Mosquito

November 14, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Fancy this in October, the last
Mosquito of summer left buzzing alone,
Its last fling in my room on the sixth floor
Of a tower block hotel; marooned like one
In the seventh decade with only the past
To look forward to, as the one sure

Topic he can buzz round with some old chum.
‘I had a good bloody summer,’ it seems to say,
‘With waiter and bellman, and that prim peach
Who keeps the consultant’s books across the way.’
And for one last sally it swoops and bites my thumb.
So I bite mine back at it, and reach

For a folded newspaper; all the same aware
How much I resemble it, my own small spites
And hopeless needs reduced to the last fling
Of one who doles out charm in sexless bites
To check-out girls and bank clerks as if to swear,
‘Oh man, I buzz and suck like anything!’

by Alan Brownjohn

Notes from Enitharmon:

Drawing on six decades of work, this new selection charts Alan Brownjohn‘s idiosyncratic take on the issues for which his poetry is known – love (and sex), time (and mortality) and our ecological and cultural environment (threatened and abused).

Brownjohn was born in London in 1931 and was educated at Merton College, Oxford. He worked as a schoolteacher between 1957 and 1965 and lectured at Battersea College of Education and South Bank Polytechnic until he left to become a full-time freelance writer in 1979. A regular broadcaster, reviewer and contributor to journals including the Times Literary Supplement, Encounter and the Sunday Times, Alan Brownjohn was poetry critic for the New Statesman and was Chairman of the Poetry Society between 1982 and 1988. He has also served on the Arts Council literature panel, was a Labour councillor and a candidate for Parliament. In 2007, he received the Writers’ Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award. You can find out more about Brownjohn in these interviews, and hear him read some of his poems at the Poetry Archive.

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.

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.

Songs and Sonnets: 248

November 7, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Look at her. You will see nature’s power
Hanging like the sun over a blind world.

Quickly. Death searches out the gentlest.
Loveliness is mortal. She is looked for.

He sidles up beside a creature in spring
Temper, everything wonderful in one flesh.

My crazed verse is stricken with sun.
Look on this glare before blindness

Rides weeping over the world.

by Francesco Petrarch, trans. Nicholas Kilmer

This translation of ‘Songs and Sonnets: 248’ is copyright © Nicholas Kilmer, 2011. It is reprinted from Songs and Sonnets (Poetica 8), published by Anvil Press, 2011. This is an enlarged edition of Songs and Sonnets from Laura’s Lifetime published by Anvil Press in 1980.

Notes from Anvil Press:

‘Petrarch deserves to be valued as a real man, a careful thinker, a good poet,’ writes Nicholas Kilmer introducing his enlarged selection of the great Italian poet who lived from 1304 to 1374. Free in form yet holding close to the central impulses of Petrarch’s inspiration, Kilmer’s ‘readings’ in this bilingual edition present Petrarch as a confessional poet and a humane moralist of startling honesty.

Nicholas Kilmer lives in Cambridge, MA, USA. Since leaving teaching in 1982 he has worked as an art dealer and curator. As well as poetry and translations, he also writes mysteries set in the art world. You can learn more about Kilmer 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.

The Tadpole Goddess

October 31, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My Lethe, motionless between green thickets
Where flags prick up their rust-stained saffron ears,
You hear no splash of oars, no dust-up of lost souls
Except for dragon-flies a-spin, and tadpoles
That hang like little mud-bubbles, expecting
Their childhood gloom to lift, and life bounce up in them.
Your spirit’s airless, Lethe; boot-top-deep,
You’re less ditch than a mouthful of saliva
Drained by a dental tube. So why this leaning
To breathe into your film of suspect glitters,
And leave my slutty kiss? The final flutter on
Posterity? Perhaps a faster current
Washes the tubers, where my hair would tangle
And pass, and finally drag me to pure water.
I’d travel free of earth, rapid and weightless
And miles out of my depth, my shadow flinging
north and north, my coughed-up lungs your rattles
To play with till their fragments swam like tadpoles.
I’d find my cold Elysium, and to keep.

by Carol Rumens

A poet, novelist, translator, and editor, Carol Rumens was born in South London in 1944. She started writing at school and went on to study (and drop out from) a philosophy degree at London University. She has won many awards for her writing and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Rumens’s latest collection, De Chirico’s Threads, features a play-for-voices about the life of the painter Giorgio de Chirico, as well as a number of occasional poems, such as ‘The Tadpole Goddess’. You can read a number of other poems from the new collection at the link to the book above. In addition to her own work, Carol Rumens selects and comments upon another poet’s writing each week in her blog on the Guardian website here. She also maintains a website 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 new website, where there is a blog about Seren’s news and events. You can also find Seren on Facebook and on Twitter: @SerenBooks.

Young John Clare

October 24, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Helpston, Northamptonshire, 1806

Not often do I find a nest fallen
Among seed pods in autumn, three blue-white
Eggs broken, rags of rucked and yellow flesh
And hinge of beak still beckoning ants, but
One egg sealed, the fluids of birdmaking
A milky galaxy bundled inside—
So smooth and dry I want to swivel it
Wholly into my mouth despite dirt-flecks,
Leave the vowel-sheen off the oval shell,
Tumble that globule of starling within
Until its unspooled trill begins to boil,
Slips its bony case and kindles my voice.
O then would I sing! I would have no choice.

by Michael Waters

Welcome to the Poetry Centre’s new series of Weekly Poems. As always, we are most grateful to our publishers for providing us with such good work, and encourage you to read widely amongst their authors. If you use social media and haven’t already ‘liked’ us on Facebook, do look up our page here, and then follow us on Twitter by searching for @brookespoetry. We hope you enjoy this year’s selection of poems.

Michael Waters’ previous book, Darling Vulgarity, was a finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has published ten collections of poetry, including five from BOA Editions. In 2004, he chaired the poetry panel for the National Book Awards. He is Professor of English at Monmouth University and also teaches in the Drew University MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation. Waters lives with his wife, poet Mihaela Moscaliuc, in Ocean, NJ.

You can watch a video of Michael Waters at a BOA event reading from this collection at this page, and read an interview with him at poetrynet.org.

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 BOA on Facebook, and on Twitter by searching for @boaeditions.

Who’s playing

June 27, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

for Renata Fontenla

who’s playing
the symphony of quivering shadows

the water drips drop by drop
leaves imprints on stones

the sun rises
and small pieces of darkness are
spread on the white wall of your house
shadows

                                            of the olive tree
                                of the lamp post
                                                            and
                                                            of the bird perching on it

the white wall
soaks the shadows
drop by drop
leaf by leaf

from the crevices of the wall
little plants
little shadows sprout

to reach the roots of the tree
the lamp post
the bird
the sun has come to your house

the door is open
but
the house is empty

the sun stands on your threshold in silence

by Amarjit Chandan

Read the Punjabi original of ‘Who’s playing’ [PDF file]

‘Who’s playing’, copyright © Amarjit Chandan, 2010, is taken from Sonata for Four Hands by Amarjit Chandan, a bilingual edition edited & introduced by Stephen Watts, with a foreword by John Berger, and translated by the author with Stephen Watts, Julia Casterton, Shashi Joshi, Amin Mughal, Ajmer Rode and John Welch.

Notes courtesy of Arc:

Amarjit Chandan was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1946, and lives and works in London. He has published seven collections of poetry and four books of essays in Punjabi and his poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines world-wide. He has edited and translated into Punjabi about thirty anthologies of Indian and world poetry and fiction by, among others, Brecht, Neruda, Ritsos, Hikmet, Cardenal, Martin Carter and John Berger. He was one of ten British poets selected by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, on National Poetry Day in 2001, and he participated in the International Aldeburgh Poetry Festival the same year. He has given many readings throughout the world including at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest and, in the USA, at the University of California Santa Barbara and Columbia University. Sonata for Four Hands is the first collection by Amarjit Chandan to be published in the UK.

He has received numerous literary awards for his work, including the Life-time Achievement Award by the Language Department of the Punjab Government, India in 2004; the Life-time Achievement Award by the Panjabis in Britain All-Party Parliamentary Group, London in 2006; and the Life-time Achievement Award by the Anad Foundation New Delhi in November 2009. A short poem by Amarjit Chandan in both Punjabi and English is engraved in granite by the artist Alec Peever and installed in a square in Slough High Street.

Amin Mughal (co-translator) was born in the Punjab in 1935 and has lived in England as a political exile since 1984. He is a critic of Urdu and Punjabi literature. He taught English at Islamia College and Shah Hussain College in Lahore. As a leader of the National Awami Party, he was imprisoned a number of times. He worked for the weekly magazine Viewpoint in Lahore and was editor of Awaz, an Urdu daily published in London.

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.

What Song is Singing in the Silence of the Snow

June 20, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My Russian neighbors slumber, they lisp and sigh, they snore. They turn over towards what door. Open or closed, in the cathedral that is coughing, in the mine where they dig the ore that shines. That burns like coal, that heats the house of hems, the skirts that bloom in paisley, red, green, and blue as Ukrainian domes, as tattoos faded on the backs of ex-prisoners, sleeping before they wake for the early shift, and the sound of their cars sparking up in the dark, and the snow falling all around in hush. What music is left, this Prokovfiev too much to bear, this Shastokovitch that we share, piano keys that stutter charts, that mutter fields of dark earth, sunflowers, the digging and the ditch, the shovel and the spade, the cut above the shoulder blade, the ladder of a stitch, that leaves a scar, that when touched opens, opens a map of the body’s archipelago, the islands of moles that stretch across the Northern sea of your back, and the snow ghosting against our bedroom window, choreographing its thousand falling stars.

by Sean Thomas Dougherty

If you use social media, you can now find the Poetry Centre on Twitter and on Facebook .

‘What Song is Singing in the Silence of the Snow’ is taken from Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line by Sean Thomas Dougherty. Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010. The poem is reprinted by permission of BOA Editions.

Notes courtesy of BOA Editions:

Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author of nine books including Nightshift Belonging to Lorca, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and Except by Falling, winner of the 2000 Pinyon Press Poetry Prize from Mesa State College. His awards include two Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry. Known for his electrifying performances, he has toured extensively across North America and Europe. He received an MFA in poetry from Syracuse University and lives in Erie, Pennsylvania where he teaches writing workshops.

In his newest book, Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line, from which ‘What Song is Singing in the Silence of the Snow’ comes, issues of identity and the various complexities of social and cultural history remain central to Dougherty’s poetics. Sasha is a powerful, grief-driven, deeply-felt collection that still manages to find the beautiful and the true, the little epiphanies that give our lives meaning no matter how ephemeral they might be. You can find out more about Sean Thomas Dougherty in an interview on this site, hear him read a poem from this collection here, and hear him read poems from earlier collections on this page.

“What is more beautiful than a road?” – George Sand

June 13, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It’s raining. We talk, here, where we always talk.
Where the pavement flares roundly in front of the Action Centre.
Next door is a caff; we never go there.
The rain started as you told me what the worst thing is for you.
It was gentle then but now we are really wet and you don’t seem to
have noticed.
At my shoulder are my Grandmas and behind them, their Grandmas.
They stand, a long line of women getting wet on street corners.
None of us are dreaming of stairs.

by Anna Robinson

If you use social media, you can now find us on Twitter and on Facebook, where our page has just reached 100 members.

Notes courtesy of Enitharmon:

Anna Robinson‘s first full collection, The Finders of London, introduces a compelling new voice in poetry. Working-class voices lend strength to Robinson’s own, and with it she mythologizes, catalogues, and searches for the anima and animus of this multi-natured city.

Anna Robinson was born and lives in London. She has an MA in Public History from Ruskin College, Oxford. Her pamphlet, Songs from the flats (Hearing Eye, 2006), was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. In 2001, she became the first recipient of The Poetry School Scholarship and her poetry was featured in the School’s second anthology, Entering the Tapestry, (Enitharmon, 2003). Her work has appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Poetry London, Magma, Brittle Star, the reater, In The Company of Poets (Hearing Eye, 2003), and Oxford Poets 2007 (Oxford/Carcanet). As part of Poetry International and the South Bank Centre’s Trading Places project, Robinson was Poet in Residence in Lower Marsh in 2006. A former tutor in prisons, she is a regular poetry judge for the Koestler Competition and is a founding editor for Not Shut Up! and the newly established Long Poem Magazine.

You can read more of Anna Robinson’s work here, and hear her read ‘The Flats’, another poem from this collection, here.

Waking Late in My Garden: To Magistrate Han and Secretary Lu in Chaoying

June 6, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Farmers have already started to plow
thick smoke is rising from their yards
birds are singing sweetly from garden trees
being retired I was still asleep
unaware the day was so late
I got up and gazed at the azure sky
I stretched my limbs
and felt happy indeed
then I went back below thatched eaves
poured some wine and considered fine men
adjusting their belts on their way to the office
with nothing but documents to fill their days
wishing they were here in the woods
enjoying the sight of mountains and streams
unless you’re living in enlightened times
why not work on yourselves instead

by Wei Ying-wu, translated by Red Pine

Translation © Red Pine, 2009. This week’s poem is taken from In Such Hard Times: The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu, and reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

If you haven’t yet found it, Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre is on Facebook and Twitter.

Born into an aristocratic family in decline, Wei Ying-wu (737–791) served in several government posts without distinction. He disdained the literary establishment of his day and fashioned a poetic style counter to the mainstream: one of profound simplicity centered in the natural world. You can find out more about Wei Ying-wu in a sample from the introduction to In Such Hard Times here.

Bill Porter (who assumes the pen name Red Pine for his translation work), is one of the finest translators of Chinese poetry into English and the first to translate the classical anthology Poems of the Masters. He was born in Los Angeles in 1943, grew up in the Idaho Panhandle, served a tour of duty in the U.S. Army, graduated from the University of California with a degree in anthropology, and attended graduate school at Columbia University. Uninspired by the prospect of an academic career, he dropped out of Columbia and moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After four years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own and eventually found work at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where he interviewed local dignitaries and produced more than a thousand programs about his travels in China.

In October 2010, Red Pine received the American Literary Translation Association’s Lucien Stryk award for In Such Hard Times. Read more poems from the book on this page.

Copper Canyon Press is a nonprofit publisher that believes poetry is vital to language and living. Since 1972, the Press has published poetry exclusively and has established an international reputation for its commitment to authors, editorial acumen, and dedication to the poetry audience. As the preeminent American independent publisher of poetry, Copper Canyon Press fosters the work of emerging, established, and world-renowned poets for an expanding audience. Copper Canyon Press publishes new collections of poetry by both revered and emerging American poets, translations of classical and contemporary work from many of the world’s cultures, re-issues of out-of-print poetry classics, anthologies, and prose books about poetry. Click here to visit the Copper Canyon website.

Malcolm Administered

May 30, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

difficult as in a black box in a dark bar Malcolm
battles admin in the morning unhappy rain sent
by data gods growing up bad business their sick words

smudge Malcolm’s forearm misty in a solo stagger him
till he fluffs his notes and stumbles in his lines
all he wishes a sturdy bench at night in gardens

to sit and be like other people lively and with ending
but something has happened somewhere a hardy friend
may have swung a punch

Malcolm springs back it must be stopped
made error questing now dark eyes
well darker in a violent light of thinking

by Nathan Hamilton

A reminder: Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre is on Facebook and on Twitter.

Nathan Hamilton has had poetry and criticism published in The Guardian, The Spectator, The Rialto, and The Manhattan Review. He co-edits the influential anthology series for emerging poetry, Stop Sharpening Your Knives, and will be compiling a new anthology of young poets for Bloodaxe. You can follow Nathan Hamilton at his blog.

Egg Box is a small independent poetry publisher based in Norwich. You can find out more about the publisher here.

[untitled]

May 23, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Sand martins sea-stone black
gulls sea-foam white
you screech over the harbour
sweep over the churches
circle over the city walls
the breaking waves and me
birds city birds
what tales do you tell of Tallinn

You tell of
how the alarm bells were rung
how mothers ran with their children
when everywhere walls were in the way
and the Russian bombers kept coming and coming
from the east
when it was all burning screaming and crumbling
cracking and bursting

Even now I hear the weeping
this stony medieval beauty’s
this age-old city’s
black dresses rustling
I feel the wind
the soothing soft wind of the present
that makes feathers and sand fly

In the original Estonian:

Kaldapääsukesed merekivimustad
röövkajakad rannavahuvalged
kiljute sadama kohal
sööstate üle kirikute
tiirlete kohal linnamüüri
murdlainete ja minu
linnud linnalinnud
mida te pajatate Tallinnast

Räägite ju
kuidas siin hädakelli löödi
kuidas emad lastega jooksid
kui kõikjal olid müürid ees
ja Vene pommilennukid tulid ja tulid
ida poolt peale
kui kõik põles karjus ja varises
pragunes ja lõhkes

Kuulen praegu veel nuttu
selle kivise keskaegse kaunitari
iidvana linna
leinakleitide kahinat
tunnen tuult
vaigistavat pehmet olevikutuult
mis lennutab sulgi ja liiva

by Kristiina Ehin

A reminder: Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre is on Facebook and on Twitter.

Notes courtesy of Arc:

Kristiina Ehin was born in Rapla, Estonia in 1977. She received an M.A. in Comparative and Estonian Folklore from Tartu University in 2004. She has published five volumes of poetry in her native Estonia and has won a number of prizes there, including Estonia’s most prestigious poetry prize for her fourth volume, written during a year spent as a nature reserve warden on an uninhabited island off Estonia’s north coast. She has also published a book of short stories and written a play. The Drums of Silence (Oleander Press, Cambridge, 2007), a volume of her selected poems in English translation, was awarded the Poetry Society’s Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation in 2007.

The Scent of Your Shadow, from which this poem is taken, was the Poetry Book Society’s Recommended Translation for summer 2010, and features an introduction by the poet Sujata Bhatt. In her introduction, Bhatt describes Ehin as ‘a visionary poet with a discerning and distinctive voice, a voice resonant with genuine passion, close to the primordial world of spirits and myths, but also rooted in history and in contemporary life.’

You can read more selections from the book at this link, and find out more about Kristiina Ehin here.