In the Orchard of Pomegranates

November 16, 2015April 20, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Then you wonder, astonished, who am I? I am a mustard seed in the middle of the sphere of the moon.
Moses Cordovero, Or Ne’erav (The Sweet Light), trans. Ira Robinson

When I was a girl, holy in sending,
alive in receiving, I knew a word
was, like an angel, flaming, both message
and messenger.

Electric the flowerin my eye, the opening of the heart:
if ‘house’ is a prison, ‘home’ is a latticed
(look up) constellation. At such elevation,
this is return under you the harvest moon.

Anemone,
anemometer.

I have nothing withheld in my hands, but
nothing. Doubled. The seed of. Your wish for.

by Sophie Mayer

Two notes from the Centre: on Friday 20 November there will be a free poetry workshop in Oxford on the theme of ‘history’, led by experienced poets. From myths, collective stories or personal narratives, what does history mean to you? To join, email your name and affiliation to oxfordpoetry.history@gmail.com The workshop will take place from 3-5pm  in the Old Library, University Church of St Mary the Virgin, High St, Oxford, OX1 4BJ.

And on Wednesday 25 November, the Centre is hosting a spoken word/open mic event in the Main Lecture Theatre, Clerici Bldg, Gipsy Lane on the Headington campus. All are welcome to this event, which will feature numerous local poets and a set from Maddie Godfrey (Australian National Poetry Slam Finalist, 2015). You can find more details and register your interest via the Facebook page. ‘In the Orchard of Pomegranates’ is copyright © Sophie Mayer, 2015. It is reprinted from (O) (Arc Publications, 2015) by permission of Arc Publications.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Her poetry has been translated into Russian, Greek, Dutch, and Japanese, and has appeared on poster hoardings in Dublin and as part of Yoko Ono’s Meltdown 2013. Previous collections include Her Various Scalpels (Shearsman, 2009), The Private Parts of Girls (Salt, 2011), Kiss Off (Oystercatcher, 2011) and signs of the sistership (with Sarah Crewe, KFS, 2013). She is a film critic and scholar, author of The Cinema of Sally Potter, and (for the Oxford Handbook on Contemporary British and Irish Poetry), ‘Cinema Mon Amour’, the definitive essay on British poetry and film.

(O) is Sophie Mayer’s fourth published poetry collection. Energetic, determined, politicised, contemporary and classical. Brimming with wit, these poems endeavour into the challenges, obstacles and successes which accompany the path into womanhood. A powerful poetic voice, which serves as a testament to the women who live in the cracks of history. You can read more about the book on the Arc website, and more about the author on her own site. You can also follow her on Twitter.

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.

Sudden Collapses in Public Places

November 9, 2015April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

like buildings, people can disintegrate
collapse in queues, or in a crowded street

causing mayhem, giving kids bad dreams
of awkward corpses, policemen, drops of blood

but I’m stood here, a miracle of bones
architecturally balanced in my boots

I feel each joint, each hinge and spinal link
jolting to the rhythm of my breath

aware of every tremor in my joists,
and yet I’m scared I haven’t done enough

to be re-enforced and girded, Christ, I fear
those flowers tied to lamp posts, dread the crash

by Julia Darling

Two upcoming events: on Monday 16 November at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop from 7.30pm, the Poetry Centre co-hosts a reading by visiting US poet celeste doaks and Hanne Busck-Nielsen. It promises to be a lively and exciting event. Find out more on our Facebook page.

And then on Friday 20 November there will be a free poetry workshop in Oxford on the theme of ‘history’, led by experienced poets. From myths, collective stories or personal narratives, what does history mean to you? Does living in Oxford, a place steeped  in history and memories, inspire you to write about the past? To join, email your name and affiliation to oxfordpoetry.history@gmail.com The workshop will take place from 3-5pm  in the Old Library, University Church of St Mary the Virgin, High St, Oxford OX1 4BJ.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Julia Darling was born in Winchester in 1956, and moved to Newcastle in 1980. Her first full poetry collection, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, was published by Arc in 2003. It was awarded a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Julia’s second collection Apology for Absence was published in 2005. Darling was a recipient of the prestigious Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award, the largest literary award in England.

Ten years after Julia Darling’s death, her poetry continues to represent the very essence of what a poem can be – in her own words, a ‘first aid kit for the mind’. Surprising, vivid, beautiful, often disturbing and always thought-provoking, Darling explores themes of illness, hope, family, and the acceptance of mortality in a body of work that reminds us why we read poetry in the first place. Read more about Indelible, Miraculous, a collected edition of her poems, 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.

Come to Me

October 26, 2015April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I was bringing you a little cheese sandwich. It was two in the morning, everybody sleepy, shops closed but in the I Love You bar they gave me a little cheese sandwich.

I was in a taxi bringing you a little cheese sandwich ’cause you were lying there sad, perhaps even ill, and there was nothing good to eat in the house. Was real expensive, around one lat, but that’s OK.

So I was in the taxi with my little iluvu, all squished, practically cold. But for some reason I didn’t make it home. Somehow I ended up where all were merry and witty, and starving. So I drank, I sang, but I saved my little sandwich.

Must have been the third day when I could finally treat you to it, you were so angry, you ate the sandwich hardly looking at it. Had I had more courage, I would have said: but you know I love you, you know I admire you. Don’t make me say it again.

by Kārlis Vērdinš, translated by Ieva Lešinka

Tomorrow (Tuesday 27 October) at 7pm in the John Henry Brookes Building at Oxford Brookes, the prizegiving for the Poetry Centre’s Wellbeing Poetry Competition will take place. All are welcome. The event will also feature a reading from Dan Holloway, celebrated local poet, novelist, and publisher. You can read the winning poems now on the Centre’s website.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Kārlis Vērdiņš has published five books of poetry, which have been received with great critical acclaim and garnered top literary awards. He is a renowned poet, translator, and critic, living and working in Riga. Vērdiņš has an MA in Cultural Theory and a PhD in Philology. In addition to his innovative poetry, he has published many essays on literature as well as translations of European and American poets (including T.S. Eliot, Konstantin Biebl, Georg Trakl, Joseph Brodsky, Walt Whitman), and has also written libretti and song lyrics.

The poems in Come to Me show us what’s most noble in human relationships, alongside the basest fears and anxieties. Irony and sarcasm somehow never seem to obscure the warmth of Kārlis’s voice and his attention to intimate details. This book represents Kārlis at the peak of his poetic power: it is gripping, vivid and not a little romantic. Read more about the book on the Arc website.

Translator Ieva Lešinska-Gaber (Ieva Lešinska) studied English at the University of Riga. From 1978 to 1987 she lived and worked in the USA, studying at Ohio State University and the University of Colorado. She now lives in Riga, working as chief translator at the Bank of Latvia, and as a freelance journalist and translator. She has translated the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot and various American Beat Generation poets into Latvian, and has published numerous English translations of poems and prose by Latvian authors in periodicals and anthologies in the UK and the US.

Esther Alone

October 19, 2015April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I remember my birth as a dream,
Voices beyond the give and wrench
Of my mother’s bone-tunnel,
Pulled, pulled into the world,

The reddening, vein-thin last look,
Drench of fluid and air the length
Of my body as it fell feet first
To hang by the umbilical.

When I was two I found the company
Of cupboards, made friends
With dust in corners, a hidey hole
Between two rooms

Where I learned to sing
In the first language: mammal clicks
And growls, mouth pictures,
Before there was speaking.

On my fifth birthday I made a peg doll,
Crayon eyes and nipples, pink tissue skirt,
Married her to another peg,
Jammed their legs until they split.

I’d seen my father to my mother do it
And after, her thigh’s black marble.
By forty she was papering folds
Of her face where the powder gathered.

When I was seven I changed: thing
To girl back to thing; then a doubling,
One skin inside another.
At fourteen, my baby girl

By my father still-born in the woods,
Her eyes one long stitch in linen,
White as milk, white as the cut
That opened then sealed.

I grew into stone that could stand
The rain, the cold, the driven wind,
That would be an age in the weathering,
Speck of me a fossil eye watching

In the heart for the time to waken.
The train made the first crack, but deep,
Inaudible, then a fissure from that kiss
It’s taken three months to notice.

I grew out from there with every touch,
Eyelash reaching into leg then pubis,
The spine’s knuckling a whip
All the way to the pads of my fingers.

Now there is Iain I bend him to me.
We are tightening, we are softening,
Our bodies muscle of the other
Until we are more alike than different.

I stand in the wardrobe mirror,
My silvered scar, my silvered belly.
I look for where he has entered me,
And a slit opens an eye in my rib.

by Sarah Corbett

This is the second poem drawn from the new collections of Eleanor Rees and Sarah Corbett and published by Pavilion Poetry. We featured Eleanor Rees’s poem ‘The Cruel Mother’ last week, and you can read it on the Centre’s website. Both Sarah and Eleanor will be visiting Oxford this Friday 23 October – a super opportunity to hear two of the most exciting voices in contemporary poetry. The reading will take place at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Jericho from 7.30pm, and all are very welcome! You can get more details on our Facebook events page or by e-mailing us.

Sarah Corbett has published three collections of poetry with Seren Books: The Red Wardrobe (1998), The Witch Bag (2002) and Other Beasts (2008). She received an Eric Gregory award in 1997 and her work has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize, as well as being widely anthologised and translated. Her new book, And She Was: A Verse-Novel, was published in April by Pavilion Poetry. Sarah has a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from Manchester University and teaches on Lancaster University’s Distance Learning MA in Creative Writing. She regularly collaborates with other artists, writers and filmmakers, and runs the monthly poetry reading series in Hebden Bridge, poetrynites@thebookcase. You can read more about And She Was on the LUP website, and more about Sarah’s work on her own site.

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’s first three books are by three exciting voices: Sarah Corbett, Eleanor Rees, and Mona Arshi. Pavilion has already enjoyed considerable success, with Mona Arshi’s book, Small Hands, winning the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection at this year’s Forward Prizes. You can read more about the series on the Liverpool University Press website.

The Cruel Mother

October 12, 2015April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

after the ballad

Amongst the leaves I lie
teeth-bared,

raw as the sundown.
Scattered skins hang on the trees

like prayer flags – I am demon,
I am the bad-one.

I am the wild, edible bark.
You bit my tongue and made me roar.

I will barren you, bust up your eye,
scratch at damp dirt with these claws.

Where are you? Nest of twigs,
den in the woods,

hut with smoke at the door.
The home burns its riches.

My young slide onto the forest floor like eels.
They writhe –

branches hold them. Swaddle
small forms with dirt. They call

on into the blistering night.
Sky bubbles and caws.

Trees like dogs lick at the sun,
wide as horizon, large as moon.

The oak I lean on leans back,
bark like a spine.

Over the fence on the well-kept lawn
I hear them talk –

O there is nothing to be done,
Nothing, nothing to be done.

And hear him say
It is not his fault.

And they all agree
it was all up to me.

In the green wood
I sing to hope of rain.

I sing to blood
which falls and pours;

in the garden they sit, drink wine
and thunder, wonder

where I have travelled towards
but don’t stand and search

but talk, and worse they sigh,
O there is nothing, nothing to be done.

I will eat these babies,
cook them one by one.

The green wood says I should stay the night.
The green wood casts a curse

on those who say nothing can be done
and leave me, a wild cat, to run

into their sleep in hot damp beds,
into their eyes in the dark.

I am a clawed mother
and he will not have them back.

O the cruelty he weighed on me.

by Eleanor Rees

Over the next fortnight, we will be featuring two poems drawn from the new collections of Eleanor Rees and Sarah Corbett, and published by Pavilion Poetry. Both Sarah and Eleanor will be visiting Oxford on Friday 23 October – a super opportunity to hear two of the most exciting voices in contemporary poetry. The reading will take place at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Jericho from 7.30pm, and all are very welcome! More details can be found via Facebook.

The Poetry Centre has announced the winners of its Wellbeing Poetry Competition! Thank you to all who entered. You can see the shortlist and read the winning poems on the Poetry Centre website.

‘The Cruel Mother’ is copyright © Eleanor Rees, 2015. It is reprinted from Blood Child (Liverpool University Press, 2015) by permission of Liverpool University Press.

Notes from Liverpool University Press:

Eleanor Rees was born in Birkenhead, Merseyside in 1978. Her pamphlet collection Feeding Fire (Spout, 2001) received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and her first full-length collection Andraste’s Hair (Salt, 2007) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Glen Dimplex New Writers Awards. Her second collection was Eliza and the Bear (Salt, 2009), and her most recent, Blood Child (Liverpool University Press, 2015). Rees has worked extensively as a local poet in the community and has a PhD from the University of Exeter in this practice. She often collaborates with other writers, musicians and artists and works to commission. She lives in Liverpool. You can read more about Eleanor’s book on the LUP website, on her own site, 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’s first three books are by three exciting voices: Sarah Corbett, Eleanor Rees, and Mona Arshi. Pavilion has already enjoyed considerable success, with Mona Arshi’s book, Small Hands, winning the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection at this year’s Forward Prizes. You can read more about the series on the Liverpool University Press website.

Razorshell Wreck on Barleycove Beach on the Eve of All Saints’ Day

October 5, 2015April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A small wreck is a large wreck when a species is in retreat,
undertow and wave-sets soothe and stress between slate hills:
the rise & fall, the artwork re-inscribed in sand which will
gradually wash away, the full weight of the Atlantic.

So attuned, so sensitive, so determined to pull themselves down –
foot anchored hydraulic pull to start again down down down –
razorshell feedertube sucking low tide sweet and sour
into the glasses-case body, enrapture, huddling organs

snug against a cutthroat world’s predators, the larger shifts
making small changes massive, prescribe low-tide second-sight,
test hope as St Jude’s day swell ripped the world apart, a mass
of brethren exposed to make detritus of selves, the soup of origins and excrescence sharply in bands of shifting light,
dozens scattered on this earthquake beach, this harbour wave jewel
where corpses cut bare feet to bone or sinew, ghouls and gods
make sense of spring water bottles and plastic ropes binding
‘best kept secrets’. So many starved here, and razorshells make
discrete sub-fences that will briefly hold the residue of Lisbon’s collapse,
a history divined in shell, its dead reflections, separations along
vaguely perfect faultlines, what fate saw from below the sand.

by John Kinsella and Alan Jenkins

News! On Friday 23 October, poets Sarah Corbett and Eleanor Rees will be visiting Oxford to read from their exciting new books in an event organized by the Poetry Centre. It will take place at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Jericho, and all are very welcome! More details can be found via Facebook.

The Adam Phillips seminars at Keble College continue. Seminars focus primarily on American poetry of the twentieth century, and at the meeting Phillips will introduce the material and lead the discussion. For more details about the series, and forthe link to the reading material, please visit: https://tinyurl.com/nbgwdwb The next seminar will be on Robert Hass’s ‘On Teaching Poetry’, and will take place at 4.30pm on Wednesday 21 October in the Pusey Room, Keble College. All are welcome.

Notes from Enitharmon Press:

John Kinsella’srecent works of poetry include Armour (Picador, 2011) and Jam Tree Gully (W.W. Norton, 2012). Picador published Sack in November, 2014. He is editor and the author of anthologies, works of criticism, fiction and poetry. He is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University.Alan Jenkins’s volumes of poetry include Harm, which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 1994, A Shorter Life (2005), Drunken Boats (2008), and Revenants (2013). He is Deputy Editor and Poetry Editor of the TimesLiterary Supplement. He is a Fellow of the RSL. You can read more about his collaboration with John Kinsella on the Enitharmon website.

‘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.

The Man From the Sea

September 28, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

they find him in a dinner suit of salt
and sand, his passport seaweed, an ensemble
of herring gulls behind him in the drizzle.

he says nothing, but lets the surging felt-
surf caper through the piano case
to grand surprise. The heavy epaulettes
of hands weigh on his shoulders: this
is his hour of fame, a time of tablets,

Autumn nights with nurses floating
like icebergs through the wards. In the clinic
garden the last leaves flutter
beneath the walls. From an old cabin,
where ivy rises, drifts the muted tinkle
of a piano. Some believe it is Chopin.

by Jan Wagner
translated by Iain Galbraith

On Friday 23 October, poets Sarah Corbett and Eleanor Rees will be visiting Oxford to read from their exciting new books in an event organized by the Poetry Centre. It will take place at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Jericho, and all are very welcome! More details can be found via Facebook.

‘The Man From the Sea’ is copyright © Jan Wagner, 2015. It is reprinted from Self-Portrait with a Swam of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015) by permission of Arc Publications

Notes from Arc Publications:

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).

In Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees, Wagner is a vigilant, yet playful, chronicler of the quotidian, his meticulous handling of image and sound forging a worldly, almost luminous palpability. Intensely curious, constantly attentive to novel or unanticipated possibilities afforded by traditional forms, Wagner’s poems celebrate what he has called ‘our steaming, glowing, odorous, noisy world’.

You can read a review of the collection by one of the Poetry Centre’s own interns, Inigo Purcell, on the Poetry Centre website.

Iain Galbraith is a prolific translator of German and Austrian poetry, while his own poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. A winner of the prestigious John Dryden Translation Prize, and editor of five anthologies of poetry, his recent translated books include a selection of W.G. Sebald’s poetry, Across the Land and the Water (2011). He is also a widely performed translator of British and Irish drama into German.

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.

The Rolling Stones

September 21, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

An unrestrainable storm’s energy,
a blues tornado building year by year,
smashing successive decades like stage-props
into a singular reality –

the music’s drive, and how Keith Richards loads
that power-line with such a laid-back style
he might be anywhere the drug dictates;
and now in high key the dervish explodes

frenetically, adopting a persona
for each volatile lyric expression,
a manically improvised Lucifer,
a lashingly exploitative ‘Gimme Shelter’,

a transsexual identity which dares
contain a crowd that’s like an exodus
come across country for the new ideal,
and with the red light on, it really scares.

Jagger’s psychopathic ‘Midnight Rambler’,
cued up to stick a knife right through the throat,
a pyrotechnical ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’,
no ostentation from the bass-player,

it’s all up front by a shared microphone,
and what was revolutionary is still
an ongoing assessment of our lives,
survival, altered consciousness, a tone

that challenges the way we live and think,
and devastates the old world, moves into
the centre of new chaos, while the pack
flail for the singer on the spotlit brink…

by Jeremy Reed

Some local poetry news: Mimi Khalvati, Giles Goodland, and the winners and commended poets in the 2015 Four Corners Poetry Competition will be reading in the Common Room, St Cross College, Oxford on Tuesday 13 October, 2015. The event will open at 5.30pm, with readings from 6-7pm. To attend, contact Ella Bedrock: ella.bedrock@stx.ox.ac.uk

In Voodoo Excess, Jeremy Reed charts in poetry and prose the astonishing career of the Rolling Stones from the band’s early days in 1962 to the 50th anniversary tour in 2012 and its extension in 2013. With great originality he examines why the Stones have been a musical and cultural phenomenon, and everything public and mythical, anecdotal and apocryphal about the larger-than-life individual band members. You can read more about the book on the Enitharmon website.

Called by the Independent ‘British poetry’s glam, spangly, shape-shifting answer to David Bowie’, Jeremy Reed’s poetry, fiction and performances are inimitable and utterly opposed to grey mainstream poetry. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. He has received numerous awards work has been translated abroad in numerous editions and more than a dozen languages. He is widely acknowledged as the most imaginatively gifted British poet of his generation. His Selected Poems were published by Penguin in 1987. You can watch Reed performing with The Ginger Light in his poem ‘Kit Marlowe’ here.

‘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.

Lemmeleht

September 14, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The moon was glowing
the forest darkening
the swing creaking
the pond shimmering

the lemmeleht
in the overgrown water
its blossom calls
a maiden

come from here
over the water
take me
and bear me

the lemmeleht
seemed to move
the pond did not
ripple

what will be given
in return
it knows how to make demands
the lemmeleht
the plant knows how to haggle
the dawn grass to reckon

the face of the maiden wilts
but the lemmeleht burns
side by side with a star
in the pond

the maiden pleads
the lemmeleht burns

promises to give
jewellery and silver beads
pendants and brooches
and from over the heart
a clasp
but the lemmeleht
stays silent
under its leaf
a frog
just croaks

she promises to give
her father’s plough
her brother’s horse
her sisters’s spinning wheel
her mother’s cows Maasik Lehik Lillik

and little Muu
and grandmother’s loom

the lemmeleht
doesn’t move
demands something else
it glows like day
it rings like a bell
the maiden pleads
and begs and

calls

no help to be found
anywhere

and quietly the lemmeleht says
                         promise me your home
                         your home promise me
                         nothing else
the lemmeleht stirred
the water rippled

and she promised her home

and the lemmeleht
was near her mouth
beneath her heart
and on her head
but her home was gone

the lake was left
the maiden
tore fescue from
her head
from beneath her heart
scraped the knowing plant
from her mouth
she struck the lemmeleht
the fescue didn’t argue any more
the lemmeleht lay still

her home was gone
the lake was left

a duck quacked
and a frog croaked

by Kauksi Ülle
translated by Ilmar Lehtpere and Mari Kalkun

News from the Centre: many thanks to everyone who entered our International Poetry Competition. The judging process has now begun, and our shortlist and winners will be announced in December!

On Monday 21 September from 4-5pm, Peter Hainsworth and David Robey will be discussing Dante in a free event at Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford. They will be giving a very short introduction to Dante and his work in the 750th anniversary year of his birth. Visit the website for more details.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Kauksi Ülle is a poet and cultural activist. She has become something of a symbolic figure, an icon of ethno-futurism, the focal point of an ebullient era with its own worldview, currents of literary life, identity issues, conflicts and impassioned debate. ‘Lemmeleht’ appears in the book Six Estonian Poets, in which the editor, Doris Kareva, presents us with the work of five highly individual poets of the younger generation together with that of the most influential figures of their parents’ generation. You can read more about the book on the Arc website.

IlmarLehtpere had a bilingual upbringing in Estonian and English. He is the translator of Kristiina Ehin’s The Drums of Silence (Oleander Press, Cambridge, 2007), which was awarded the Poetry Society Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation. His other translations of Kristiina Ehin’s work are Põletades pimedust -Burning the Darkness – An Dorchadas á Dhó (trilingual Estonian-English-Irish selected poems, Coiscéim, Dublin, 2009), A Priceless Nest(short stories, Oleander Press, Cambridge, 2009), Päevaseiskaja -South-Estonian Fairy Tales (Huma, Tallinn, 2009) and Noorkuuhommik- New Moon Morning (selected poems, Huma, Tallinn, 2007). He has also translated her play, A Life Without Feathers, and has already started working on her next collection of poems in English.

Read more about the work of the translators: Ilmar Lehtpere and Mari Kalkun.

Barleyfield Wind

August 3, 2015April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Midsummer wind,
thought across the mind:

a running hare,
invisible, a hare-shape –
gone – leaving the field motionless, supple,
greeny yellow. Ripple,
current, eddies,
whirlpool, a pattern created
and in one movement unmade . . .
Quiet then quick,
a country undiscovered, mapped, unknown.
It is all imagination:
pooling – running – streaming – a long, slow surge.
Then, barely a touch,
the whiskered heads
brushed by a breath.
And all the time,
burnishing every grain,
the sun brings to fruition:
a dry, brittle gold.

by Jeremy Hooker

The deadline for submissions to the Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Prize is 31 August. There are two categories: Open and English as a Second Language, and First Prize in each category is £1000. The competition will be judged by Bernard O’Donoghue and Hannah Lowe, and you can enter by visiting this page. Please do pass on details to friends and colleagues.

Local poets may be interested to learn that Back Room Poets in Oxford are offering a masterclass with George Szirtes on the afternoon of August 15th at the Friends Meeting House. If you are interested in submitting a poem which George Szirtes might discuss, please contact aekocsis@googlemail.com for more details.

Please note that the Weekly Poem will be taking a month’s break. We’ll be back in early September.

‘Barleyfield Wind’ is copyright © Jeremy Hooker, 2015. It is reprinted from Scattered Light (Enitharmon Press, 2015) by permission of Enitharmon Press. Notes from Enitharmon Press:

Jeremy Hooker’s new collection, Scattered Light, shows him producing some of his finest work – a variety of short, ‘light’ poems, longer poems, and sequences such as ‘Saltgrass Lane’ and ‘Hurst Castle’ which revisit his childhood terrain on the Hampshire coastline. The poems show him extending his thinking about powerful crosscurrents that constitute the ‘sacred’, and deepening his exploration of history embodied in landscape. You can read more about the collection on the Enitharmon website.

Jeremy Hooker was born in 1941. Poet, critic, teacher and broadcaster, he is currently Professor of English at the University of Glamorgan. He has published ten collections of poetry. His other books include Imagining Wales: a View of Modern Welsh Writing in English, and studies of David Jones and John Cowper Powys. He has edited writings by Alun Lewis, Frances Bellerby, Richard Jefferies, and Wilfred Owen. Gillian Clarke has described his work as ‘a deceptively readable poetry that leaves phrases and images in the mind as the best poems should’, whilst Poetry Review called it ‘original and very ambitious’. Follow Jeremy’s work on his website, and hear him read from his poems on the Poetry Archive.