Crime of the Century

July 9, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Burning up inside, Ethel Rosenberg gets dressed
as if she’s going to a gala. For one bright moment
everything forgotten: her brother’s lies, evidence –
typewriter, console table, notes burning in a frying pan –
as flimsy as her nylons. She remembers only Julie’s touch,
his pencilled love letters, the arias she sung him
from an adjoining cell. And then he’s there, her husband,
and the room has no screen and they charge and grasp,
mouths, hands, flesh. Prised apart by guards. Julie’s face
so smeared with lipstick he looks as if he’s bleeding.

That last hot evening, their fourteenth anniversary,
they finger kiss through wire mesh, blood trickling
down the screen. At 8.06, just before the setting sun
heralds the Jewish Sabbath over Sing-Sing, Julius is dead.
Minutes later, Ethel, in a green print dress, settles
tight lips into a Mona Lisa smile. Says nothing,
winces as the electrode cap makes contact with her skull.
It takes five shocks to kill her, the oak chair made
for a man, Ethel so petite the helmet doesn’t fit, so fried
witnesses see coils of smoke rising from her head.

She dreamed of being an opera singer but who was she
to have such dreams, product of the Jewish Bronx,
a mother who belittled her, said she brought it on herself?
Anyway, her mouth would never open wide enough,
except to kiss him, her beloved Julius. His crime?
Handing over minor secrets. Hers was finding love
one New Year’s Eve, just before she went onstage to sing.
He cooled her flaming nerves. Never having known such caring
she hurled herself into her role – loyal wife, so insignificant
to the KGB, she didn’t even have a code name.

by Lorna Thorpe

Lorna Thorpe was born in Brighton where she lived for most of her life until relocating to Cornwall in 2011. Before turning her hand to poetry she worked as a tour operator, social worker and barmaid. Her debut publication Dancing to Motown (Pighog Press, 2005) was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice, and her first full collection A Ghost in My House was published by Arc in 2008. As a fiction writer, her short stories have been short-listed for awards, and appeared in magazines and anthologies. She works as a freelance writer and has published features in the Guardian. You can read more selections from Lorna Thorpe’s work at Arc’s page here, and follow her work via her website here, which includes more examples of her poetry and video of Lorna reading.

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 now 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.

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 Black Guitar

July 2, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Clearing out ten years from a wardrobe
I opened its lid and saw Joe
written twice in its dust, in a child’s hand,
then a squiggled seagull or two.

Joe, Joe
a man’s tears are worth nothing,
but a child’s name in the dust, or in the sand
of a darkening beach, that’s a life’s work.

I touched two strings, to hear how much
two lives can slip out of tune

then I left it,
brought down the night on it, for fear, Joe
of hearing your unbroken voice, or the sea
if I played it.

by Paul Henry

Notes from Seren:

Paul Henry is one of Wales’s leading poets. Described by the late U.A. Fanthorpe as ‘a poet’s poet’ who combines ‘a sense of the music of words with an endlessly inventive imagination’, he came to poetry through songwriting. The Brittle Sea, New & Selected Poems has recently been published by Seren in the UK and by Dronequill in India, under the title The Black Guitar. A popular Creative Writing tutor, Henry has read his poems and performed his songs at festivals across the UK and Europe and also in the USA and Asia. He recently presented the ‘Inspired’ series of arts programmes for BBC Radio Wales and ‘Do Not Expect Applause’, his celebration of the Scottish poet W.S. Graham, for BBC Radio Three.

As well as portrait-poems set against the Breconshire villages where Henry lived from his mid teens, the book collects poems about the undulating river Usk and the post-industrial cityscape of Newport, Gwent. The Brittle Sea also includes the three poems Henry was commissioned to write for BBC2’s ‘Poetry in Motion’, which celebrated the Welsh national rugby team as they prepared for the 2007 World Cup.

You can read more about this new collection at Seren’s website, read more from Paul Henry’s work at his own website, and hear the poet read ‘Daylight Robbery’ and ‘The Black Guitar’ on Seren’s YouTube channel here.

Seren is based in Wales (‘Seren’ means ‘star’ in Welsh) and recently celebrated its 30th birthday. Begun as an offshoot of the magazine Poetry Wales by Cary Archard and Dannie Abse in the latter’s garage in Ogmore-by-Sea, the press has now grown and employs a number of staff. It is known for publishing prize-winning poetry, including collections by recent Forward winners, Hilary Menos and Kathryn Simmonds, as well as books by Owen Sheers, Pascale Petit, Deryn Rees-Jones, and many others. The fiction list features a new title by Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days, that was longlisted for the Booker Prize. The high-quality arts books include the recent collaboration between the poet John Fuller and the photographer David Hurn, Writing the Picture.

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.

Heraclitus

June 25, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A winter’s day is ringing after rain.
Doves bedazzled in the walnut tree
My garden flowers drip with silver
Beyond, the fields are slashed with mercury
As if a star had dropped from outer space
Impacting into streaks of wobbling light;
With fireflies the hedges flicker
And gritty rutted tracks up-spurt sparks.

My soul is fiery aether, and stares
From mediating flesh, translucent eyes
In rapture at the shorn transfigured land
In sympathy, like with like,
At nights so dark the stars recede to bort;
Flaring, a mystery to itself, a dove
Erupting into snowy flames.

by James Harpur

Notes from Anvil Press:

An Irish monk watching the Black Death edging towards him; a priest at Delphi lamenting the passing of an era; an Assyrian extispicist receiving more inspiration than is good for him – these are some of the voices in James Harpur‘s third collection. Drawing on legend, myth and sacred traditions, his poems explore universal forces – seen and unseen, personal and cosmic – shaping people’s destinies, and the signs by which their patterns are revealed. These central issues coalesce in ‘Dies Irae’, a long poem in which a Dark Age churchman tries to reconcile his mission to save souls in a sinking world with his own sickness, both physical and spiritual.

James Harpur’s previous collections include A Vision of Comets and The Monk’s Dream, plus a subsequent collection The Dark Age and a translation of Boethius’s poems entitled Fortune’s Prisoner. He was born in 1956 of Irish-British parents and works as a freelance writer. He has received an Eric Gregory Award, bursaries from the Arts Council and the Society of Authors, and a Year of the Artist award to be poet in residence at Exeter Cathedral in 2001. He was also winner of the 1995 National Poetry Competition. His new collection Angels and Harvesters was published by Anvil in May 2012. Visit James Harpur’s website, where you can read a further selection of his poems.

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.

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts

June 18, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Your father steps on board the train of ghosts.
You watch him from the platform:

somehow, he doesn’t look as old
as you expected him to be.

You think this must have something to do
with the light, or maybe

how much bigger the train is.
It stretches down the track
a long way, as far as your eyes can make out.

It’s like a black bullet
that keeps speeding toward you,
you think, and then:

No, it’s like a very long train, that’s all.

Somewhere on board the train, your father
is choosing a seat. Maybe

he’s already found one, has settled in,

picked up a magazine or newspaper
someone else left lying there,

is flipping through it, idly.
Maybe he’s looking out the window, for you
you would like to think, waving,

only you’ll never see it
because of the reflected glare.

Or maybe he’s not looking for you at all.
Maybe he’s watching the hot-air balloons
that have just appeared

all over the sky, ribbed like airborne hearts
of the giants Jack killed.

In the stories, Jack has no father.
This would explain a lot, you are thinking

as the train begins to pull away:

his misplaced affections,
stealing the harp of gold that played
all by itself. Around you,

men and women and children
are standing on the platform, shouting, waving,
hugging themselves.
The wind is cold; it must be March.

You would want that kind of music
if you were Jack, wouldn’t you?

by G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher

‘Your Father on the Train of Ghosts’ is copyright © G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher, 2011. It is the title poem from Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, which was co-written by G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher and published by BOA Editions in 2011.

Notes from BOA Editions:

G.C. Waldrep was born in the small town of South Boston, Va., in 1968, and currently lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He holds degrees in American history from Harvard and Duke and a MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. He teaches at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where he directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. John Gallaher’s previous collections of poetry include The Little Book of Guesses (2007), winner of the Levis Poetry Prize, and Map of the Folded World (2009). His work has appeared in such journals as Field, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, New American Writing, Colorado Review, and The Kenyon Review, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2008. In 2010, he won the Boston Review poetry prize. He is currently co-editor of The Laurel Review, and, with Mary Biddinger, the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics.

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is one of the most extensive collaborations in American poetry. Over the course of a year, acclaimed poets G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher wrote poems back and forth, sometimes once or twice a week, sometimes five or six a day. As the collaboration deepened, a third ‘voice’ emerged that neither poet can claim as solely their own. The poems of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts read as lyric snapshots of a culture we are all too familiar with, even as it slips from us: malls and supermarkets, museums and parades, toxic waste and cheesecakes, ghosts and fire, fathers and sons. Ultimately, these fables and confessions constitute a sort of gentle apocalypse, a user-friendly self-help manual for the end of time. You can find out more about Your Father on the Train of Ghosts by visiting BOA’s website here and hear John Gallaher read the poem here.

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.

To a Fraud Whose Work Has Come to Be Canonical

June 11, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Now all the lies are told
go public and seek praise
as prizes now unfold
like afternoons on days
dishonor schemes in groves
and shame lurks in the eyes
and lips can only love
a self which they contrive.

Born to charm and born
for easy triumph, turn
this way and like some
weeping thing amid a field
of bones, anthologize despair
and cry at last Forlorn!
because in all this barren yield
there is no living air.

by John Matthias

If you are around Oxford this weekend, the Poetry Centre warmly invites you to attend our performance poetry event on Sunday 17 June at the Old Fire Station. It features six leading local voices: George Chopping, Paul Askew, Tina Sederholm, Alan Buckley, Jennifer A. McGowan, and Vahni Capildeo. We also have a guest headlining act: Rose Solari. Tickets will be available on the door or in advance from WeGotTickets.com. Find out more about the event and some of the poets taking part by visiting our new Poets in Oxford page.

Notes from Shearsman:

John Matthias was born in 1941 in Columbus, Ohio. For many years he taught at the University of Notre Dame and continues to serve as poetry editor of Notre Dame Review. He has been a Visiting Fellow in poetry at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and lived for much of the 70s and 80s in East Anglia. His books of verse include Turns, Crossing, Northern Summer, A Gathering of Ways, Swimming at Midnight, Beltane at Aphelion, Pages, Working Progress, Working Title, New Selected Poems and Kedging. He has also published translations from the Swedish, editions of David Jones’s work, and a volume of literary criticism, Reading Old Friends. In 1998 Robert Archambeau edited Word Play Place, a selection of essays on Matthias’s work. Another book of essays on his poetry appeared in 2011 in the Salt Companion series, edited by Joe Francis Doerr. In 2011, Shearsman Books also published his essays in Who was Cousin Alice? And Other Questions. His collected poems are being published in three volumes, with the Collected Longer Poems slated to appear in October, and the Collected Shorter Poems Vol. 1 in 2013. You can watch John Matthias reading from his shorter poems at UC Berkeley here (his reading begins at around 10:30).

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with an active translation list. You can learn more about the publisher here, and find Shearsman on Facebook.

At the Yeoman’s House

May 28, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

June, Nine p.m.

The social bees work late,
Barren girls with honeyed thighs
Labouring among aquilegia,
The eagle flower, purple-spurred,
Multitudinous, nearly a weed.

I sit in the mid-year garden
To hear the poplars clatter,
And to admire what I have done.
The day is advanced, the bees
Drone vespers, the sun hits the wheat.

Farmers sat on the doorstep
At this hour, aching and comfortable,
Their eyes registering
A patch of pinks and mignonette
As their gaze settled for the big field.

An ancient man who had been
Young here arrived to say,
‘Mother saw to the flowers, of course’.
Of course. Father saw to that.
Their ancient son spoke of hives,

Hives here? ‘Hives, honeybees,
Pears in the orchard, muck
In the soil, all you had to have.’
The same water plashing, as
They put it then, and gulped by the horses.

Their shoes turn up in the beds.
I see my luckless father
Ploughing, confident in his rut,
His eye on the holly marker,
His tongue conversing with beasts,

Social bees will not pause
While there is light, while an anther
Can be seen to yield. And the poplars
Applaud them with gray and silver leaves,
The roses blacken, the cornfield fades.

by Ronald Blythe

Notes from Enitharmon:

Ronald Blythe has written novels, short stories, poetry, literary criticism, and social history. Among his books are Akenfield, now a Penguin Modern Classic, The Age of Illusion, The View in Winter, Divine Landscapes, Aldeburgh Anthology, The Assassin (his most recent novel), and Aftermath: Selected Prose 1950-2010. He has published critical studies of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, William Hazlitt and Henry James and for many years has been President of the John Clare Society. He has received honorary doctorates from the universities of East Anglia and Essex and in 2006 was awarded the Benson Medal, the highest honour of the Royal Society of Literature.

When as a young writer in 1947 Blythe first visited Bottengoms Farm on the Essex-Suffolk border, the ancient house of the artists John and Christine Nash, he could not have guessed that this would in time become his own home and the centre of the writing life. The old farm nestled in a valley, in a landscape little changed since the Middle Ages, immediately surrounded by a richly-stocked garden created by the Nashes from the flinty fields. From his current perspective, Blythe looks back in this collection with affection to the friendships with artists, writers, farmers, gardeners, and neighbours that were to enrich his life. You can read more about Blythe’s relationship with the farm and the people he met there in this interview by Patrick Barkham on the Enitharmon site, and hear Ronald Blythe interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs 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.

Loie Fuller’s Dancing School

May 21, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I am terpsichorean
a figure in burlesque.

Sometimes Miss Pepper stranded on the prairie
sometimes Buffalo Bill’s navvy
sometimes a soubrette.

Imagine my surprise at the spectacular
a bijou opera house.

An alien in melodrama
Aladdin-girl in melos.

In the cave of the fire of life,
I am Ayesha of two thousand years

finding a silhouette
within slimness.

Such methods of the divine
becomes a gal from Chicago.

by Nerys Williams

Notes from Seren:

Originally from Pen-y-Bont, Carmarthen, Wales, Nerys Williams has been a recipient of a Fulbright Scholar’s Award at UC Berkeley and a winner of the Ted McNulty Poetry Prize. She gained a DPhil at Sussex in 2002 through research focused on a reading of error and the lyric in contemporary American poetics. Nerys has lectured in American Literature at University College, Dublin since 2003. A native Welsh speaker, she has also worked at BBC Wales and as a care assistant on psychiatric wards. Nerys has published poems and critical essays widely and is the author of A Guide to Contemporary Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) as well as a study of contemporary American poetry, Reading Error (Peter Lang, 2007). She recently published her first collection of poetry, Sound Archive (Seren 2011), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize’s Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and the Michael Murphy Prize. Of her first book Poetry Review wrote that ‘a certain other-worldliness combines well with a vigorous realism to tease the reader into putting two and more than that together to perceive something rare and beautiful.’

You can read more about the collection and watch Nerys Williams read from her book here, and follow her thoughts on her blog here. Nerys was interviewed on RTE 1 about her collection, and you can hear the discussion at this link. You can also follow the poet on Twitter; search for @archifsain.

You can find out more about Loie Fuller, the subject of the poem, at Susan Gillis Kruman’s page about the dancer and (possibly?) watch her in action here.

For more details about Seren, visit the publisher’s new 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.

Bull-Box

May 14, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I have acquired all the furniture I need
and left it behind, done all my repairs
and bought enough clothes.
The less you possess, the more they are
not decorations but what is more needed: icons
requiring as icons do small space to give up their worth –
this water jug, this stove, this lamp, this spade,
this small table and chair.
All of it “junk” in any place but here

in this hut
so tender in my feelings that when I turn the corner
I fear it might have proved a chimera,
a space among nettles, the victim of vandals.
For the dream is frail, yet firm the stone
of what is called “The Bull-Box” and that has held
one beast or another for a hundred years
so traditional is it, stone roof, stone walls,
no guttering, no drain-pipe, nettles rising to
a half-door and square window
that look onto a half moon meadow
seeded with wild wheat to a curve of stream.

In the sun
I watched a trout leap, a silver sword
small, quick, cutting air
as I built steps out of brook-stones
dug a pool for my washing-water
and saw a red-backed shrike on the thorns
that are overgrown behind The Bull-Box.
I was immortal then, not seventy but
a lithe, inquisitive
child again.

by Glyn Hughes

The first Poetry Centre podcast has been launched! Each monthly podcast features the work of local poets or general discussion about poetry. You can hear the podcast on our new website at this link, and subscribe to it in iTunes by clicking on the link on the right-hand side of the Podcasts page. This month’s podcast features Claire Cox and her poem ‘Tolstoy at Astapovo Station’, which was awarded first prize in the 2011 Barnet Arts Council Open Poetry Competition. We hope you enjoy it and we welcome your comments. Get in touch with us by replying to this e-mail, via Facebook, or through the ‘Contact us’ section of the Poetry Centre site.

Glyn Hughes is best known as a Northern poet and novelist with a string of prizes for his work, including the Guardian Fiction Prize, the David Higham Prize, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and a Welsh Arts Council Poet’s Prize. He was also shortlisted for the Whitbread, Portico and James Tait Black Prizes. He was resident in the Calder Valley, Yorkshire, for forty years, and most of his work is based on the county. Glyn Hughes was diagnosed with lymphoma cancer in 2009. He had recently been granted use of an isolated stone hut – the ‘Bull-Box’ – in the Ribble Valley and the time spent there and in its environs was a major part of his healing. The poem sequence, A Year in the Bull-Box, describes the experience. Glyn Hughes died in May, 2011. You can read more poems from A Year in the Bull-Box here, some notes about him by Tony Ward at this link, and an obituary by David Pownall on the Guardian website.

Children in the Cherry Tree

May 7, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

They perch in the cherry tree – two fledglings
Not quite hidden, gigglers in the dusk, hatching a plan.
The tree begins to shake them. It is not laughing,
It groans, its limbs beat slowly like prehistoric wings
And skin-soft leaves, yellow and pink and red cascade.

So high and so cold, the tree now such a stranger.

Peering out from their eyrie, and down through the web
Of branches, the silent high-riders hear shouts
In their throats. Their colours are lowered, dashes
Of scarlet and white legging it down as light fails.
As darkness lopes along the waiting blue hills.

by Kevin Crossley-Holland

Upcoming events from the Poetry Centre

This week, as part of the Amazing Acts festival at the Pegasus Theatre in Oxford, Oxford Brookes presents two literary events. On Thursday 10th May at 7pm, Philip Pullman and Kate Clanchy host a showcase for competitively-selected students of the prestigious Oxford Brookes Creative Writing MA Programme. On Friday 11th May at 7.30, poet Fiona Sampson presents ‘Science Writes to Life’, an event in which budding and professional poets read original writing inspired by contact with scientists at Oxford Brookes. Fiona Sampson will also be reading some of her own work, commissioned by the Poetry Centre. All are welcome to these evenings, and more details about these and other festival events, including ticket information, can be found on the Oxford Brookes website.

Notes from Enitharmon:

Kevin Crossley-Holland is a poet, translator from Anglo-Saxon, and Carnegie Medal-winning author for children. His new and selected poems, The Mountains of Norfolk, was published in 2011, and brought together poems from eight previous collections. These works are spare yet sensuous, bearing witness to relationships, history, East Anglia, language and the craft of writing, and the meeting-places of body and spirit. The volume also contains a group of new poems musing on youth and old age, friendship, love and the layers of landscape. Kevin Crossley-Holland is the author of the bestselling Arthur trilogy, Gatty’s Tale and The Penguin Book of Norse Myths. His most recent book for children is Bracelet of Bones, in which a Viking girl travels from Norway to Constantinople, and he is the author of The Hidden Roads, a memoir of childhood. Kevin has worked with many composers and artists, and with Lawrence Sail he has edited two anthologies for Enitharmon Press: The New Exeter Book of Riddles and Light Unlocked: Christmas Card Poems. Kevin is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Patron of the Society for Storytelling and of Publishing House Me, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. He is currently the President of the School Library Association. He lives in north Norfolk with his wife and four children. You can read another selection from The Mountains of Norfolk here, and find out more about Kevin Crossley-Holland from his website.

Small Sorrows

April 30, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You can start anywhere,
you can start with the hummingbird
that quivers at the feeder, or with a moon
lost in the corner, or the stray dog who creeps
to my window and breathes. But not with
the Lebanese woman on TV who sobs as she
trudges back to her house of rubble.

How can I tell you my small sorrows?
In Slovenia, at the Nazi prison in Begunje,
you can see the last writing of two British
soldiers. On the stone of a shared cell, each
scraped the facts he pared himself down to:
name, address, parents, schools, date of enlistment,
rank, battalion, date and place taken prisoner, and
the date which became the year of death.

I didn’t want to start there.
I don’t want to end there. But no matter where I start,
or end, I will tell you—that if I could
touch you, I would become a hummingbird, a hidden,
shining center. And the dog—she would
press her small, strong back into my hip.

by Deborah Brown

Poetry Centre announcements: Two poets based at Oxford Brookes, Steven Matthews and Claire Cox, have written poems in response to photographs by a Brookes colleague, Sabine Chaouche. The opening of the exhibition, ‘Poetry of Forms, Forms of Poetry’, is on Thursday 3 May from 12-1pm in the Tonge Building, Oxford Brookes University, Headington, Oxford. All are welcome.

On Friday 4 May, the Poetry Centre launches its monthly podcast. The first episode features local poet Claire Cox, who reads and discusses her poem ‘Tolstoy at Astapovo Station’. You will be able to listen to the podcast via the Poetry Centre website, or download it from iTunes.

‘Small Sorrows’ is copyright © Deborah Brown, 2011. It is reprinted by permission of BOA Editions from Deborah Brown’s book Walking the Dog’s Shadow, which was selected by Tony Hoagland as the 2010 winner of BOA’s annual A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and published by BOA in 2011. Together with another BOA poet, Michael Waters, whose work we featured on 24 October, Deborah Brown was recently announced as a Pushcart Prize winner, with the title poem from her collection selected to appear in the Pushcart Prize anthology, due out in November.

Notes from BOA Editions:

Deborah Brown was co-editor, with Maxine Kumin and Annie Finch, of Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics, and co-translator, with Richard Jackson and Susan Thomas, of The Last Voyage: Selected Poems by Giovanni Pascoli (Red Hen Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Margie, Rattle, The Alaska Quarterly, Stand, The Mississippi Review, and others. Brown teaches literature and writing at the University of New Hampshire-Manchester, where she won an award for Excellence in Teaching. She lives in Warner, New Hampshire, with her husband, George Brown, and four cats. You can read two further poems by Deborah Brown at ConnotationPress.com.