Sweets

~ oxfordbrookesuni

After dark she handed round the confectionery
and the rustle of the papers excited me.
As well as the comforting chocolate colours
there were staring greens, lumps of grainy yellow
and white fondant homunculi, whose feet
were the first items to be bitten off.
I would nibble my way up through the body,
thinking about the organs I’d consumed
and which had yet to come. The head when reached
was crunched between my remorseless milk teeth.

Now there’s unwelcome knocking at the door
and parents’ voices in the social mode.
No, I will not come home! This is my home –
from now on and forever. I have left you
and shall be colonising this chaise longue,
where Phyllis sits, warm thigh pressed against mine,
biting into dusted Turkish delight
with regular little ivory teeth
and squeezing the pieces against her palate
with a pink, unspeakably catlike tongue.

by Fergus Allen

If you are in Oxford or visiting the city soon, and haven’t yet seen the exhibition Where We Begin to Look. Landscape and Poetry, there is still time! Where We Begin to Look is a collaborative exhibition by the artist Zoe Benbow and the poet, Deryn Rees-Jones, and is presented by the Poetry Society and Small World Theatre, Ceredigion. It will be at the Glass Tank at Oxford Brookes until 5 November, and you can find out more about it on the Brookes web site.

‘Sweets’ is copyright © Fergus Allen, 2010. It is reprinted from  Before Troy  by permission of CB editions.

Fergus Allen is 92 years old. Educated in Ireland, he moved to England during the Second World War and ended his professional career as First Civil Service Commissioner. Following retirement he has published collections with Faber and Dedalus Press as well as CBe. Writing from a lifetime of rich experience, Fergus Allen offers poems of precision and fine observation, stripped of illusion yet deeply human in their affections and glancing wit. The confusions of abroad, of childhood and memory, of love and sex and identity, are rendered in  Before Troy  with a bracing clarity. You can hear Fergus Allen reading from his poems at the Poetry Archive.

CB editions publishes no more than six books a year, mainly poetry and short fiction and including work in translation. Since 2008 its poetry titles have twice won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and have been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize three times. In 2011 CBe put on  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 September 2012 and this year, with over 50 publishers taking part. 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.

Holes

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I pressed the button. No-one came. The police could not find me in
the dark. They were also afraid of death… it might come for them
instead. They waited behind a screen of trees, for the moon to
uncover itself, silver the edges of their sirens, their dark cars. The
pale pebbles in the driveway, left to imagine the river that used to
wet them-they must tire of always staring up, sightless and at the
mercy of everything. The police step on them. They creep only so
close, but no closer. My son is dead on the ground. Someone close
his eyes. But I am ignored in this as I have been with so many other
things. His blood is cold now, blackening, drying up, stiffening the
fabric of his jacket, soaking into the soil. There are holes in him I
know nothing about, nothing to do with the boy I delivered to the
world, my gift, small and pure. The dark is blue and cold. The trees
conceal susurrations in their high skirts, branches uplifted like arms,
wailing whispers… Black cars, old scars, my son’s open mouth,
empty shotgun shells whistling smoke white dancing up and out

by Ivy Alvarez

There is an exciting multi-poet reading taking place at the Jericho Tavern on Walton Street in Oxford tomorrow (Tuesday 22nd October). The evening will feature Fiona Sampson (former associate of the Poetry Centre), Patrick McGuinness, Jenny Lewis, and Claire Trévien, who featured in a recentPoetry Centre podcast. Tickets cost £5/£4 on the door, doors and bar open 6pm, and you are advised to arrive early! You can find more details about the event from thewebsite of Gareth Prior, who is the organizer of the reading.

‘Holes’ is copyright © Ivy Alvarez, 2013. It is reprinted from Disturbance, published by Seren Books in 2013.

Notes from Seren: 

Ivy Alvarez is the author of Mortal (Red Morning Press, USA, 2006), her first poetry collection. Her poems appear in anthologies, journals and new media in many countries, including Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, Roundyhouse and Red Poets, as well as Best Australian Poems (2009), A Face to Meet the Faces (University of Akron Press, 2012), The Guardian (online, 2012), Prairie Schooner (US, 2012) and Junctures (NZ, 2010), with individual poems translated into Russian, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. A MacDowell and Hawthornden Fellow thrice-shortlisted for Best Poem by fourW (Australia), both Literature Wales and the Australia Council for the Arts awarded grants towards the writing of her second collection, Disturbance, which was published this month. Born in the Philippines and raised in Australia, she became a British citizen in 2010 after living in Cardiff, Wales since 2004. Disturbance is a book-length long poem, in multiple voices, that relates the devastating consequences of a true-life case of domestic violence that leads to murder. Writing about her first collection, Denise Duhamel commented that ‘Alvarez is an ambitious poet who challenges herself and her readers, while exploring the complexities of families through persona.’ You can read further extracts from Disturbance on the Seren website, and follow her work via her website or on Twitter: @IvyAlvarez.

Seren Books (‘Seren’ means ‘star’ in Welsh) is based in Bridgend, South Wales. Originally conceived by Cary Archard and Dannie Abse as an offshoot of Poetry Walesmagazine in the latter’s garage in Ogmore-by-Sea in the early 80s, under Managing Editor Mick Felton the press has gone from strength to strength and has published a wide range of titles including fiction (which under Editor Penny Thomas has seen the Booker-nominated novel by Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days, and an acclaimed novella series based on the medieval Welsh tales from the Mabinogion) and non-fiction (including literary criticism such as the new John Redmond title Poetry and Privacy, as well as sumptuous art books like the collaboration between photographer David Hurn and poet John Fuller, Writing the Picture). Seren’s poetry list, edited by Amy Wack since the early 90s, has produced T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated titles by Deryn Rees-Jones and Pascale Petit, Costa winner John Haynes, and a large list of Forward Prize winners and nominees, as well as continuing to publishing classic Welsh writers. Most recently, Seren has also added Irish and American writers to its list.

For more details about Seren, visit the publisher’s website, where there is a blog about Seren’s news and events. You can also find Seren on Facebook, on Twitter, and on YouTube, where there are videos of a number of poets reading from their work.

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.

John Betjeman at Trebetherick

~ oxfordbrookesuni

A mile of sunny, empty sand away
A boy sits by the surf and clasps his knees.
‘Don’t care. Don’t care. Don’t care,’ the breakers say;
A mile of sunny, empty sand away;
Joan, Tom, Ralph, Alistair and Phoebe play,
But Biddy whispers to the foam-flecked breeze,
‘We’re sorry, sorry, sorry. Come back please.’
A mile of sunny, empty sand away
A boy sits by the surf and clasps his knees.

Red Admirals basking with their wings apart;
Up on the links it’s been like this all week.
Plus fours and baggy caps look very smart:
(Red Admirals basking with their wings apart)
As serious golfers make an early start;
The niblick and the mashie and the cleek
Where light and dappled shade play hide-and-seek.
Red admirals basking with their wings apart
Up on the links. It’s been like this all week.

Then the cool silence of St Enodoc,
Her spire bent like a crooked witch’s hat,
A grave, a stile, a dandelion clock
Then the cool silence of St Enodoc
A clergyman attends his little flock:
The Psalms, the Lesson, the Magnificat,
The Creed, the Prayers, the Anthem, all of that
In the cool silence of St Enodoc,
Her spire bent like a crooked witch’s hat.

by John Whitworth

The Wantage (not just) Betjeman Festival gets underway this week, and the programme for Sunday 20 October features a number of poetry events, including readings from former Poetry Centre Fellow Fiona Sampson (some of whose poems you can read on the Poetry Centre site); an event entitled Now as Then: Mesopotamia-Iraq, which includes work by British poet Jenny Lewis and Iraqi poet Adnan al Sayegh to mark the 10th anniversary of the 2003 UK/US invasion of Iraq; and a collaboration between Peter Wyton, former Poet Laureate of Gloucestershire, and Cheltenham Poetry Festival Co-Director Robin Gilbert, celebrating history in verse. In the evening, there will be a poetry slam. You can find out more about the Festival and book tickets for it via the Festival website.

If you are a poet yourself, you may be interested in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize, the winner of which receives £2500. The judges this year are Deryn Rees-Jones and George Szirtes, and the deadline for entries is Monday 21 October. More details and the rules are to be found on the Coffee-House Poetry site.

‘John Betjeman at Trebetherick’ is copyright © John Whitworth, 2012, and reprinted from his book Girlie Gangs, published by Enitharmon Books in 2012.

Notes from Enitharmon:

The first line of each verse of ‘John Betjeman at Trebetherick’ is from Betjeman’s poem ‘Sunday Afternoon Service in St Enodoc’s Church, Cornwall’. Cornwall was, unsurprisingly, the first of the Guides to English Counties he edited and in some cases, including this one, wrote for the Shell Oil Company. Names in the first stanza are of children he knew from holidays at Trebetherick, Biddy [Walsham] not quite the first of his freckled, boyish blondes.

John Whitworth has published nine books of poems, edited two Faber anthologies and written a book on writing verse. His work has appeared in Poetry Review, the TLS, London Magazine and the Spectator among many others. He has been awarded the Cholmondeley Prize and The Silver Wyvern, Poetry on the Lake. You can read more by John Whitworth at the poetry pf site.

Enitharmon Press takes its name from a William Blake character who represents spiritual beauty and poetic inspiration. Founded in 1967 with an emphasis on independence and quality, Enitharmon has been associated with such figures as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Kathleen Raine. Enitharmon also commissions internationally renowned collaborations between artists, including Gilbert & George, and poets, including Seamus Heaney, under the Enitharmon Editions imprint. You can sign up to the publisher’s 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.

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.

Wingprint

~ oxfordbrookesuni

the colour of power hanging in the air
                      is a word for sun on warm stone
made transparent

as sky and trees
           repeat leaves in flame
                      on the other side a flight path

where finches throw their outlines
                      wings etch themselves on windows

in the stun of what stops them
an identified span
of feather grease and dust

                                            a curve of passageways
glazed over a bird
                      flies in
                                 lost in exits
           and entrances                      a tongue silent
                      behind a mouth that moves through glass

when the door is locked it is alarmed
                                 somewhere between G4 and E7
or what I know and and how it’s different from X

a restless wish for    what can’t be googled
           and if so is it knowledge
                                            or the lost keys
that apple F won’t retrieve

by Zoë Skoulding

The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre warmly invites you to attend the opening of the exhibition Where We Begin to Look: Landscape and Poetry on Friday 11 October at 6.30pm in the Glass Tank, Abercrombie Building, Oxford Brookes University. Where We Begin to Look is a collaborative exhibition by the artist Zoe Benbow and the poet, Deryn Rees-Jones, and is presented by the Poetry Society and Small World Theatre, Ceredigion. The opening event will feature a discussion about the exhibition by Benbow and Rees-Jones, and readings by Rees-Jones and Sarah Corbett, whose work appears in the show. You can find out more on the Brookes website. If you would like to attend the opening, please reply to this message with your details. The exhibition runs until 5 November and is open to all.

‘Wingprint’ is copyright © Zoë Skoulding, 2013. It is reprinted from The Museum of Disappearing Sounds, published by Seren Books in 2013.

Notes from Seren: 

Zoë Skoulding‘s previous collections of poems include Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008), and The Mirror Trade (Seren, 2004). Her work as a poet also encompasses criticism, translation and cross-media performance; she has been involved in several projects combining poetry with music or experimental soundscape, particularly as a member of Parking Non-Stop. She lives in north Wales, where she is Senior Lecturer in the School of English at Bangor University and Editor of the international quarterly Poetry Wales. You can follow Zoë’s work via her website or on Twitter.

Seren Books (‘Seren’ means ‘star’ in Welsh) is based in Bridgend, South Wales. Originally conceived by Cary Archard and Dannie Abse as an offshoot of Poetry Wales magazine in the latter’s garage in Ogmore-by-Sea in the early 80s, under Managing Editor Mick Felton the press has gone from strength to strength and has published a wide range of titles including fiction (which under Editor Penny Thomas has seen the Booker-nominated novel by Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days, and an acclaimed novella series based on the medieval Welsh tales from the Mabinogion) and non-fiction (including literary criticism such as the new John Redmond title Poetry and Privacy, as well as sumptuous art books like the collaboration between photographer David Hurn and poet John Fuller, Writing the Picture). Seren’s poetry list, edited by Amy Wack since the early 90s, has produced T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated titles by Deryn Rees-Jones and Pascale Petit, Costa winner John Haynes, and a large list of Forward Prize winners and nominees, as well as continuing to publishing classic Welsh writers. Most recently, Seren has also added Irish and American writers to its list.

For more details about Seren, visit the publisher’s website, where there is a blog about Seren’s news and events. You can also find Seren on Facebook, on Twitter, and on YouTube, where there are videos of a number of poets reading from their work.

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.

Putting on my shoes

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I am going to be sociable, I need
an intermediary between the planet and my own weight.
I lean my head towards my feet; I love and serve myself.
A rapid mechanical operation.
For four or five seconds
my brain engulfed with blood
and shut off from the universe
reformulates some fundamental notions.
Its conclusions are wiped out when I sit up.
I surface again, tired,
but the world hasn’t changed one iota.
Why not carry on, as a drowned man? Something
might happen.
Every morning my shoes grant me dizziness
and a sudden secret opportunity.

by Joaquín Giannuzzi

This year’s Oxford Brookes Annual Creative Writing lecture will be given by Mark Watson on Wednesday 9 October at 6pm. The novelist and comedian will be combining two strands of his rich and varied career in an evening of ‘bookomedy’, and the event is open to all. To book a place, visit the Brookes website.

This translation of ‘Putting on my shoes’ is copyright © Richard Gwyn, 2012. It is reprinted from A Complicated Mammal by permission of CB editions.

Notes from CB editions:

Joaquín Giannuzzi was born in 1924 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and died in 2004. His ten collections of poetry, written while working as a professional journalist, established his reputation as one of the most admired and influential Spanish-language poets of his time.  You can read further excerpts from the collection on the CB editions website. The translator Richard Gwyn has published several collections of his own poetry, two novels and a memoir, The Vagabond’s Breakfast (2011), winner of the 2012 Wales Book of the Year in the creative non-fiction category, as well as books on illness, language and the body. He is Director of the MA in Creative Writing at Cardiff University.

CB editions publishes no more than six books a year, mainly poetry and short fiction and including work in translation. Since 2008 its poetry titles have twice won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and have been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize three times. In 2011 CBe put on 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 September 2012 and this year, with over 50 publishers taking part. 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.

The Sum of Mum

~ oxfordbrookesuni

she begins to calculate:

that’s 3 times 9 months
that’s 3 times (approximately 30 days times 9)
which is really 3 sons times 270 days
equals 810 days of combined incubation
that’s 24 hours a day
equals 19,440 hours of combined incubation
but one came early
one month early
so minus one set of 30 days
equals 810 minus 30 equals
780 days times 24 hours a day equals
18,720 hours of combined incubation

when the sons floated in her universe
yolk eyes staring into membrane galaxy
flicking pulse and finger
nail into red-darkness
she breathed for all of them
always will because
everything adds up to four

by Selina Tusitala Marsh

The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre warmly invites you to attend the opening of the exhibition Where We Begin to Look: Landscape and Poetry on Friday 11 October at 6.30pm in the Glass Tank, Abercrombie Building, Oxford Brookes University. Where We Begin to Look is a collaborative exhibition by the artist Zoe Benbow and the poet, Deryn Rees-Jones,and is presented by the Poetry Society and Small World Theatre, Ceredigion. The opening event will feature a discussion about the exhibition by Benbow and Rees-Jones,and readings by Rees-Jones and Sarah Corbett, whose work appears in the show. You can find out more on the Brookes website. If you would like to attend the opening, please reply to this message with your details. The exhibition runs until 5 November and is open to all.

‘The Sum of Mum’ is copyright © Selina Tusitala Marsh, 2012. It is reprinted by permission of Arc Publications from Fast Talking PI (Arc Publications, 2012).

Notes from Arc Publications:

Selina Tusitala Marsh is of Samoan, Tuvaluan, English, Scottish and French descent, and was the first Pacific Islander to graduate from The University of Auckland with a PhD in English, where she is now a lecturer. Fast Talking PI (pronounced pee-eye) reflects the poet’s focus on issues affecting Pacific communities in New Zealand, and indigenous peoples around the world including the challenges and triumphs of being afakasi (mixed race). You can read more about the collection from Arc’s pages (where you can read further selections from the book), and hear Selina read from it on Soundcloud.

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.

Redwings and Magnetism

~ oxfordbrookesuni

How small is the god of those migrating bird-rivers:
redwings, fieldfares that fall from Norway to the Neva.

She will climb from her bed and airbrush their science.
The season is ice-mist, a scared short-range weather.

Redwings, fieldfares that fall from Norway to the Neva
smash as if thrown against the solid-state river.

The season is ice-mist, a scared short-range weather.
A small neck bows, the tiles of its wings

smash as if thrown against the solid-state river.
She makes herself dark coffee, taps in the data.

Her small neck bows; the tiles of those wings
are unfolded and healed by the heat of her argument.

She makes herself dark coffee, taps in the data.
How those ten thousand birds fleer in her thought,

unfolded and healed by the heat of her argument.
Warm the cold lives by her limpid knowledge:

those ten thousand birds that fleer in her thought.
She has climbed from her bed, airbrushed their science,

warmed the cold lives by a limpid knowledge:
how small is the god of those migrating bird-rivers.

by David Morley

This week’s poet, David Morley, will be speaking at John Clare in Space: Poetry, Nature and Contemporary Culture, a conference at Oxford Brookes from 30-31 May 2014. Other confirmed speakers include: Jonathan Bate, Josie Long, Richard Mabey, and Iain Sinclair. All are welcome to attend, and details about registration can be found on the Oxford Brookes website.

‘Redwings and Magnetism’ is copyright © David Morley, 2001. It is reprinted from Of Science, edited by David Morley & Andy Brown (published by Worple Press in 2001) by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Of Science is a sample of poems by contemporary poets who are also trained as scientists. The writers of this selection are drawn from the fields of freshwater ecology, mathematics, marine biology, neural physiology, ethnology, computing, phenomenology and biochemistry. The mode of selection is modelled on the 1802 Lyrical Ballads, in the spirit of Miroslav Holub’s notion of ‘serious play’, with the shared belief of Wordsworth and Coleridge that ‘poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is the countenance of all science.’ Read more about the book on Worple’s site.

David Morley read Zoology at Bristol University, gained a fellowship from the Freshwater Biological Association and pursued research on acid rain. He co-founded the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick, of which he is now director, and develops and teaches new practices in scientific and creative writing. He co-edited The New Poetry for Bloodaxe and authored The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing. He has published eleven collections of poetry. The Invisible Kings (Carcanet, 2008) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, as was his most recent book, The Gypsy and the Poet (Carcanet, 2013). You can read more from David about his new book on his blog at the University of Warwick, read an illuminating interview with him by Simon Kövesi in the latest John Clare Society Journal, and follow his work via his website and Twitter.

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 include work from John Greening, Michael McKimm, Peter Robinson, Mary Woodward and Sally Flint. More information can be found on Worple Press’s new website and Facebook page.

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 Homecoming

~ oxfordbrookesuni

For Lois Pereiro

In Ithaca everyone was dead.
They say it was me, Argos the dog, who woke first:
           –  Dead, dead, dead!
A smell stronger than dung,
the smell of a living man,
made me vomit celestial remains,
cloud-bones,
rainbow-hides.
That man who reeked of legend,
a twitching skeleton,
a bad-tempered ghost,
ripped open the scar with his nails
and smeared the mired shadows with words.
There were our names. All of them.
And the infallible memory of the trees
in Laertes’ orchard.
Half a hundred rows of vines,
thirteen pear trees,
ten apple trees,
forty fig trees.
The blind old man saw, in the end, his son, thanks to the earth’s algebra.
After, Odysseus
came and woke us one by one
and our tears, since then,
are the rope that binds the light
with a violent joy.

by Manuel Rivas, translated by Lorna Shaughnessy

This is the second in our series of four poems taken from the shortlist for The Corneliu M Popescu Prize. The Prize, run by the Poetry Society, was formerly called the European Poetry Translation Prize. The first winner of the Prize, in 1983, was Tony Harrison for The Oresteia. The prize was relaunched in 2003, and renamed in honour of the Romanian translator Corneliu M Popescu, who died in an earthquake in 1977 at the age of 19. The Popescu Prize 2013 has a shortlist of seven books, and the winner will be announced on 29 November.

The original poem ‘The Homecoming’ is copyright © Manuel Rivas, 2009, and the translation is © Lorna Shaughnessy, 2012. It is reprinted by permission of  Shearsman Books from  The Disappearance of Snow  by Manuel Rivas, translated by Lorna Shaughnessy.

The judges of the Popescu Prize, Karen Leeder and David Wheatley, comment: ‘What is your message?’ asks Manuel Rivas in ‘Missed Call’, but these translations show that, as well as being what gets lost, poetry in translation can be about what gets through, the connections we make, and the voices we hear loud and clear.

Poet, novelist, short-story writer and journalist, Manuel Rivas was born in A Coruña, Galicia (north-western Spain) in 1957, and writes in Galician, which is one of Spain’s co-official languages. His work has a deep connection with the landscape, folklore and history of Galicia, but has a universal impact that has led to him being recognised as one of Europe’s leading contemporary writers. A desaparición da neve is his most recent collection of poems and had the unusual distinction of being issued with a single volume in Spain together with translations of the poems into Catalan, Basque and Castilian. Further selections from The Disappearance of Snow can be found in  this pdf file from the Shearsman website.

Lorna Shaughnessy was born in Belfast and lives in County Galway. She lectures in the Department of Spanish, NUI Galway. She has published two collections of her own poems, Torching the Brown River and Witness Trees (Salmon Poetry) as well as two translations of contemporary Mexican poets: Mother Tongue: Selected Poems by Pura López Colomé and If We Have Lost Our Oldest Tales by María Baranda, both with Arden House.

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with a very active translation list. Founded in 1981 as a magazine, with some occasional chapbooks, the press – now based in Bristol – has grown rapidly in recent years, and is now one of the most active poetry publishers in the U.K. You can find out more about Shearsman’s work from 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.

Happy Days

~ oxfordbrookesuni

                Happiness is a warm gun – JOHN LENNON

            1

Mammy tells me “Just read your book.”
I’m sick of reading Captain Cook.
The rain has made a lake in our garden.
I hope some swans land there.
I feel sorry for John Tracy,
All alone in Thunderbird 5.
Do the Tracys have rows like us?
Who cooks dinners?
Who irons their uniforms?
Jeff could marry Lady Penelope.
Then they’d all be happy.

            2

The cherry blossom trees
Are happy young bridesmaids:
They lean together in the breeze,
Petals flying from their braids.

When I quietly eat my Frosties
Aware of my character flaws
I hear the magpies’ congratulations
And the frying pan’s applause.

by Alan Moore

The Poetry Book Society recently announced its fantastic T.S. Eliot Prize Tour, a ten-venue national tour to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first T.S. Eliot Prize. The tour will visit Portsmouth on 17 September, then Winchester, Oldham, Halifax, Ludlow, Glasgow, Norwich, Liverpool, Durham, and finally Sheffield on 15 October. It includes a spectacular selection of the best poets writing today. Visit the PBS website for more details, and head to the venue nearest you this autumn!

‘Happy Days’ is copyright © Alan Moore, 2010. It is reprinted by permission of Anvil Press from How Now! (Anvil Press, 2010).

Notes from Anvil Press:

In How Now! Alan Moore treats themes of love, evil, and personal loss with gentle humour and tough seriousness. He evokes memories of Ireland in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, capturing flashes of awareness from childhood, youth and adult years with masterful description of emotion and settings.

This absorbing work is his second collection of poems, following Opia, a Poetry Book Society Choice in 1986, which was described by Ciaran Carty as ‘a virtuoso first collection’. You can read ‘Summer’, another poem from his latest collection, on Anvil’s site.

Alan Moore was born in 1960 in Dublin, Ireland, where he lives and works. A graduate in English and Philosophy of University College, Dublin, he worked in the Office of the Revenue Commissioners and in legal publishing before setting up his own tax consultancy business. He is a crime novelist, teacher, business adviser and the author of several professional books.

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.

The Grape Grower in Champagne

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The regiment arrives
The village dozes off in the perfumed light
A priest has a helmet on his head
Is the champagne bottle artillery or not
The vinestock like ermine on a coat of arms
Bonjour soldiers
I saw them racing this way and that
Bonjour soldiers champagne bottles in which blood ferments
You’ll stay a few days then back to the front
In your echelons like a field planted with vines
I send my bottles all over the place like the shells of a delightful artillery

The night is blond oh blond wine
A grape-grower was singing bent over his vines
A grape-grower without a mouth on the far horizon
A grape-grower who himself was the living bottle
A grape-grower who knows all about war
A grape-grower in Champagne who’s an artilleryman

Now it’s evening and they’re playing poker
Then the soldiers will return to the front
Where the Artillery uncorks its foaming bottles
Well Adieu gentlemen come back if you can
But who’s to say what the future has planned

by Guillaume Apollinaire

Welcome back to the Weekly Poem series after its summer vacation. This week’s publisher, CB editions, organises a highly successful annual poetry book fair called ‘Free Verse’, and this year’s event will take place in Conway Hall in London on Saturday 7 September. More than fifty publishers will be represented, and there will be free readings and workshops. Entry is free too. For more details, visit the the Free Verse website.

And a reminder that the Poetry Centre is offering a PhD Studentship in Poetry. This is a three-year, full-time PhD studentship in any aspect of Poetry and Poetics. More details can be found on the Brookes website. Please share this link with anyone you think might be interested. The deadline for applications is 6 September.

This translation copyright © Beverley Bie Brahic, 2012. It is reprinted from The Little Auto by Guillaume Apollinaire by permission of CB editions.

Notes from CB editions:

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) – whose writings ranged from plays to experimental poetry, from art criticism to erotica – was a central figure in the literary and artistic life of early 20th-century Paris. In 1914 he swapped the high life of avant-garde Paris for the mud and desolation of war in the trenches, but in The Little Auto, Beverley Bie Brahic, the translator and a poet in her own right (and whose poem ‘PS: Book of Eve’ was a Weekly Poem selection in January), has chosen poems that are wholly different from those that for English readers have come to exemplify the genre of war poetry. In Apollinaire, juxtaposed with the orgy of destruction are nostalgia for antiquity and impatience for the future, melancholy and exuberance. You can read further excerpts from the book at CB editions’ site.

CB editions publishes no more than six books a year, mainly poetry and short fiction and including work in translation. Since 2008 its poetry titles have twice won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and have twice been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize. In 2011 CBe put on 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 September 2012 with over 50 publishers taking part. 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.