F.G.

~ oxfordbrookesuni

And on the plasma screen these words appear:
If I am asked to represent World’s End,
I want to make this absolutely clear,
my one priority will be to spend
more money on my home… No, no, that’s wrong.
It’s true, but not what politicians say
in my time or in yours. Mine was a long
brown nosing into power, but I made my way
from Clerk of the Signet (you may well ask)
to Treasurer of the Navy, until – a piece of luck –
the Stuarts gave me Warwick Castle. Then Chancellor,
some time to write, and finally Lord Brooke.
The words, of course, that matter in the end
are Greville was Sir Philip Sidney’s friend.

by John Greening

The most recent episode of the Poetry Centre podcast is now available via the website and on iTunes. This release features a critical-creative dialogue between Terri Mullholland and Siân Thomas about issues raised by Siân’s poem ‘The Abandoned House’, a work inspired by a derelict building in The Weald, East Sussex.


‘F.G.’ is copyright © John Greening, 2013. It is reprinted from Knot (Worple Press, 2013) by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Born in Chiswick in 1954, John Greening has lived in Upper Egypt, New Jersey, Mannheim, Arbroath but chiefly in Huntingdonshire, where he teaches. He has published more than a dozen collections (including Hunts, Poems 1979-2009) and several critical studies – of Yeats, Ted Hughes, Hardy, Edward Thomas, First World War Poets and the Elizabethans. His most recent book is a guide to the art: Poetry Masterclass. A regular reviewer with the TLS and a judge for the Eric Gregory Awards, Greening has received the Bridport Prize, the TLS Centenary Prize and a Cholmondeley Award for his poetry. Based on the design of a seventeenth-century knot garden, Knot makes consort music with the poets of Elizabethan England. Sonnets and verse letters are woven around a journal of life in a twenty-first century writers’ retreat (Hawthornden Castle) and a prose allegory of Ben Jonson’s famous walk from London to Scotland to visit William Drummond. The collection concludes with a witty modern masque.

Read more about Knot from Worple’s website, and more about John Greening’s poetry from his own site. You can also follow him on Twitter. John Greening will be reading at various events and festivals around the country in July and August, and you can see these listed on the Worple site.

Worple Press was founded by Peter and Amanda Carpenter in 1997. Since then they have published a wide range of authors, including Iain Sinclair, Joseph Woods, Elizabeth Cook, Beverley Bie Brahic, Clive Wilmer and Kevin Jackson. They published the selected poems of the acclaimed American nature poet Peter Kane Dufault for the first time in the UK (Looking in All Directions); this was followed in 2007 by Kane Dufault’s To be in the same world. Peter Robinson’s The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems was the Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for Spring 2002. This impressive backlist was augmented in 2012 by three significant titles: Passio: Fourteen Poems by János Pilinszky from Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri; Riddance by Anthony Wilson; and the republication of William Hayward’s cult novel from 1964, It Never Gets Dark All Night. Over 2013 and 2014 new titles have included work from John Greening, Michael McKimm, Peter Robinson, Mary Woodward and Sally Flint. More information can be found on Worple Press’s website, Facebook page, and Twitter feed, and you can sign up for Worple’s mailing list by e-mailing: theworpleco@aol.com.

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 War Reporter Paul Watson and the Boys with the Bomblet

~ oxfordbrookesuni


A gang of shepherd boys minding their own
rib-caged cows. When a yellow can appears
in a dust cloud. Like soda or a sleeve
of tennis balls, clasped in a corona
of tabs known as The Spider. Casing scored
so as to better shatter in a blast
of stampeding shrapnel that will strip all
clothes and flay any naked skin, leaving
pulped, cauterized stumps. Tinkling like wind chimes
after the wetter thuds. The tiny chute
hangs limply from the lip. Designed to drift
silently, otherworldly, increasing
our scatter radius. Preset to detonate
at precise heights or times. Or with the thrum
of traffic, the plosives of speech. Tremors
of the lightest footfalls. Two boys running
off in search of a father. The one boy
holding the canister suggests, Maybe
we’ll find some food inside? The other one
slips his knife beneath the tab to find out
what’s inside The Spider.

by Dan O’Brien 

A reminder that as part of the MCS Arts Festival Oxford, Azfa Awad, Youth Ambassador for Poetry (a position co-sponsored by Oxford Brookes and Oxford City Council), will be reading in Oxford alongside the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, this Thursday 3 July from 7.30-9.30pm. For more details, visit the festival website.

This year’s Free Verse, a one-day book fair for poetry publishers to show their work and sell direct to the public, organized by this week’s publisher, CB editions, is taking place on 6 September. See below for more details.

‘The War Reporter Paul Watson and the Boys with the Bomblet’ is copyright © Dan O’Brien, 2013, and is reprinted from War Reporter (CB editions, 2013) by permission of CB editions.

Notes from CB editions:

Dan O’Brien is an American playwright and poet living in Los Angeles. His play The Body of an American was the inaugural winner of the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama, and was produced in London in January 2014. War Reporter – which won the 2013 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize – derives from a collaboration between the poet and the war reporter Paul Watson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1993 photograph of a dead American being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu and has since reported from the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

Read more from Dan O’Brien’s book on the CBe website, and find out why CBe decided to publish the book on its blog. You can also follow O’Brien’s work on his own website and via Twitter.

CB editions, founded in 2007, publishes poetry alongside short fiction and other writing, including work in translation. Its poetry titles have won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize three times (in 2009, 2011 and 2013), and have been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize.

In 2011 CBe inaugurated Free Verse, a one-day book fair for poetry publishers to show their work and sell direct to the public; the event was repeated in 2012 and 2013, with over 50 publishers taking part, and has become an annual event. The next fair will take place on 6 September at Conway Hall in London. Find out more about the publisher from the website, where you can also sign up to the CB editions mailing list, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook to keep up-to-date with its activities.

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.

Why poetry?

~ oxfordbrookesuni


To catch the cat’s
studied indifference,
her yawn and stretch in the sun.

To take what once was thought
and twice rejected
and refine it
until it is not what it was.

To recover the realm
between waking and sleep
where a dragon guards
the golden hoard

and a word marks the lizard’s dart
between is and
was.

Casual, effortless, elegant
to be the heron
climbing the air.

To give to the human order
a kinder face
a better shape.

To be and not
to be Hamlet beset
by slings and arrows.

To find a way back
to the bush stream
where small fish used to hang
in shafts of sunlight.

To get ahead of yourself
and accept the silence.

by CK Stead

As part of the MCS Arts Festival Oxford, Azfa Awad, Youth Ambassador for Poetry (a position co-sponsored by Oxford Brookes and Oxford City Council), will be reading in Oxford alongside the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, on Thursday 3 July from 7.30-9.30pm. For more details, visit the festival website.

‘Why poetry?’ by CK Stead is copyright © CK Stead, 2013, and is reprinted by permission of Arc Publications from the book The Yellow Buoy (Arc Publications, 2013).

Notes from Arc Publications:

CK Stead, poet, essayist and novelist, is only one of two writers to hold the Order of New Zealand. In The Yellow Buoy, Stead’s fifteenth collection of poetry, the writer journeys in time and space from Croatia and Colombia to Karekare and the Côte d’Azur; Catullus returns to receive plaudits, write to friends and read the world; and various other literary fellows appear in person, dream or conversation – Allen Curnow and Hugh Kawharu, Frank Sargeson and Barry Humphries, Robert Creeley and Katherine Mansfield.

You can read more about CK Stead on Arc’s page, where you can also read further samples of his work. Eight poems from Stead’s work, read by the poet himself, can also be heard on the Poetry Archive 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.

Speeches at an Eightieth Birthday

~ oxfordbrookesuni

If the dead could be summoned
to say what they thought of you,
they would be as reluctant
and evasive as in life.
No eloquence from a friend,
no measured words from a foe,
would counter your sense of faint
virtue, lacking solid proof.

But why expect of the dead
more than of the loud voices
in present praise and debate
of your accomplished manhood?
Fading under fine phrases,
you disappear in plain sight.

by Tony Connor

This Wednesday 18 June from 6-7pm at The Poetry Society, Betterton Street, London, Jenny Wong, PhD student at the Department of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes, presents a reading by Chinese poets Jiang Tao and Ming Di. The event is free to attend. Visit the Poetry Society website for more details.

‘Speeches at an Eightieth Birthday’ is copyright © Tony Connor, 2013. It is reprinted by permission of Anvil Press from The Empty Air, New Poems 2006-2012 (Anvil Press, 2013).

Notes from Anvil Press:

Tony Connor’s tenth collection is framed by military encounters. In the first poem a young man grapples with a malfunctioning machine-gun, while the author grapples with the poem he is making from this event, memory or fantasy. In the surrealistic sequence that ends the book, a strange army invades a country collapsing into societal and semantic dissolution. Connor’s abiding preoccupations continue into his eighties:his own life and the lives around him, passing time and its traps, poetry and its transfiguration of the commonplace. Yet all is not solemn as Connor extends his range into comic verse and dramatic dialogue. His new poems mix fantasy and reality in unexpected ways, always with the unobtrusive hand of a skilled craftsman. You can read further selections from the new book on the Anvil website, and more about Tony Connor from the Academy of American Poets site.

Since 1971 Tony Connor has lived partly in Middletown, Connecticut where he was a professor of English at Wesleyan University. He spends the summers in London. He left school at fourteen and worked in Manchester as a textile designer for many years.

Anvil Press, founded in 1968, is based in Greenwich, south-east London, in a building off Royal Hill that has been used at various points in its 150-year history as a dance-hall and a printing works. Anvil grew out of a poetry magazine which Peter Jay ran as a student in Oxford and retains its small company ethos. Visit Anvil’s website here, where you can sign up to their mailing list to find out about new publications and events.

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.

Puddle

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Rain-junk.
Sky-litter
Some May mornings
Atlantic storm-horses
clatter this way,
shedding their iron shoes
in potholes and ruts,
shoes that melt
into steel-grey puddles
then settle and set
into cloudless mirrors
by noon.

The shy deer
of the daytime moon
comes to sip from the rim.
But the sun
likes the look of itself,
stares all afternoon,
its hard eye
lifting the sheen
from the glass,
turning the glaze
to rust.
Then we don’t see things
for dust.

by Simon Armitage

On Wednesday 18 June from 6-7pm at The Poetry Society, Betterton Street, London, Jenny Wong, PhD student at the Department of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes, presents a reading by Chinese poets Jiang Tao and Ming Di. The event is free to attend. Visit thePoetry Society website for more details.

The Dermot Healy Poetry Competition has just been launched by the Five Glens Arts Festival and is now open for submissions. The deadline for entries is 15th July 2014. The prize money is 1,000 euro, and shortlisted entrants will beinvited to read their work at the festival. To find out how to enter, visit the Five Glens website.

‘Puddle’ is copyright © Simon Armitage, 2013, and reprinted from his book Stanza Stones (2013) by permission of Enitharmon Books.

Notes from Enitharmon

Simon Armitage lives in Yorkshire, has taught at universities in this country and the United States, and is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield. He has published nine full-length collections of poetry, including Selected Poems and Seeing Stars, as well as notable translations of medieval verse such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He has published two novels and three works of non-fiction; Walking Home – the prose account of his walk along the Pennine Way as a latter-day troubadour was a Sunday Times bestseller. Armitage also writes extensively for radio, television and film, is a regular broadcaster and presenter with the BBC, is the lyricist and singer with the band the Scaremongers, and has written several theatre pieces including dramatisations of both the Odyssey and the Iliad. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, most recently the Keats-Shelley Prize and the Cholmondeley Award, and in 2010 was honoured with the CBE for services to poetry. You can read more about Armitage’s work on his website.

The newly drawn Stanza Stones Trail runs through forty-seven miles of the Pennine region, some of the most strikingly varied landscape in the world. The terrain bears the deep scars of industrial exploitation, as well as those less obvious: the signs left by a hundred local generations are carved into the region’s abounding rocks. Simon Armitage was born and raised here, in the village of Marsden, and in 2012 he was commissioned through the Ilkley Literature Festival to write site-specific poetry. Armitage composed six new poems on his Pennine walks and, with the help of local expert Tom Lonsdale and letter-carver Pip Hall, found extraordinary, secluded sites and saw his words carved into stone. This book is a record of that journey, containing the poems and the accounts of Lonsdale and Hall. Read more about it on the Enitharmon website.

The many layers of stone and sediment found beneath the surface of the rock reflect the drama of the landscape itself. Covered in decades of industrial soot and grime, the colours released by the carver’s tools will likely never return to shades of black and grey, but become a small reminder of the changes that our natural environment undergoes, and the marks, small and large, of humankind. You can learn more about the Stanza Stones Project, and watch a short film about it, on the Ilkley Literature Festival website, and listen to Simon Armitage discussing the book with Guardian Books Editor Claire Armitstead on the Guardian’s 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.

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.

Full Moon at Little White Alice

~ oxfordbrookesuni


In spite of hats, coats and candles, we’re cold and fear
is in the frosty air: for our own health, that of others,
for the planet, our families, businesses and love affairs,
paintings or projects. We’re afraid of moving and changing,

the process by which butterflies leave the chrysalis,
a new-born baby first cries, tearing open her lungs.
Stagnating’s not an option.  Time taunts us: the ticking clock
mocking our bodies, no longer young, a slow decoupling

from our sister moon. We walk in silent meditation round
the high, granite-strewn pool, seeing, as we step with care,
a frill of thin ice form in the reeds along the edge, watch,
amazed, as Rosie suddenly sheds all of her clothes. She dives,

spine curved in a crescent, breaks the black water, sending
courage, like a scatter of stars, up into the still January air.

by Victoria Field

The Weekly Poem is off on holiday for a couple of weeks! The Poetry Centre wishes you a very good start to the summer, and thanks you for reading. The poems will begin again on 9 June.

‘Full Moon at Little White Alice’ is copyright © Victoria Field, 2012. It was first published in Quadrant (Australia) in the January-February 2012 issue, and is collected in The Lost Boys  by Victoria Field, published by Waterloo Press in 2013, and reprinted by permission of  Waterloo Press.

Notes from Waterloo Press

Note: Little White Alice is a granite-quarrying area of Cornwall.

The Lost Boys enlarges Victoria Field’s scope and her poetics with freshness and ambition, whilst drenching her growing readership with the light of place, person and belief. Penelope Shuttle writes: ‘Less pessimistic than R.S. Thomas, T.S. Eliot or Elizabeth Jennings, Victoria Field is that rara avis, the religious poet. Her spiritual realities are firmly anchored in contemporary reality. Her poems illuminate the heart, and shine with richness of compassion and understanding of human predicament and travail.’

Victoria Field is a writer and poetry therapist, now living and working in Canterbury, Kent after many years in Cornwall. The Lost Boys is her third full collection of poetry. She is a previous writer-in-residence at Truro Cathedral and Associate Artist at Hall for Cornwall who produced two of her plays. Her new play, BENSON was showcased at The Marlowe Theatre Canterbury in April 2014. You can read more about her work on her blog, and read further samples of her work on the Waterloo website.

Waterloo Press offers readers an eclectic list of the most stimulating poetry from the UK and abroad. We promote what’s good of its kind, finding a commonality amongst the poets we publish. Our beautifully designed books range from lost modernist classics, translations and vibrant collections by the best British poets around. Our translation list is growing to 25% of our output. Waterloo Press brings radical and marginalised voices to the fore, mirroring their aesthetics in outstanding book design, including dust jackets; large font; and original artwork. With its growing list, Waterloo Press promotes at last a permeable membrane between contemporary schools, quite apart from archiving a few sacred vessels for good. WP fosters a poetics based on innovation with respect for craft, bloody-mindedness and as founder Sonja Ctvrtecka put it: ‘An elegant unstuffiness – a seagull perched on a Porsche.’ Now the major poetry publisher of the south-east, we also believe strongly in a community of like-minded independent presses. We’ve become a land.

Find out more about Waterloo Press via  its website, or ‘like’ the publisher on  Facebook.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Next to Nothing

~ oxfordbrookesuni


Through a watery light of after-rain
this bed, its personal history,
brought back by container ship from Japan
shows in ruffled covers
lines that say love spent the night here,
its indentations, your body’s traces.

This commonplace bed with everyday sheets,
its rumples and creases
caused by the nightmare disturbances,
forms a tableau of shadowy folds
where by contrast time
tries to recover us, in all senses.

Yet still this unmade double bed
while you are away
preserves outlines where your body lay,
reminding me what lovers
do in their proximity
although I’m next to nothing now.

by Peter Robinson

Are you a Brookes member of staff or student? Do you have a favourite poem? The Poetry Centre invites you to share your love of poetry with the community in our exciting new project for National Poetry Day. If chosen to participate, you will be filmed reading your favourite poem and sharing why it is memorable to you. Filming will take place in September 2014 and videos will be posted to the Poetry Centre website via the Oxford Brookes YouTube channel for National Poetry Day on 2 October. If you wish to participate, all you need to do is send an e-mail to favouritepoem@gmail.com including your name, your role at Brookes (student or member of staff), the title and author of your favourite poem, and a brief description of the poem’s significance to you, by this Friday 16 May, 2014. No original poems, please!

On Monday 26 May, join an impressive line-up of writers (Lydia Mcpherson, Ian House, Brookes PhD candidate Jennifer Wong, Alyson Hallett, Barbara Marsh, Victoria Field, Jackie Wills, and special guest Louis de Bernières) at a special Coffeehouse Poetry reading. The event, which takes place from 8-10 pm, is hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe at the Troubadour Cafe, 263-267 Old Brompton Road, Earl’s Court, London SW5 9JA. Tickets are £8 (£7 concs). For more details, visit the Coffee House Poetry website.

‘Next to Nothing’ is copyright © Peter Robinson, 2013. It is reprinted from Like the Living End (Worple Press, 2013) by permission of Worple Press.




Notes from Worple Press:

Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953, and grew up mainly in Liverpool. His many volumes of poetry include a Selected Poems (2003), Ghost Characters (2006), and The Look of Goodbye (2008). He was awarded the Cheltenham Prize for This Other Life (1988). Both The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems (2002) and The Returning Sky (2012) were recommendations of the Poetry Book Society. A translator of poetry, mainly from the Italian, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni (with Marcus Perryman) appeared in 2006 and paperback in 2013. He received the John Florio Prize for The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (2007) in 2008. Other publications include his aphorisms, Spirits of the Stair (2009), four volumes of literary criticism, the most recent being Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible (2010), various edited collections and anthologies, such as The Complete Poems, Translations & Selected Prose of Bernard Spencer (2011) and The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2013). A collection of essays on his work, The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, edited by Adam Piette and Katy Price, appeared in 2007. The poetry editor for Two Rivers Press, he is Professor of English and American Literature, and currently Head of Department, at the University of Reading. You can read more about the book on Worple’s dedicated page, and visit Peter Robinson’s own website.

Worple Press was founded by Peter and Amanda Carpenter in 1997. Since then they have published a wide range of authors, including Iain Sinclair, Joseph Woods, Elizabeth Cook, Beverley Bie Brahic, Clive Wilmer and Kevin Jackson. They published the selected poems of the acclaimed American nature poet Peter Kane Dufault for the first time in the UK (Looking in All Directions); this was followed in 2007 by Kane Dufault’s To be in the same world. Peter Robinson’s The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems was the Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for Spring 2002. This impressive backlist was augmented in 2012 by three significant titles: Passio: Fourteen Poems by Janos Pilinszky from Clive Wilmer and George Gomori; Riddance by Anthony Wilson; and the republication of William Hayward’s cult novel from 1964, It Never Gets Dark All Night. Over 2013 and 2014 new titles have included work from John Greening, Michael McKimm, Peter Robinson, Mary Woodward and Sally Flint. More information can be found on Worple Press’s website, Facebook page, and Twitter feed, and you can sign up for Worple’s mailing list by e-mailing:  theworpleco@aol.com.

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 Shipwrecked House II

~ oxfordbrookesuni

After Frank O’Hara

When waves were far enough away
and the pumpkin seeds still as amber
in the treasure chest, the calls tumblingly
came to crook the paintings, writings, all.

Now your voice falls like a coin to the ocean’s floor
and the house is dragged apart by the fractures
of your smiles – the thought of its absence echoes
unbelievably – our breath opens like a stiff drawer.

You are everywhere and nowhere, you are
the unfinished cup of tea and its straw,
dipped like a paintbrush. I want to keep
the yoghurts that went out of date yesterday.

by Claire Trévien

Near Oxford this week? Come along to OutBurst, the Oxford Brookes Festival at Pegasus, which runs from Tuesday to Saturday. Showcasing cutting-edge research from across the university, the festival features a fantastic range of events and activities for all ages: hear some of Oxford’s best young writers in an event hosted by Kate Clanchy; explore the connections between technology and modernist literature with Eric White; join English PEN for an evening about how publishing and human rights campaigns can join forces; hear the results of a collaboration between the Poetry Centre and the Archway Foundation about mental health; and write a haiku inspired by spring and display it in the Pegasus garden. Visit the website to learn more about these and the many other events this week, and book tickets via the Pegasus Box Office on 01865 812150 (11-4pm).

‘The Shipwrecked House II’ is copyright © Claire Trévien, 2013. It is reprinted by permission of Penned in the Margins from The Shipwrecked House  (Penned in the Margins, 2013). 

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

‘The Shipwrecked House II’ is from Claire Trévien’s debut collection of the same name, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Trévien’s is a surreal vision, steeped in myth and music, in which everything is alive and – like the sea itself – constantly shifting form. You can read more about the collection on the Penned in the Margins website, and hear Claire discuss her work in a Poetry Centre podcast. You can also follow her via her website or on Twitter.

Penned in the Margins is an independent publisher and live literature producer specialising in poetry and based in East London. Founded in 2004, the company has produced numerous literature and performance events, toured several successful live literature shows, published over twenty-five books, and continues to run innovative poetry, arts and performance projects in the capital and beyond.

Their recent anthology, Adventures in Form, was awarded a Special Commendation by the Poetry Book Society and was chosen as one of 50 Best Summer Reads by The Independent. You can visit the Penned in the Margins website  here to sign up to the mailing list, and follow the publisher on  Facebook and  Twitter. 

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

The North Side

~ oxfordbrookesuni


I took a job at the Arnold Grill,
topping off drafts with a paddle
for the St Johnsbury truckers.

Tuesday nights my father came in
to buy a shot of muscatel
and nurse it in a far booth
beside a small jukebox
which he plied with quarters.

He was dead so the smoke
and obscenities did not bother him.

At three a.m. I began tallying my tips –
a fortune in Canadian pennies.

Once, I confronted him:
Why do you keep coming?
Can’t you rest? And why Tuesday?

He was hurt. He averted his fine eyes
and joined a conversation
about Billy Martin –

had he ruined Vida Blue?
A waitress laughed –  apparently
my father knew nothing of the forkball –
and next Tuesday he did not come.

No one missed him.
The pool players cleaned the table,
rack after rack, adjusting the score
with beads on a string in midair,

the dart players paused, with pursed lips,
pushing the feathers through air
as if they had just found an opening,

but my father had not returned,
not even as a ghost, not even
as a tremor in a bettor’s hand.

I locked the iron door at first light,
lowered the steel shutters,
clicked the seven padlocks,
and instead of my father,
to whom I’d spoken all my life
with bitterness, with sarcasm,

I spoke to that uncertain moment
between false dawn and dawn
when the traffic roars north,
just streaks of trapped light,
lamps go out in the charity ward,
and the tenements light up,
the highest floors first:

Why can’t you rest, I said.
by D. Nurkse

Two important announcements! First, to all Brookes staff and students: do you have a favourite poem? The Poetry Centre invites you to share your love of poetry with the community in our exciting new project for National Poetry Day. If chosen to participate, you will be filmed reading your favourite poem and sharing why it is memorable to you. Filming will take place in September 2014 and videos will be posted to the Poetry Centre website via the Oxford Brookes YouTube channel for National Poetry Day on 2 October. If you wish to participate, all you need to do is send an e-mail to favouritepoem@gmail.com including your name, your role at Brookes (student or member of staff), the title and author of your favourite poem, and a brief description of the poem’s significance to you, by Friday 16 May, 2014. No original poems, please!

Secondly, there are a number of poetry and creative writing events coming up at this year’s OutBurst Festival (6-10 May). OutBurst showcases cutting-edge research and expertise from across the university in a variety of stimulating and fun events for students, staff, and the local community, including installations, lectures, workshops, exhibitions, and discussions for all ages. Find out more from the website, via Facebook, or on Twitter, and book your tickets now!

‘The North Side’ is copyright © D. Nurkse, 2012, and is reprinted from A Night in Brooklyn (CB editions, 2013) by permission of CB editions.

Notes from CB editions:

D. Nurkse lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is a former poet laureate of that borough. His parents fled Nazi Europe during World War Two. His Voices over Water, published by CBe in 2011, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. He has also written on human rights issues and worked with Amnesty International. You can read further selections from A Night in Brooklyn on the CB editions website.

CB editions, founded in 2007, publishes poetry alongside short fiction and other writing, including work in translation. Its poetry titles have won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize three times (in 2009, 2011 and 2013), and have been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize.

In 2011 CBe inaugurated Free Verse, a one-day book fair for poetry publishers to show their work and sell direct to the public; the event was repeated in 2012 and 2013, with over 50 publishers taking part, and has become an annual event. The next fair will take place on 6 September at Conway Hall in London. Find out more about the publisher from the website, where you can also sign up to the CB editions mailing list, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook to keep up-to-date with its activities.

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.

what comes to mind is meadow

~ oxfordbrookesuni

nasuwa się łąka, łąka łąk ta jedna na starość

przywykam do mijania twarzy

grobek w piasku, kwiatki krzyżyk „muszę zobaczyć kto
tam czy mewa ryba nic”, za falę będzie po nim

morza mam tyle ile przy nim stoję, nie pilnowane
rozpływa się w szare nie wiem

what comes to mind is meadow the meadow of meadows

the one for my old age

slowly I’m getting used to the passage of faces

a small grave in the sand a small cross and some flowers
‘I need to see who it is, seagull fish nothing’ in a wave
it’ll be gone

sea that much of it as I stand on its shore unattended it
spills slurs into the grey I don’t know

by Krystyna Miłobędzka, translated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese

Owing to essential maintenance work, the Poetry Centre website will not be available on Monday 21 and Tuesday 22 April, and so this week’s poem is being distributed early. Happy Easter to all our readers!

News from the Centre: for the first time since its establishment, Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre has established a formal link with another academic centre dedicated to the study of poetry. In March 2014 Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre entered into a partnership with the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies, which is based at Mater Dei Institute, Dublin City University, and is under the direction of Dr Michael Hinds. The link will raise the international profile of Brookes’ Poetry Centre, and facilitate collaborations based on existing and emerging research areas at both centres. Learn more about the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies at the Centre’s website.

‘what comes to mind is meadow’ by Krystyna Miłobędzka is copyright © Krystyna Miłobędzka, 2013, and translated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese. It is reprinted by permission of Arc Publications from the book  Nothing More , which is introduced by Robert Minhinnick, and is part of Arc’s Visible Poets series, edited by Jean Boase-Beier (Arc Publications, 2013).

Notes from Arc Publications:

Krystyna Miłobędzka was born in Margonin, Poland, in 1932. She is an author of twelve books of poetry. Her ‘collected’ appeared in 2006 and in 2010. Recipient of numerous awards, she has been nominated for the NIKE Prize in 2006 and won the Silesius Award in 2009, and again in 2013 for Lifetime Achievement. 

Nothing More crystallizes relationships between people from erotic engagements to the bond between mother and child. These are poems rooted in the earth and body, beginning in a physical experience that expands into philosophical questioning. They are not polite, they do not hide their imperfections. They reveal an immediacy of expression. Each text reveals itself seemingly uncontrolled, an unspecified thought: a sentence broken off, a sudden mental leap, an ellipsis, a slip of the tongue.

You can read further poems from Nothing More on Arc’s website, and a short essay by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese about her translations of Miłobędzka’s work on the Voltage Poetry blog.

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.