Swan, As the Light Was Changing

February 13, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Fall, when everything was turning
dark. & the fog moved in
like a wolf, circling the park,

& the holiday children parading
in the bodies of witches & bears.
All skins gleamed orange

as the sun made tricks out of us,
brilliant as new coins or foxes
until the sun left, all the way,

& the only light, then, was
the white of the swan,
animal in the park pond. So long—

I held it in my eye the way a person
sometimes carries a flash,
again & again; like light, that swan shape burned

into the screen of my eyes. & when I stood
to leave it, the white peony of its body,
for life, had marked my visions. Now everything

I see, even today, even this “trace”: a swan.

by Aracelis Girmay

Aracelis Girmay was born and raised in Southern California, with roots in Puerto Rico, Eritrea, and African America. She is also the author of the collage-based picture book changing, changing, and the poetry collection Teeth, for which she was awarded a GCLA New Writers Award. Girmay has taught youth writing workshops in schools and community centers for the past ten years. She is assistant professor of poetry writing at Hampshire College, and also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Drew University in New Jersey. Kingdom Animalia won the 2011 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and was recently shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. You can read another poem from the book at BOA’s site here, and watch Aracelis Girmay read from her work 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.

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 Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer, 2004-05

January 30, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

—as he damned well deserves to be
after all these ticky-tacky years
soiling and being soiled
leaded and unleaded, head heavy with Cremnitz
living the life of a prize smear
staying up half the night with rags . . .

What woman wouldn’t go down—
be bare on the bare floor
sniffing his oily woodwork
keeping his thighs company
checking their health, their tree-stump
strength and protean quality?

Gallantly he pits her presence
against the mess he’s made of wall
his fury of backdrop
their crib of a love nest
his gloriously free comic routine
and her bliss, there’s no mistaking it.

Every other woman can go jump.
And the gormless feminist men, too.
Brave the fire that’s in submission.
See how ignitable she is—
like that bundle of sticks on the stool.
Brushes, some say, but they’re ready to burn.

He’s even made a clearing in the room.
They could swing a dozen cats.
The wall, every stab and jet, ripples with mirth.
And what does he say about what
he’s been doing with faces lately?
Those not hers, the wild golden ones—

I’m thinking of Ria, a naked portrait
a face that’s pitted, ecstatically roughed—
an attack that could be viscous
as if he’d break each atom open.
Yes, he says, wait and it will settle
paint abides by Egyptian rules.

Meanwhile all naked admirers
will cling to what they must—
what’s oily, hot, conflagrations of riposte.

by Barry Hill

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Notes from Shearsman:

Barry Hill was born in Melbourne in 1943, and completed his tertiary education in Melbourne and London, where he worked as an educational psychologist and a journalist. He has been writing full time since 1975, living by the sea in Queenscliff, Victoria. He has won major national awards for poetry, history and the essay. Penguin and Faber have anthologized his short fiction, and stories have been translated into Chinese and Japanese. He has written many pieces for radio. His libretto, Love Strong as Death was performed at The Studio, at the Sydney Opera House in 2004.

Broken Song: T G H Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (Knopf, 2002), Hill’s magnum opus on Australian poetics, which won a National Biography Award and the 2004 Tasman-Pacific Bi-Centennial Prize for History, has been described as ‘one of the great Australian books’; it was reviewed in the TLS in 2003. His poetry has been published in the Kenyon Review, The Literary Review and Agenda, as well as the major literary magazines in Australia, including the annual anthologies, Best Australian Poems. In 2008 he won the prestigious Judith Wright Prize for his reflections on revolutionary romanticism, Necessity: Poems 1996-2006. Along with As We Draw Ourselves (2007) this book also includes his responses to living in Italy, and his Buddhist travels in India and East Asia. Lines for Birds (2011) is a collaboration with the painter, John Wolseley.

Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud, is Barry Hill’s ninth collection. Read more about the book on this page, and sample several more poems from it here (pdf). An article about Hill’s response to nakedness in Freud’s work and the writing of the book, including further poems, is available to read here.

Between 1998 and 2008 he was Poetry Editor of the national newspaper, The Australian and between 2005 and 2008 he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is currently the recipient of an Australia Council Fellowship, which enables him to spend time in Kyoto and Calcutta while writing a book called The Peace Pagoda, about the travels of Rabindranath Tagore in Japan.

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.

The Midnight Hare

January 23, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Gold-foot, loping, leaping to light,
twisting to the smile on the silent field,
flying to the drum of the full moon dance,
hops the hedge, legs spread loose,
lank, then taut, tight, sprightly
springs, flips to her form, then:
still.

Spellbound, sleek, almost
invisible, low on dark ground,
inscrutable hieroglyph of being, seeing
secrets deep behind honey eyes,
old as time, cold as stone,
alone with night, a million stars,
counting.

Up again, snatched from dreams,
darting to the mewse, the Old Ways,
pitched like a soft stone, silhouetted
on rising silver, high over water,
low across earth, drawn to the down,
the husk hushed, then wild, moonstruck,
shadow boxing things unseen.

by Oz Hardwick

Notes from Oversteps:

Oz Hardwick, a York-based writer, photographer, lecturer and musician, has published widely, including two previous collections. He also writes on art and literary history, and is Professor of English at Leeds Trinity University College. As Paul Hardwick, he has recently published an impressive book about English misericords, English Medieval Misericords: The Margins of Meaning (Boydell Press, 2011). You can read more about Oz Hardwick at this link, find out more about his music here, and read a further poem from The Illuminated Dreamer at this page.

Oversteps Books publishes some of the best in contemporary poetry, covering a wide range of established and new poets. There is a rigorous editorial policy, and the books are produced to the highest standards both in terms of editorial accuracy and the beauty of the finished books. Oversteps poets also give regular poetry readings at festivals and other events. Oversteps Books was founded in 1992 by the poet and translator, Anne Born. The poet and lecturer, Alwyn Marriage, became Managing Editor in 2008. You can find out more about the press and sign up for Oversteps’s mailing list here.

The Ballad of the Moon, Moon

January 16, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The moon came to the forge
with her bustle of tuberose.
The boy looks and looks.
The boy is looking at her.
In the stirred night air
the moon sways her arms
and bears, lubricious and pure,
her breasts of hard tin.
‘Run, moon, moon.
If the gypsies come
they will turn your heart
into necklaces and white rings.’
‘Boy, let me dance.
When the gypsies come
they will find you on the anvil
with your little eyes shut.’
‘Run, moon, moon, moon
for I already hear their horses.’
‘Boy, let me be, do not step
on my starchy whiteness.’

The rider came closer,
drumming on the plain.
Inside the forge
the boy’s eyes are shut.
Bronze and dream, the gypsies
came through the olive grove.
Their hands held high,
their eyes half closed.

How the owl sings,
ay, how it sings in the tree!
The moon crosses the sky
with a child by the hand.

Inside the forge the gypsies
scream and weep.
The air is keeping watch.
The air watching over her.

by Federico García Lorca

Fascinated by the folk music of his native Spain, Federico García Lorca wrote two books inspired by gypsy rhythms: Poem of the Deep Song (on the world of flamenco and cante jondo) and the best-selling Gypsy Ballads, from which ‘The Ballad of the Moon, Moon’ is taken. In Poet in New York (written 1929-1930) he turns the American city into an image of universal loneliness, and in tragedies like Yerma, Blood Wedding, and The House of Bernarda Alba he takes the measure of human longing and of the social repression that would contribute to his early death (he was shot by right-wing forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War).

In Romancero gitano/Gypsy Ballads, carefully translated by Jane Durán and Gloria García Lorca (Lorca’s niece), the poet transforms into metaphor and myth the fantasy and reality of a marginalized people. Lorca described Romancero gitano as ‘the poem of Andalusia … A book that hardly expresses visible Andalusia at all, but where hidden Andalusia trembles.’ Seeking to relate the nature of his proud and troubled region of Spain, he drew on a traditional gypsy form; yet the homely, unpretentious style of these poems barely disguises the undercurrents of conflicted identity never far from Lorca’s work. You can find out more about this bilingual, illustrated edition here, more about Jane Duran here, and more about Lorca himself at the Fundación Federico García Lorca website 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.

Covenant

January 9, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Thick weave of winter. Skeins of brown
and dun. Wrapped in these

garments, the sky
heavy on our backs,

we stand in the rainfield
and make a covenant with the silence:

let us trample this trampled ground
as the long-eyed horses do,

go cross-field through rain
and ask for only

blue clouds, slow across
hilltops. Dark footholds of earth.

by Nina Bogin

Notes from Anvil Press:

Nina Bogin writes of her second collection that she has ‘drawn together poems that deal with the personal – family, friendship, love and loss; poems about landscape and place; and poems that try to come to grips with the larger world and its chaos. Uniting the poems is a common thread: the natural world and its impenetrable presence which, though threatened, remains a source of renewal and, therefore, of faith.’

Nina Bogin was born in New York City in 1952 and grew up on Long Island. She has been living in France since 1976. She works as a translator and as a teacher of English. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines in the United States, England and France. She received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1989 and published her first volume of poems, ‘In the North’, in the same year. A new collection, The Lost Hare, will be published by Anvil in April 2012.

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.

Six Million Hand-driven Rivets

December 19, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My father is dying – tentatively, unhappily –
and I give him a bridge.

Precisely, I give him Sydney Harbour Bridge,
this Christmas, this turning year,

as I travel under it, gazing up at all its iron.
Girder-strong, massive, the old world built this

into the new. There are photos of Englishmen
in 1930 in waistcoats and cufflinks

and neat bowties, straddling the sky, hammering
rivets into air. My father would approve:

How many rivets? he’d ask me.
Facts, hard facts. I’d tell him the answers

to ease the time – and the number of man hours,
the number of years, before they could journey

over the water with perfect confidence,
step on step, to reach the other side.

by Robert Seatter

This is the last of the weekly poems for this year. Poems will start appearing in your inbox again on Monday 9th January. Many thanks to all our readers for your continued support of the Weekly Poem. If you’re on Facebook or Twitter, don’t forget you can catch up with us there. In the meantime, the Poetry Centre hopes that you enjoy a very happy Christmas and an excellent start to 2012.

Robert Seatter has published two previous collections with Seren: Travelling to the Fish Orchards and On the Beach with Chet Baker. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked as an EFL teacher in Italy and France, as an actor and journalist, and also in publishing and broadcasting. He lives in London where he currently works for the BBC. You can read further selections from Writing King Kong here (click on the book’s cover), and here, and you can see and hear Robert Seatter reading from his work on this page.

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 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.

Backpacking Across Pangea

December 12, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

In its last throes, when the earth huddled back together
for warmth, a single crust floating in a soup bowl,
you could walk ten thousand miles and never reach the sea.

We packed The Rough Guide to Pangea, a work in seven parts,
a stack of t-shirts, and a compass that did nothing but spin.
We crossed the great land bridge that rose out of the Channel.

We stepped from Eurasia to Gondwana while they scanned
our retinas and rummaged through our DNA.
In the mountains of Oman, we met musicians

who plied us with Yak blood and sweet potatoes
while we listened to their songs of a separated world: the spindle
of central America; the anachronism of island nations.

In the old Aegean, the sole of my boot peeled off
like a transfer; within six steps the other did the same.
Our navigation implants made our heads ache.

This was many years ago, before the mantle
began to melt, when you could tread the earth in bare feet,
all of the world a golden outback.

In the hills of Matabeleland, the devil appeared to us
in the form of a toad, while an angel drove by
disguised as a tractor driver with a swollen hand.

It was possible we had skipped an injection or two.
When we awoke we found ourselves on a white headland
with a single red hut selling herring and Coca-Cola.

We returned on the Trans-Pangea Express – forty three days
without a stop. On the train a beautiful old woman smiled at us
with our golden hair and brown skin

while we drifted into sleep; we dreamt of the slow dance
of the continents joining hands in a ceilidh of lithospheric plates
parting and drifting back together.

We arrived on The Last Night of The Proms
and sang ‘Rule Pangea, Pangea Rules the Waves’.
As the waters rose, we waved our single flag of woe.

by Christopher James

The One Who Writes

December 5, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You write. About the things that already exist.
And they say you fantasize.

You keep quiet. Like the sunken nets
of poachers. Like an angel
who knows what the night may bring.

And you travel. You forget,
so that you can come back.

You write and you don’t want to remember
the stone, the sea, the believers
sleeping with their hands apart.

by Nikola Madzirov

‘The One Who Writes’ is copyright © Nikola Madzirov, 2011. It is reprinted by permission of BOA Editions from Remnants of Another Age, translated by Peggy and Graham W. Reid, Magdalena Horvat and Adam Reed, and with a Foreword by Carolyn Forché. BOA has today featured Nikola Madzirov’s work on its blog.

Notes from BOA Editions:

Born into a family of Balkan Wars refugees in 1973 in Strumica, Macedonia, poet, essayist and translator Nikola Madzirov has emerged as one of the most powerful voices of the new European poetry. His work has been translated into thirty languages and published in collections and anthologies in the US, Latin America, Europe and Asia. Two short films based on his poetry have been shot in Bulgaria and Croatia. Oliver Lake, the contemporary jazz composer who has previously collaborated with Björk and Lou Reed, has composed music based on Madzirov’s poetry, which was performed at the Jazz-Poetry Concert in Pittsburgh in 2008. You can read another poem from Remnants of Another Age here, and a recent interview with Madzirov here. You can also see and hear Madzirov reading from his work in this video from March 2011.

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. This year BOA celebrates its thirty-fifth anniversary. To find out more about BOA Editions, click here. You can also find and ‘like’ BOA on Facebook, and follow the publisher on Twitter by searching for @boaeditions.

Smoke

November 28, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

In order to revive the orange age, you must assemble all of the witnesses, all those who suffered, those who laughed and even the youngest and those who were furthest away.

You must rekindle your grandmothers; make them come with their great crucifixes of cinnamon in tow and well-nailed with those large aromatic cloves, just as when they lived surrounded by fire and syrup.

You must interrogate the gillyflower and harass her with questions, until not a single purple detail is lost.

You must talk with the butterfly, seriously, and savage roosters with their hoarse voices and great silver talons.

And the veronicas shall come from way back when, pale veronicas—wandering among the flowers and smoke and trees—and the face of sugar, the portrait of the figs shall return.

And advise the wisteria so that they bring their old resemblance to grape. And the populous pomegranate, and the procession of yuccas, and the guardian of the loquat tree, yellow and hateful, and my mane of hair from that time, all of it full of witches and planets, and the wandering livestock and the angel of the hills and of the amethysts—with one pink and one blue wing —and the lemon blossoms, as big as spikenards.

And all of the silverplated cages shall come and all of the colored bottles and the keys and the fans and the Christmas cake standing on its cherry stilts.

In order to revive the orange age, you cannot forget anyone, you must call everyone, most importantly the smoke man, who is the most serious and the most delicate and the most beloved.

And you must invite God.

by Marosa di Giorgio, translated by Susan Briante

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This section from ‘Smoke’ is copyright © Shearsman, 2011; translation © Susan Briante, 2011. It is reprinted by permission of Shearsman Books from Hotel Lautréamont: Contemporary Poetry from Uruguay , edited by Kent Johnson and Roberto Echavarren.

Notes from Shearsman:

Named in homage to Isidore Ducasse, the Uruguayan-French poet who wrote Maldoror under the name Comte de Lautréamont, and with a knowing nod to John Ashbery’s book of the same title, Hotel Lautréamont is the first major English-language survey of contemporary Uruguayan poetry for some 40 years. It features the work of Roberto Appratto, Nancy Bacelo, Amanda Berenguer, Selva Casal, Marosa di Giorgio, Roberto Echavarren, Eduardo Espina, Gustavo Espinosa, Silvia Guerra, Circe Maia, Eduardo Milán and Idea Vilariño. The volume is bilingual. You can find out more about the book from Shearsman’s page dedicated to it, and read further selections from the volume here.

Marosa di Giorgio (1932–2004) was born in Salto in Uruguay to Italian immigrant parents. After she studied law and briefly acted in a professional theatre company, she took a job in Salto’s municipal government and devoted her free time to reading extensively and writing fifteen books of poetry, three books of short stories and one novel. She is increasingly considered to be one of Latin America’s greatest poets of the 20^th century. You can learn more about Marosa di Giorgio at the official website for her work here (in Spanish, but with a translation option), and hear her read from her work at this link (in Spanish).

Susan Briante is the author of two collections of poetry: Pioneers in the Study of Motion (Ahsahta 2007) and Utopia Minus (2011). Her translations of Latin American writers have appeared in Bomb, Translation Review, and Reversible Monuments (Copper Canyon Press) among others. From 1992–1997, she lived in Mexico City where she worked for the magazines Artes de México and Mandorla.

River is the Plural of Rain

November 21, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Each of us is water Carole Satyamurti

From a mouth of soil among sedge and willow
water calls out on its journey
to all its other selves: follow

follow us from the shallows into the deep. Below
the surface currents strain their sinews
spilling white foam over stones to follow

the earth vein where it flows,
furling and ravelling together
as stream follows after stream.

Its pulse is the undertow,
its pores are the rain,
and every drop is dreaming of sky.

by Rebecca Gethin

Notes from Oversteps:

Rebecca Gethin’s first collection, River is the Plural of Rain, named after this poem, was published in 2009 by Oversteps Books. Rebecca lives on Dartmoor in Devon, but also returns frequently to the mountainous valley in Italy where her ancestors lived. She teaches poetry at Dartmoor Prison, and has recently published her first novel, Liar Dice. You can find out more about Rebecca Gethin at this link, where you can also read another poem from the collection.

Oversteps Books publishes some of the best in contemporary poetry, covering a wide range of established and new poets. There is a rigorous editorial policy, and the books are produced to the highest standards both in terms of editorial accuracy and the beauty of the finished books. Oversteps poets also give regular poetry readings at festivals and other events. Oversteps Books was founded in 1992 by the poet and translator, Anne Born (1924–2011). The poet and lecturer, Alwyn Marriage, became Managing Editor in 2008. You can find out more about the press here, and sign up for Oversteps’s mailing list.