (2011), Singing Underwater (1992), which won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize, and The Clever Daughter (1996), which was shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. She was one of the Poetry Society’s ‘New Generation Poets’ in 1994. Cold Spring in Winter (2010), her translation of Valérie Rouzeau’s first major collection, Pas revoir, was shortlisted both for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for Literary Translation and the International Griffin Prize for Poetry, and won that year’s Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation from French. Her translation of Valérie Rouzeau’s second collection in English, Talking Vrouz, won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for Literary Translation in 2014. You can read a discussion with Susan and Valérie on the Arc website, and hear the pair read one of Valérie’s poems and its translation together.

Valérie Rouzeau was born in 1967 in Burgundy, France and now lives in a small town near Paris, Saint-Ouen, well-known for its flea-market. She has published a dozen collections of poems, including Pasrevoir (l’Idée Bleue, 1999), Va où (Le Temps qu’il Fait, 2002) and more recently Apothicaria (Wigwam, 2007) and Mange-Matin (l’Idée Bleue, 2008). She has also published volumes translated from Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, Ted Hughes and the photographer Duane Michals. She is the editor of a little review of poetry for children (from 5 to 117 years old) called dans la lune and lives mainly by her pen through public readings, poetry workshops in schools, radio broadcasts and translation. Valérie was selected to represent France in the 2012 Cultural Olympiad Poetry Parnassus in London.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.

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.

Lesson

~ oxfordbrookesuni

It was a shadowy yard, walled high with stones.
The trees held early apples, dark
wine-coloured skin, the perfected flavour of things
ripe before their time.
Clay jugs sat alongside the wall.
I ate apples and sipped the purest water,
knowing the outside world had stopped dead from heat.
Then my father appeared and tweaked my nose,
and he wasn’t sick and hadn’t died, either;
that’s why he was laughing, blood
stirring in his face again,
he was hunting for ways to spend this happiness:
where’s my chisel, my fishing pole,
what happened to my snuffbox, my coffee cup?
I always dream something’s taking shape,
nothing is ever dead.
What seems to have died fertilises.
What seems motionless waits.


by Adélia Prado; translated by Ellen Doré Watson

The Poetry Centre recently announced the winners of its inaugural International Poetry Competition, which received nearly 900 entries from all over the world. In the Open category, the winner was Siobhan Campbell, with second place going to Claire Askew. There was a Special Commendation for Wes Lee. In the ESL category, the winner was Marie-Aline Roemer, with Armel Dagorn in second place, and a Special Commendation for Hanne Busck-Nielsen. You can read the winning poems and see the shortlist and longlist on the Centre’s website.


‘Lesson’ is copyright © Adélia Prado; translated by Ellen Doré Watson, 2014. It is reprinted from The Mystical Rose: Selected Poems by Adélia Prado, published by Bloodaxe Books (2014).

This poem continues our series featuring work from collections shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize 2015, judged by Olivia McCannon and Clare Pollard, and supported in 2015 by the British Council. The winner of the competition was Iain Galbraith, who translated Jan Wagner’s book Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015). You can find out more about the competition and all the shortlisted books on the Poetry Society website.

Poet & translator Ellen Doré Watson directs the Poetry Center at Smith College and has translated over a dozen books from the Brazilian Portuguese, most notably poetry by Brazilian Adélia Prado, including The Mystical Rose (Bloodaxe, 2014). She has also translated from the Arabic with co-translator Saadi Simawi. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, Watson serves on the faculty of the Drew University Graduate Program in Poetry and Translation and as Poetry & Translation editor of The Massachusetts Review. She was shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize in 2015 for her translation of The Mystical Rose by Adélia Prado (Bloodaxe Books). Read more about the book here.

Adélia Luzia Prado de Freitas (Adélia Prado) was born in 1935 and has lived all her life in the provincial, industrial city of Divinópolis, in Minas Gerais (General Mines), the Brazilian state that has produced more presidents and poets than any other in the country. She was the only one in her family of labourers to see the ocean, to go to college, or to dream of writing a book. She attended the University of Divinópolis, earning degrees in Philosophy and Religious Education, and taught in schools until 1979. Adélia Prado has been the subject of dozens of theses and dissertations, as well as a documentary film and countless articles, profiles, and interviews in newspapers, literary supplements, and popular magazines, and her work has been translated into Spanish, Italian and English. In June 2014 Prado received the Griffin Lifetime Achievement Award in Canada. You can find out more about Prado on the Bloodaxe website.

Bloodaxe Books is internationally renowned for quality in literature and excellence in book design, and its authors and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry, from the T.S. Eliot Prize and Pulitzer to the Nobel Prize. You can read more about Bloodaxe 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.

‘the is of the silence in the room’

~ oxfordbrookesuni

the is of the silence in the room
the is of the walls, each so different
the is of the sunshine on the curtain
the greying is of the dust
through the thin is of the glass
the is of the sparrow outside the window
the is of the child on the grass, chasing a butterfly
the is of the butterfly in the net
the floating is of the cloud

and once again: I am

in this vast
circular spherical nobody’s
agape virulent scorching
grass-strong swift-winged quick-legged
dripping rabid
acute
is


by Krystyna Miłobędzka; translated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese

‘the is of the silence in the room’ is copyright © Krystyna Miłobędzka; translated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese, 2013. It is reprinted from Nothing More by Krystyna Miłobędzka, published by Arc Publications (2013).

This poem continues our series featuring work from collections shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize 2015, judged by Olivia McCannon and Clare Pollard, and supported in 2015 by the British Council. The winner of the competition was Iain Galbraith, who translated Jan Wagner’s book Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015). You can find out more about the competition and all the shortlisted books on the Poetry Society website.

Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese writes between English, Polish and Danish; her multilingual texts have appeared in such journals as Shearsman, Cordite Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, on the London Underground and in anthologies. She has published numerous translated collections including Nothing More (Arc, 2013), her selection from Krystyna Miłobędzka, and Salt Monody (Zephyr Press, 2006) by Marzanna Kielar. She has co-edited Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird: Poetry from Poland (Zephyr Press, 2004), guest-edited Polish issues of Poetry Wales and Modern Poetry in Translation, and is a contributing editor at Poetry Wales, where she regularly reviews translated books. She teaches poetry-in-translation courses for the Poetry School in London and works at the Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use, University of Copenhagen. Arc’s website features three essays by Wójcik-Leese about her translations of Miłobędzka’s poetry.

Krystyna Miłobędzka was born in Margonin, Poland, in 1932. She is an author of twelve books of poetry, including a collected poems, Zbierane1960-2005 (Gathered 1960-2005), which appeared in 2006, and zbierane, gubione (gathered, lost) in 2010. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, was nominated for the NIKE Prize in 2006, and won the Silesius Award in 2009, and again in 2013 for Lifetime Achievement. She lives in Puszczykowo near Poznań. You can find out more about Nothing More on the Arc 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.

Black Beans

~ oxfordbrookesuni

In the afternoon I pick up a book
In the afternoon I put a book down
In the afternoon it enters my head there is war
In the afternoon I forget each and every war

In the afternoon I grind coffee
In the afternoon I put the ground coffee
Back together again gorgeous
Black beans
In the afternoon I take off my clothes put them on
Apply make-up first then wash
Sing don’t say a thing


by Sarah Kirsch; translated by Anne Stokes

‘Black Beans’ is copyright © Sarah Kirsch, and translated by Anne Stokes, 2014. It is reprinted from Ice Roses: Selected Poems by Sarah Kirsch by permission of Carcanet Press.

This poem continues our series featuring work from collections shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize 2015, judged by Olivia McCannon and Clare Pollard, and supported in 2015 by the British Council. The winner of the competition was Iain Galbraith, who translated Jan Wagner’s book Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015). You can find out more about the competition and all the shortlisted books on the Poetry Society website.

Anne Stokes holds a PhD in German Literature from Ohio State University. She teaches Translation at the University of Stirling and translates from German.

Sarah Kirsch (1935–2013) is recognised as one of Germany’s most powerful poets of the post-war era. She lived and worked first in East Germany, then (after political persecution) in the West, making her home finally in rural Schleswig-Holstein. Her poetry’s free-flowing syntax and fluid sound patterning reflect her lifelong resistance to constraint and convention. Anne Stokes’ translations above all capture the living sounds and rhythms of Kirsch’s writing. In Ice Roses Anglophone readers experience the full range of Kirsch’s poetry, from her early work to her last books, full of the strange beauty of her chosen landscapes. You can read more about the book on the Carcanet website.

Carcanet Press is in its fifth decade, and continues to publish a comprehensive and diverse list of modern and classic poetry in English and in translation, as well as a range of inventive fiction, Lives and Letters and literary criticism. Read more about the publisher on its 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.

an essay on midges

~ oxfordbrookesuni


as if all the letters had suddenly
floated free of a paper
and formed a swarm in the air;

they form a swarm in the air,
of all that bad news telling us
nothing, those skimpy muses, wispy

pegasuses, only abuzz with the hum
of themselves, made from the last twist
of smoke as the candle is snuffed,

so light you can hardly say: they are –
looking more like shadows, umbrae
jettisoned by another world

to enter our own, they dance, their legs
finer than anything pencil can draw,
with their miniscule sphinx-like bodies;

the rosetta stone, without the stone.


by Jan Wagner, translated by Iain Galbraith

There are two exciting Poetry Centre events this week: on Wednesday we host a spoken word/open mic evening, with a featured performances by Maddie Godfrey (Finalist in the Australian National Poetry Slam, 2015), andlive music by Steph Masucci. You can find more details on our Facebook page.

Then on Thursday we launch our occasional lunchtime poetry reading, Eat My Words, with Emma Jones and Harry Man. All are very welcome. The reading will be from 12.15-1pm in T.300 (Tonge Conservatory), Gipsy Lane, Oxford Brookes. Contact us for more details.

‘an essay on midges’ is copyright © Jan Wagner, 2015. It is reprinted from Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015) by permission of Arc Publications.

Over the next few weeks, we will be featuring poems from collections shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize 2015, judged by Olivia McCannon and Clare Pollard, and supported in 2015 by the British Council. We begin with the winner of the competition, which was announced this evening. You can find out more about the competition and all the shortlisted books on the Poetry Society website.

Iain Galbraith‘s poems have appeared in Poetry Review, PN Review, Edinburgh Review, Times Literary Supplement, Irish Pages, New Writing and many other journals and books. He is the editor of five poetry anthologies and translates poetry, fiction and drama. A winner of the John Dryden Translation Prize and the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation, his recent translated books include W.G. Sebald’s poetry and John Burnside’s selected poems in German. He is an occasional lecturer, and in 2014-15 taught Poetics of Translation at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He was born and grew up in the west of Scotland and now lives in Wiesbaden, Germany.

Of the winning collection, the judges said: ‘Galbraith converts every challenge (formal, lexical, metrical) into an opportunity, matching Wagner’s ingenuity and investment at every step, having internalized the “primal syntax” so completely that everything he writes hits the mark. The result is a perfect sufficiency: a set of poems in English that somehow inhabit the same skin as the German, with their own autonomous heart and lungs.’

Jan Wagner studied English in Hamburg, Dublin and Berlin, where he has lived since 1995. A poet, essayist and translator of British and American poetry by Charles Simic, Simon Armitage, Matthew Sweeney, and Robin Robertson, he was also, until 2003, co-publisher of The Outside of the Element, a boxed loose-leaf periodical based on an idea by Marcel Duchamp. He has published six volumes of poetry and has received numerous awards, including the Mondsee Poetry Award (2004), the Ernst Meister Prize for Poetry (2005), the Wilhelm Lehmann Prize (2009) and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize (2011).

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.

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.