Alfie Does Not Speak Much Now

April 23, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Dorset tenor does not speak much. Harsh mum.
Acquiescent dad. Storm forms and lasts.
Gradual to sudden invasion of dying people,
houses priced out of local reach, cows in fields.

Was lean to shed, doing time, mind slant
numinous creature to the locked lollard,
keeper of birds, hens and beans, skull herd,
hot room surgeon to flinch and buckle.

Was gaunt in the sun and rented room, crew
cut, get it right cheese maker, not so cheeky,
sing a long, what’s that in the magician’s hat,
that T. Cooper moment, mild analgesic, aspirin.

Alfie spits tobacco, his first and index fingers
tightly holding a roll-up, his right arm arcing
outwards and down. His stare fixed, seemingly
intent upon some distant object. Quiet bull.

Now owl, lady’s bedding, dace out of school,
ace in the hole in an underworld of muteness,
nod and nudge, flutterer of bets, plough of silence,
confederacy of dunces, apocrypha and apocryphal.

by David Caddy

Notes from Shearsman:

David Caddy is a poet and critic from the Blackmore Vale in north Dorset. He was educated as a literary sociologist at the University of Essex. He founded and organised the East Street Poets, the UK’s largest rural poetry group from 1985 to 2001. He directed the legendary Wessex Poetry Festival from 1995 to 2001, and later the Tears in the Fence festival from 2003 to 2005. He has edited the independent and eclectic literary magazine, Tears in the Fence, since 1984. He co-wrote a literary companion to London in 2006, has written and edited drama scripts and podcasts, and regularly contributes essays, articles and reviews to books and journals. Read more selections from The Bunny Poems by visiting Shearsman’s page about the book here, and watch David Caddy reading from his work at Whittier College’s Dezember House last year.

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.

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.

Vigil

April 16, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The log flared on the grate
as I poked its side, poor demon

left to its own devices, hissed
blue lipped, then shriveled

into itself like a stunned
worm, before turning to ashes;

I stirred in my chair, half conscious
of darkness lapping –

even you, my lambent fawn, soft
hammered in copper,

leapt back into the shadows
of the holy mountain

(whose rock makes us fierce)
with nothing to confess

when I rose without ceremony
and called it a night.

by Gabriel Levin

Notes from Anvil Press:

With Jerusalem as its epicentre, The Maltese Dreambook extends Gabriel Levin‘s quarter-century-long ramble through the Levant, his adopted homeland. On a Greek island, in the desert wastes of southern Jordan, and in Malta, whose Stone Age temples serve as a backdrop to the title poem, this collection abounds in unforeseen encounters that blur the borders between the phantasmal and the real, the modern and the archaic, the rational and the imaginary.

Gabriel Levin was born in France, grew up in the United States, and has been living in Jerusalem since 1972. He has published two collections of poetry, Sleepers of Beulah (1992) and Ostraca (1999), and several translations from the Hebrew, French, and Arabic, including a selection of Yehuda Halevi’s poetry, Poems from the Diwan (Anvil, 2002). He is one of the founding editors of Ibis Editions, a small press established in Jerusalem in 1997 and dedicated to the publication, in English, of literature from the Levant. His new collection To These Dark Steps will be published by Anvil this month. You can find out more about Levin’s books on Anvil’s site, and read a review of The Maltese Dreambook here.

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.

Seedcorn

April 9, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

In Nutwood, Rupert’s father wore a bracken-
coloured jacket when he did the garden;
his mother stayed indoors, in an apron

frilled like the mantelpiece. Bluebell woods
had winding paths which led him home again
after his visit to the elves, deep in their caves

where lanterns flamed with trapped sunshine.
On the next page you could make an elf
by folding paper on the dotted line.

One day in Bournemouth, my teenage heroine
hopped on a bus because she liked its name,
then spent a golden summer out of time;

the hidden house she camped in, she revived:
pulled paper off the wainscot, scrubbed it white,
trundled the mildewed chairs off-stage, repaired

a lacquered bed inlaid with tourmaline;
then, dead on cue, right on the final page
our hero returned to claim his lost domaine.

Jan Morris made up Hav from everywhere
she’d been: the iron dog from Venice, a bridge
from Newport in South Wales; she wove it all

together. We’re the same, framed by the dots
we’ve joined as bandage, hammock, parachute.
We glut on stories, we slip between their lines

to sleep, still in their dream-mesh caught.
In a cocooned trance we are re-formed:
this is where we come from, how we make our home.

by Ellie Evans

Ellie Evans is Welsh-speaking and lives in Powys, mid-Wales. The Ivy Hides the Fig-Ripe Duchess is her first poetry collection, but she has already been widely published in magazines and anthologies, and has read at many poetry festivals. Using a surrealist palette of imagery and a tightly focused idiom, the author takes us on strange journeys: to the post-apocalyptic world of the title poem, or into a skewed 18th century Venice in ‘The Zograscope’. These strange worlds are always to the purpose; they are, as Marianne Moore famously said of poetry, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’ The novelist and poet Gerard Woodward has written that ‘Evans has an extraordinary ability to conjure startling and surprising images out of the most commonplace material. There is a very interesting juxtaposition of the domestic and the exotic in her work.’ You can read more about Ellie Evans and see her read from her work here, and visit her website at this link.

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.

Yves Tanguy

April 2, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The worlds are breaking in my head
Blown by the brainless wind
That comes from afar
Swollen with dusk and dust
And hysterical rain

The fading cries of the light
Awaken the endless desert
Engrossed in its tropical slumber
Enclosed by the dead grey oceans
Enclasped by the arms of the night

The worlds are breaking in my head
Their fragments are crumbs of despair
The food of the solitary damned
Who await the gross tumult of turbulent
Days bringing change without end.

The worlds are breaking in my head
The fuming future sleeps no more
For their seeds are beginning to grow
To creep and to cry midst the
Rocks of the deserts to come

Planetary seed
Sown by the grotesque wind
Whose head is so swollen with rumours
Whose hands are so urgent with tumours
Whose feet are so deep in the sand.

by David Gascoyne

Notes from Enitharmon:

David Gascoyne’s death in November 2001 was marked by lead obituaries in all the British broadsheets as well as in Le Monde. As a poet and translator he had been internationally renowned since the 1930s. He was the first chronicler in English of the Surrealist movement (whose members numbered the painter Yves Tanguy, the subject of this poem), and an essayist and reviewer of dazzling range. His association with Enitharmon Press dates back to 1970 and in the past decade there have been eight publications which will be lasting testaments of his importance. As well as his poetry, Enitharmon also publishes Gascoyne’s Selected Prose 1934-1996, and his Journal 1936-1937. You can read more about his Selected Poems at Enitharmon’s website here, where it is possible to hear Gascoyne read two other poems from the collection. You can also hear the poet read more of his work at the Poetry Archive. Ian Sinclair reviewed a new biography of Gascoyne in Saturday’s Guardian.

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.

Why

March 26, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Because
he sweet-talks her in places
she doesn’t want to be where her fingertips
turn bloodless from the rhythmic
pushing motions with her hands away away
because
the tea he serves are wills and wonts she never hears him
breathe at night
beside him her dreams are tumbleweed and tell her I am only one
over and over
because
she chews time he hangs her love out to dry and oil paint takes
a minimum of thirty years to dry she can never remember
exactly this dream
because
she has read somewhere six new planets orbit a star five
in a liveable zone only
they are light years from earth and already what we love is time
they spent is slipping
because
why is for Wyoming and weather and cross-eyed it is weightless
and welcome
and also for wasp and for where
because
their love is finding a view she is sick of this small miracle
under the clouds
where he gets in her hair cajoles her outdoes her outwits her
because
she may be an orange peeling itself under a desert sun
when he can’t get over how beautiful yellow is!

by Astrid Alben

Astrid Alben is an Anglo-Dutch poet who grew up in Kent and the Netherlands. She read English Literature and Philosophy at Edinburgh University. Since 2006 her poems and reviews have been published in magazines such as The Wolf, Poetry Review, Drunken Boat, TLS, Stand and Shearsman. Alben has translated the poems of several Dutch contemporary poets, including the complete oeuvre of F. van Dixhoorn. Ai! Ai! Pianissimo is her first collection. She lives in Amsterdam and London. In 2004 Alben co-founded the Pars Foundation. Pars collects the findings – such as architectural sketches, articles, music scores, research data, journal excerpts – of renowned and emerging artists and scientists and binds these in a publications series. Findings on Ice (2007) and Findings on Elasticity (2011) were published as part of the Atlas of Creative Thinking. You can read more poems from Ai! Ai! Pianissimo here, and listen to Astrid Alben read her poems on her website.

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.

Moment

March 19, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

To the woman who handed over
a folded note, I have enough time
—on a thin slip of pinkish paper,
no name or address—you’re first
in mind this January 1.
Where did we meet?
You smiled shyly, stepped away.
Do you pass that note often?
Was it a singular moment?
Maybe you’re a friend dropping lines
when you detect a listener.
And what am I?
There’s a fine soup
to be made of every minute.
A way to stand and stir
so no one catches what you’re doing.
And there’s a sea of gloom
so close under the skin
that loves the taunt of a crisp new year.
Here, this fresh morning
and every to follow,
cabinet of stacked white
bowls, shines wide and plenty.
Each square of calendar
opens its hungry mouth.

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Notes from BOA Editions:

Naomi Shihab Nye, poet, essayist, anthologist, has been a recipient of writing fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Witter Bynner Foundation/Library of Congress. Author or editor of more than thirty volumes, her most recent collection of poems, Transfer, was published by BOA Editions, Ltd. in September of 2011, and is a Finalist for the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award (more details here). She has read her work on National Public Radio’s Prairie Home Companion. Poetry editor for The Texas Observer, Nye has worked as a visiting writer in schools at all educational levels. She is currently serving on the Board of Chancellors for the Academy of American Poets. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.

You can read another poem from the collection here, learn more about Nye’s work in a 2002 interview with PBS host Bill Moyers at this link, and watch her read her found poem ‘One Boy Told Me’ 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.

The Bird-Ghost

March 12, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Like winter breath on a pane of glass
sprayed with fixing medium,
like a burglar’s greasy handprint
or white ectoplasm trace,
that bird of prey had hammered hard
against the built environment.

You could pick out its bent beak’s blunted face
and from a slow-motion film,
the flicker of that wing feather stain.
A smudged bird, arrested in headlong attack,
its output of energy equal to its impact
on the unseen or unforeseen
(our bedroom window pane),
it had made such a stunning mark.

by Peter Robinson

Notes from Shearsman:

Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953, and grew up mainly in Liverpool. He co-edited the magazines Perfect Bound and Numbers while helping organize various Cambridge Poetry Festivals and a Poetry International at the South Bank Centre. His many volumes of poetry include a Selected Poems (2003), Ghost Characters (2006) and The Look of Goodbye (2008). He was awarded the Cheltenham Prize for This Other Life (1988). Both The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems (2002) was a recommendation of the Poetry Book Society, and The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (2007) received the John Florio Prize in 2008. Other publications include four volumes of literary criticism, the most recent being Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible (2010), various edited collections, anthologies, and The Complete Poems, Translations & Selected Prose of Bernard Spencer (2011). The poetry editor for Two Rivers Press, he is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading.

The Returning Sky is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for the first quarter of 2012. You can read more from the collection at this link (pdf), and find out more about Peter Robinson’s life and work from his website and this interview at the Poetry Kit website. You can also hear him read from his work at the Archive of the Now website (search for Peter Robinson).

Bonfire on the Beach

March 5, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Tragedy was short-lived:
where the pine log had split its sides

dying, a spider elbowed out
and flared a brief nothing.

Old as planets the four faces
round this sun. A smudge

on the sand, like a mistake,
will mean we’ve gone.

by Jennie Feldman

Notes from Anvil Press:

Jennie Feldman was born in South Africa, grew up in London and graduated from Oxford, where she studied French. Her translations from Jacques Réda, Treading Lightly: Selected Poems 1961-1975, are also published by Anvil. A former award-winning radio producer and presenter, she is married with two children and lives in Israel. Her new collection Swift will be published by Anvil in April 2012.

In her first collection The Lost Notebook, from which ‘Bonfire on the Beach’ comes, visually arresting and subtly musical poems range from Scotland and the Hebrides to Paris, the Mediterranean and Israel, capturing resonant details and moments and shaping them into a quizzical coherence. Like the small ghost that circles into lamplight in ‘Moth’, the poems are on the wing, “sourcing the radiance of things” in response to the dark. A lost notebook inspires a sequence that interweaves themes of sea, music, memory, love and the charge of language.

Our Reticent Neighbour

February 27, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A bakelite telephone rings on the mortuary desk.
Voice recognition kicks in, whirrs awkwardly.

They’re tapping doors and shutters tonight
the gas-lit length of our street. By the time
you’ve pounded stairs, crossed a lobby
insinuated Yales into mortices, they’ve vanished.

Retread the four flights and try again for sleep,
despite search-beams searing the dark. Despite
unmarked ambulances that trawl the suburbs,
half-trained mastiffs that jangle and snarl.

No one’s readying for this night’s shift.
Word’s out. Declassified resumés are destined
for lock waters. A currency broker wakes
in a Third Street tailors’ doorway, coughing.

Lutheran rooming-house occupants
make hasty atonements on discovering
their Gideon Bibles bookmarked at Samuel.
The town ursologist leaves one safety-gate unlatched.

The bakelite instrument’s terrible jangle subsides.
But surely that’s a normally reticent neighbour
rehearsing his C-sharp-minor mazurkas?

by Anne-Marie Fyfe

Anne-Marie Fyfe was born in Cushendall on Ireland’s Antrim Coast. She now lives in West London where she has taught literature and creative-writing and programmed poetry events and festivals for many years, including organising and hosting the reading series at London’s famous Troubadour coffee house. She was until recently Chair of the Poetry Society.

‘Our Reticent Neighbour’ is from Understudies: New and Selected Poems, compiled from three earlier collections and including a section of new poems. Anne-Marie Fyfe has read throughout the world at festivals and events and on BBC radio and television. The poet Tom Paulin has described her work as having ‘a lyric clarity, an ontological accuracy and unflinching vigilance that is both spiritual and revelatory.’ Understudies: New and Selected Poems includes selections from her previous books: Late Crossing (1999), Tickets from a Blank Window (2002) – both from Rockingham Press, and The Ghost Twin (Peterloo, 2005). You can learn more about Anne-Marie Fyfe on her website, watch her read a poem from this recent collection here, and read an interview she gave to Pam Johnson at Words Unlimited.

In Praise of Reconnecting

February 20, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

When I was a boy in Lushoto school, Tanganyika,
playing marbles with Robin and Henry, one marble bounced in the dust
and sprang off down a steep bank of scrubby grasses.
It was gone at once. The sun-hot air
carried no memory and no trace of its passing.
We stood and looked helplessly down the almost vertical slope.
Nothing but shrivelled grass and dust, and the occasional ant, the occasional fly…
And we would have given up, shrugging our shoulders,
had not Patrick the brother of Henry said: let’s set
another marble to find it, put
another marble where you last saw the lost one –
and Henry picked up a shiny blue marble
from our small supply
and held it between two grass tussocks at the crest of the slope
and let go. It vanished at once among the dusty grass-stems –
and nothing happened a moment –
and the moment grew longer –
and then, from the grass far down on the bank, there came
a quiet, unostentatious clink
I have heard for six decades.

by D.M. Black

D.M. Black is a Scottish poet, born in South Africa in 1941, brought up in Scotland from 1950. He now lives in London and Wiltshire. In 1991 he produced a Collected Poems (Polygon), having previously published four collections of poems and a number of pamphlets. He was included in the first series of Penguin Modern Poets (no. 11, 1968) and his poems have appeared in numerous anthologies. Since 1991 he has published a collection of translations of Goethe, Love as Landscape Painter, and individual poems in a variety of journals including Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry London, Stand, Thumbscrew, and the TLS. You can read two more poems from this new collection on Arc’s site here, and read a review of his work from the Observer here.

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.