France

March 14, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Whatever they had been told was lies: there was no kind of
deal awaiting them, no siren call. The armistice was signed
but the war had been lost years before and nobody had told
them. Indigo night interrupted by orange explosions on the
horizon, great sweeping clouds of dust making everything
invisible for hours on end, the spotlights bearing down on
them the length of the assault line. We will never know defeat,
they repeated; the words of their leader an idiot’s mantra in
their throats. They spent the whole day waiting for news:
when should they expect the enemy? In the evening, a small
group sat by the linden tree and passed a bottle around. The
dusk obliterated memory. One of the men dreamed of France,
a country he had never been to. People’s lives there are
almost perfect. Something small and forgotten in his soul told
him France was a better place in which to die; that there,
eternity has brushed its sleeve against the land.

by Richard Gwyn

‘France’ is taken from Sad Giraffe Café by Richard Gwyn, and published by Arc Publications.

Notes courtesy of Arc:

Richard Gwyn grew up in Crickhowell, South Wales. He studied social anthropology at the LSE and worked in factories and as a milkman, before leaving London to spend ten years in aimless travel, settling for periods in Greece and Spain. He returned to the UK in the 1990s and took a PhD in Linguistics at Cardiff University, where he now directs the MA in Creative Writing. He is the author of five collections of poetry and two novels, The Colour of a Dog Running Away and Deep Hanging Out. In addition, he has written many articles and essays and reviews new fiction for The Independent. He has translated poetry from Spanish and Catalan, and his own poetry and fiction have appeared in several languages. You can find out more about Richard Gwyn at his website here.

Sad Giraffe Café, from which ‘France’ is taken, is a collection of prose poems which together form a shifting, progressive narrative. There are three recurring themes: an imaginary and sinister kingdom, a young wanderer named Alice, and a shape-shifting, time-travelling, first-person narrator. The poems seem to be devoid of past or future, existing in an unstable, and at times apocalyptic present. They are peopled by strangers and lodged in an ‘elsewhere’ which is also somehow familiar. They have the feel of dreams masquerading as real events, or else of real events masquerading as dreams. You can find out more about Sad Giraffe Café and read other poems from the book here.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc 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. Find out more about Arc by visiting the publisher’s website, where there are discounts available on Arc books.

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.

Disguised as the Air

March 11, 2013April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Between the chair and table
a musculature
of negative shapes.
The apple-tree thrives
on the ashes of others.
All that I give you
leaves me richer.
Only as corpses
are we entire.
If I hold back my knowing
you might find your own.
You can steal my car
but not my dance-floor.
The hole in the stone
makes for a wish.
The oyster tastes only of sea.
Thanks to what binds me
I am free for a moment.
The lopped-off branches
speed up the greening.
The sun in the monastery
slants through a void.
Love lies hidden
in what is missing.
This bird invents
from a handful of notes.

by Kate Behrens

This week’s poem from Kate Behrens and next week’s from Tom Phillips both come from Two Rivers Press, and are scheduled to coincide with an exciting reading by these two poets and the Press’s editor, Peter Robinson, on Tuesday 19 March at Oxford Brookes. The reading will take place at 6pm in Headington Hill Hall, and all are welcome. There is no charge, and refreshments will be provided! For more details, reply to this message or visit this page.

Notes from Two Rivers Press:

In The Beholder, Kate Behrens’ first collection, those fleeting moments between people, or between individuals and nature are distilled without judgement or resolution. A deer trapped in a garden makes a dangerous leap for freedom. Someone hangs onto a sense of beauty in the face of a life that is ugly and collapsing or confuses a landscape with long ago childhood play. Things are revealed obliquely, as if by homing in on a subject, its true meaning would evaporate. Nature confronts the poet with its deliberation, pointing up the mysterious gulfs between it and us from a solitude that infuses so many of these poems. The physical setting is often a Europe that feels unfamiliar — flats in cities, the burning horizon seen from a train, or the view from a window seen through the eyes of two traumatised people. But there is celebration here too, as in the ways children can heal, inspire, and teach us how to live, and in nature’s capacity to nourish. For more details about the collection, visit Two Rivers Press’s page here.

Kate Behrens was born in 1959, one of twin daughters to two painters. A runner-up in the 2010 Mslexia poetry competition, who reads regularly at the Poets Café in Reading, she lives in Oxfordshire, and has one daughter.

Two Rivers Press was founded in Reading in 1994 by Peter Hay (1951–2003), an artist and enthusiast for the town and its two rivers, the Kennet and the Thames. In nearly two decades of publishing and with over seventy titles since its inception, it has been described as ‘one of the most characterful small presses in the country’. It focuses on local poets and a significant part of its work explores and celebrates local history and environment. Bold illustration and striking design are important elements of its work, used to great effect in new editions of classic poems, especially ones with some Reading connection: for example, Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and in collections of contemporary poetry from local poets such as Reading Poetry: an anthology edited by Peter Robinson. It has recently published A Mutual Friend: Poems for Charles Dickens, an anthology with a very distinguished list of contributors, also edited by Peter Robinson. The Press is strongly rooted in the local community and has close links with the University, Poets’ Café, RISC, Museum of English Rural Life and other local groups. Its contribution to Reading’s culture won for it a Pride of Reading award in 2008. You can find more information at the press’s website, and on its Facebook page.

Osteopath

March 4, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My back’s a lump of clay, becomes a spine
Beneath your fingers, little hard-nosed creatures
That sniff out tangled nerves and sidelong pain
Autonomously probing with a blind man’s
Feel for the beauty of a groove or contour,
Reminding me that I am skeleton.

Now on my back I see the skylight frame
A chasm of unboundedness, space blue.
A half-moon lit up like an x-ray
Tugs at my gravity. You’re earthing me
With pressure: you rotate, push and pull,
Make new the muscles, tendons, of my body,
Create the definition that I lacked
So I may rise like Adam, ribs intact.

by James Harpur

Notes from Anvil Press:

James Harpur‘s fifth collection, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, journeys into realms seen and unseen, ranging from the landscapes of Ireland to the visionary realms of the mystics. Through the finely textured music of his poems, he explores emotional and spiritual intimacies while keeping a sharp observant eye on the everyday world. Angels and Harvesters displays both human tenderness and an otherworldly wonder, as Harpur continues his quest to reconcile the complexities of the human condition with a deep-seated spiritual longing.

James Harpur has published four previous books of poetry and a translation of Boethius’s poems entitled Fortune’s Prisoner. He is poetry editor of the Temenos Academy Review and has won a number of prizes and awards, including the 2009 Michael Hartnett Award and the 1995 British National Poetry Competition. He has held residencies at the Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco, the Munster Literature Centre and Exeter Cathedral. He lives in Co. Cork.

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.

The Prince of Rivers

February 25, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

In the land of rivers I was the prince of rivers.
In the land of houses I lived in a thousand houses.
In the land of scattered bones my bones were scattered

by worshipful princes who carried each one like a scepter.
I was there and a breeze eddied around me.
In the land of questions I was the subject of questions.

I’m sorry what was lost was found utterly changed.
I could see through the sky and bring down the lonely stars.
When I was happy, lambs were born. They stood up

enacting their first dance of balance. In the land of frost
I was never cold. A warm breeze eddied around me.
When I thundered the sky tore like paper. Beyond the sky

the sky tore and rain fell into the moon’s dark holes.
In the land of eagles I received messages from eagles.
I’m sorry the moon is a fake gray plate. I’m sorry the day

is so dark. In the land of the future I saw men of stone.
When I was sad all the seas swelled. The islands
were swallowed and forgotten; books were drenched and forgotten.

When I was old my hair was as long as my story.
I’m sorry the branch bearing fruit is so high.
When I was young trees arched toward me like I was the sun.

I’m sorry the dead are quiet as ash. I’m sorry what’s left is so cold.
I knew I could escape through a hole in the sky. Wherever
I wept thick stalks grew. I knew I could weep for a long time to come.

by Craig Morgan Teicher

Notes from BOA Editions:

Inspired by Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, Craig Morgan Teicher’s To Keep Love Blurry is an exploration of the charged and troubled spaces between intimately connected people: husbands and wives, parents and children, writers and readers. These poems include sonnets, villanelles, and long poems, as well as two poetic prose pieces, all meditating on the relationship between truth and art. As a son becomes a husband and then a father, Teicher expertly probes a life recast as poetry, with poems that long to leap into the lives of their subjects.

Craig Morgan Teicher is a poet, critic, freelance writer, and poetry editor and director of digital operations at Publishers Weekly. His first book of poems, Brenda Is In The Room And Other Poems, was chosen by Paul Hoover as winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry and was published by the Center for Literary Publishing. Cradle Book (BOA, 2010) was his first collection of short stories and fables. You can read another selection from Teicher’s latest collection of poetry, To Keep Love Blurry, at BOA’s website here, learn more about Teicher from his website, follow him on Twitter and Facebook, and watch him read from his work in these YouTube videos.

BOA Editions, Ltd., a not-for-profit publisher of poetry and other literary works, fosters readership and appreciation of contemporary literature. By identifying, cultivating, and publishing both new and established poets and selecting authors of unique literary talent, BOA brings high quality literature to the public. Support for this effort comes from the sale of its publications, grant funding, and private donations. In 2011, BOA celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary. To find out more about BOA Editions, click here. You can also sign up for the publisher’s newsletter here, find and like BOA on Facebook, and follow the publisher on Twitter by searching for @boaeditions.

A Place Of Fine Ridges

February 18, 2013April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A place of fine ridges
Where light was flung up from the valleys
Where flags flew in the blond wind
Little snowy pockets and high mountain monasteries
So you knew you could get a blessing before leaving for the summit
And you did
And you watched yellow-ribboned flags fly against red
And this was a new impossible adventure
From which you would learn, grow
Develop from the magic and mystery
But you knew one day too
You would trace a tablecloth pattern of red, yellow and blue
Like the blond wind and the coloured flags
And there would be an ashtray nearby and somebody talking
And it would be as if the ridges, never before seen
And the special light from the soft contours
Had never been

by Elizabeth Ashworth

Notes from Cinnamon Press:

In Flashes and Specks Elizabeth Ashworth displays a carefully honed skill, acute powers of observation and an enviable range. Birds and light, shadow and dark, the questing spirit of Walt Whitman, impermanence and a refusal to take anything for granted coalesce in mature language that is threaded with humour and made precise by the artist’s eye at work. You can read more about the book at Cinnamon’s website here, where you can also sample further poems from the collection.

Elizabeth Ashworth is a short story writer, poet, and journalist. Liz was born in Buxton and has lived in north Wales for most of her. She has taught creative writing for many years to children and adults. Her Outposts poetry collection A New Confusion won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, and she was second prizewinner in the HE Bates Short Story Competition.

Cinnamon Press is an independent publisher run by a family team and based in North Wales and the Midlands. We select books that we feel passionate about and concentrate on a list of poetry and fiction titles into which we put maximum effort at every stage of development. We also run regular writing courses and writing competitions, including major awards for poets, novelists and short story writers and a series of mini competitions. Find out more about the publisher and join their mailing list here. You can also find Cinnamon on Facebook and on Twitter.

The Burning Room

February 11, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

(aubade on a picture of spontaneous combustion)

When my lover returns
to his wife, his suburban apartment, the comfort
of a seasoned bed bearing
his beautiful weight

I say nothing.
I do not nod nor sigh nor breathe the light
starting to bleed into the room
the colour of saints

being martyred in portraits.
I walk the gallery of his absence, a tourist only
to this surfeit of space,
the erasure of lines

that is his gift to me.
It is enough, I think, to watch over the wide
territory of his need, to guard
the frontiers of desire

with my body and silence.
It is enough. And so I do not stir,
even when the flames bloom
fresh petals

from my unbrushed hair,
pursed eyelids. I disappear
into photographic retreat,
chemical shadow. So

when my lover returns
I am already the ash he wonders at
and brushes gently away
from the hood of his car.

by Alvin Pang

‘The Burning Room (aubade on a picture of spontaneous combustion)‘ is copyright © Alvin Pang, 2012. It is reprinted by permission of Arc Publications from When the Barbarians Arrive (Arc Publications 2012).

Notes from Arc Publications:

Alvin Pang (b. 1972, Singapore) is a poet, writer, editor, anthologist, and translator. His poetry has been translated into over fifteen languages, and he has appeared in major festivals and anthologies worldwide. When the Barbarians Arrive is a collection of new and selected works, with some poems taken from Alvin Pang’s previous three collections. You can hear Alvin Pang reading from another one of his poems here and watch him on the Arc website here, where you can also read more of his work.

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; search for @Arc_Poetry. 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.

On Speaking to One Another from Different Rooms

February 4, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Distorted and lingering, ‘Ant!, Dad!, Tats!’
grown interchangeable, explosive,
each sounding furious.
A search for keys in one room
nourishes fear of lateness in another.
From a kettle filled and boiling
to the weather, daily noise is damned
for drowning the needs of now!
My reply is weapon and filibuster,
deliberate sotto voce, below war level,
another trait of my father
I will never perfect:
I’m here, Can’t hear you, What is it?,
screaming inside ‘Who died?’
Because everything is not where we left it
history will revisit us tomorrow
at approximately the same time.
The door is almost closed
and we have not said our goodbyes yet.

by Anthony Wilson

Notes from Worple Press:

On Valentine’s Day, 2006, Anthony Wilson was formally diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. ‘Beginning with what happened’, the poems in Riddance chart the progress of his treatment for this disease, from initial diagnosis to the uncertain territory of remission. Even more essentially, they recover and celebrate all that is most fundamental and affirming about the act of living.

Anthony Wilson is a poet, writing tutor and lecturer at the University of Exeter. His books of poetry are Riddance (Worple Press, 2012), Full Stretch: Poems 1996-2006 (Worple Press, 2006), Nowhere Better Than This (Worple Press, 2002) and How Far From Here is Home? (Stride, 1996). He is also the author of a prose memoir, Love for Now (Impress Books, 2012), detailing his experience of cancer. Anthony has held writing residencies at The Poetry Society, The Times Educational Supplement, The Poetry Trust and Tate Britain, and he works as a tutor for the Arvon Foundation. He is editor of Creativity in Primary Education (Learning Matters, 2009), and co-editor of Making Poetry Matter (Continuum, 2013), and The Poetry Book for Primary Schools (Poetry Society, 1998). Find out more at the poet’s website here.

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.

PS: Book of Eve

January 22, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

about that snake: it was beautiful,
truly
it was beautiful
coiled on the cheek
of rock in early sun.
A garden snake, harmless therefore.
Bronze, I recall, frieze
of diamonds or black
down its sides or back
like great-uncle Sandy’s
tartan socks.
One of life’s lords,
Granddad wrestled
topsoil on his acre
of paradise. Beyond cedars
ocean sparkled. Stairs
descended to the first bright
beach of the world. Tide rising
or falling. It glittered
its tongue at me
and I will never forget
how it took me in, then
sashayed off
into the rough
where the berries hung.

by Beverley Bie Brahic

Notes from CB editions:

Beverley Bie Brahic is a poet and translator who lives in Paris and Stanford, California. Her translations of selected poems by Francis Ponge (Unfinished Ode to Mud, 2008; shortlisted for the 2009 Popescu Prize for European poetry in translation) and by Apollinaire (The Little Auto, 2012) have also been published by CBe. About White Sheets – which was shortlisted for the 2012 Forward Prize – Eavan Boland has written: ‘This is a book of craft, music and a collected vision of life that provides pleasure on every page.’ See more details about the book, as well as Brahic’s other work, at this page on the CB editions website. On this page you can also read further selections from White Sheets – just click on the link to the pdf on the left-hand side of the page.

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.

The Crane Dance

January 14, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The clew paying out through his fingers, a deftness
that would bring him back to her, its softness the softness
of skin, as if drawn from herself directly, the faint
labial smell, guiding him up and out, as some dampness
on the air might lead a stone-blind man to the light.

Asterios dead for sure, his crumpled horn, his muzzle
thick with blood . . . So at Delos they stopped,
Theseus and the young Athenians, and stepped
up to the altar of horns to dance a puzzle-
dance, its moves unreadable except to those who’d walked
the blank meanders of the labyrinth.
And this was midday: a fierce sun, the blaze
of their nakedness, the glitter of repetitions, a dazzle
rising off the sea, the scents of pine and hyacinth . . .

Well, things change: new passions, new threats, new fears.
New consequences, too. Nowadays, we don’t think much
about Theseus, the Minotaur, Ariadne on the beach
at Naxos, staring out at the coming years.
But people still dance that dance: just common folk,
those criss-cross steps that no one had to teach,
at weddings and wakes, in bars or parks,
as if hope and heart could meet, as if they might
even now, somehow, dance themselves out of the dark.

by David Harsent

Notes from Enitharmon:

Yannis Ritsos (1909–1990) is one of Greece’s finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. Louis Aragon called him ‘the greatest poet of our age’. He wrote in the face of ill health, personal tragedy and the systematic persecution by successive hard-line, right-wing regimes that led to many years in prison, or in island detention camps. Despite this, his lifetime’s work amounted to 120 collections of poems, several novels, critical essays, and translations of Russian and Eastern European poetry. The 1960 setting, by Mikis Theodorakis, of Ritsos’s epic poem Epitaphios was said to have helped inspire a cultural revolution in Greece.

David Harsent‘s In Secret gives versions of Ritsos’s short lyric poems: brief, compressed narratives that are spare, though not scant. They possess an emotional resonance that is instinctively subversive: rooted in the quotidian but at the same time freighted with mystery. The poems are so pared-down, so distilled, that the story-fragments we are given – the scene-settings, the tiny psychodramas – have an irresistible potency. In Secret was the Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for the Winter Quarter, 2012. You can find In Secret on the Enitharmon site here, and read a short article by David Harsent about Ritsos from The Guardian here.

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 here to receive a newsletter with special offers, details of readings & events and new titles and Enitharmon’s Poem of the Month.

The Jeater and The Hometown

December 17, 2012April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The black I can work,
and work, manumitting troche and trait and spillikin from

the sable yield. And in the dark time shy as farwoods fungi,

right here where the forest is beginning to reclaim the field.

The Hometown

I’d been a boy
but could not barani or shin up to the crest of the Maiden Rock.

And I could barely march, not even out into the cold sea where

a saint’s kneecap and fingerbones bobbed in a tide-trapped cave.

by Roddy Lumsden

This will be the final Weekly Poem of the year, as the Poetry Centre will be taking a Christmas break until 7 January. Very many thanks for reading the 2012 selection of poems. May you have a thoroughly enjoyable Christmas and excellent start to 2013!

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

Roddy Lumsden has six previous collections including Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2004) and Terrific Melancholy (Bloodaxe, 2011). He edited the anthology Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010), and co-edited The Salt Book of Younger Poets. Originally from Fife, he now lives in London and has also worked as a puzzle, quiz and popular reference writer. The Bells of Hope is a series of 51 poems, published as a limited edition hardback book. All the poems are written in a short form developed by Lumsden, the kernel poem, in which truth (the ‘kernel’) and metaphor swirl in one dimeter line and three equal, much longer lines. You can read another sample poem from the book at the Penned in the Margins site here.

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.