exit

February 14, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

it’s not just in dream that it’s often happened to
me that I’ve been unable to find the exit through
the right door got into trains going in the wrong
direction it was a station I only half recognised
that was a fright but I was under glass and was
fixed to that spot and could not move because
I had just got to that place in the book I began
to sense surging flushes in my blood I walked
around in the woods and could feel warm light
and slackly let myself be led to an edge images
came but they were not giving me pain any more
like they used to for beneath dead treetops the
wilderness was coming alive with fern and fox-
glove and I went back into the gullies of streets
incomprehensibly distant in my blood in its
suites of rooms without windows I walked and I
ran in circles for a while until something beneath
my jacket heaved I clutched at it with my right
hand and held it and breathed hard at the edge
of the platform I bent forward and saw the tracks

by Norbert Hummelt

Copyright © Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 2007. Translation copyright © Catherine Hales, 2010. ‘exit’ is taken from the German volume Totentanz, and appears in English in Berlin Fresco — Selected Poems by Norbert Hummelt, translated by Catherine Hales, Shearsman Books, 2010. It is reprinted here by permission of Shearsman Books.

Notes courtesy of Shearsman Books:

A poet, essayist, publisher, and translator, Norbert Hummelt was born in Neuss am Rhein in 1962. From 1983 to 1990 he studied German and English in Cologne and since 1991 he has been a freelance writer. He has been living in Berlin since 2006, having previously also lived in New York, Dublin and Amsterdam. Since 2005 he has been publisher of the Lyrikedition 2000, which publishes new editions of out-of-print 20th century poetry collections, as well as first collections by new poets. He is also editor of the journal Text+Kritik. He has taught at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut (German Literature Institute) in Leipzig and at the Universität der Künste (University of the Arts) in Berlin. He has translated the poetry of W.B. Yeats, Wordsworth and Inger Christensen, as well as T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and The Waste Land. You can read more from the book here, and hear Hummelt read from his poems (in German, with a number of translations of the texts) at this page.

The translator, Catherine Hales, grew up in Surrey, but now lives near the Spree in Berlin, where she works as a freelance translator. Her poetry and translations of contemporary German poetry have appeared in many magazines, including Tears in the Fence, Poetry Salzburg Review, Fire, Stride, and Shadowtrain. Catherine Hales’s poem ‘temporary lodging’ was the Brookes weekly poem for 15 November, 2010.

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.

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.

[Two untitled poems]

February 7, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

[untitled 1]

To return to the poplar its weight,
I would have to reject narrative’s convulsed form.
To accomplish
a literary work,
I would have to oust the stage of review
without
worsening the rest of it.
Meanwhile,
all is impossible to me and language exploits the fact.

Pour rendre son poids au peuplier,
il faudrait
que je repousse la figure convulsée du récit.
by François Jacqmin
Pour accomplir
une œuvre littéraire,
il me faudrait évincer le temps du compte rendu
sans
exaspérer le reste.
En attendant,
tout m’est impossible et le verbe en abuse

[untitled 2]

The landscape is fixed. It is that powdery
yoke
which bogs down in its whiteness. .
Its axles
sink deep in the despotic innocence
of the snow.
Though not quite lost, we start to dread
nowhere, and especially
that inclement silence
which thunders against the affront of all travel.

Le paysage est arrêté. Il est cet attelage
yoke poudreux
qui s’enlise dans sa blancheur
Ses essieux
s’enfoncent dans l’innocence despotique
de la neige.
Sans être égarés, nous commençons à redouter
le nulle part, et surtout
ce silence inclément
qui tonne contre l’affront de tout voyage.

These two untitled poems are taken from The Book of the Snow by François Jacqmin, translated by Philip Mosley, with an introduction by Clive Scott (Arc ‘Visible Poets’ translation series No. 28), and published by Arc Publications.

Notes courtesy of Arc:

François Jacqmin, acknowledged as one of the foremost francophone Belgian poets of the latter half of the twentieth century, was born in 1929 in Horion-Hozémont in the province of Liège. In 1940 his family fled to England to escape the German occupation. He learned English in a school run by Spanish Jesuits, discovered English literature, and wrote his first unpublished poems in English. He returned to Belgium in 1948 and rediscovered his native language and literature. His association with the irreverent, experimental group that formed around the magazine Phantomas inspired him to develop a distinctive identity as a poet inspired by art, nature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. His three major volumes of poetry are Les Saisons (1979), Le Domino gris (1984), and Le Livre de la neige (1990). Eléments de géométrie, a volume of prose poems written a few years before his death in 1992, was published in 2005. You can learn more about Jacqmin and the translation here, watch a short film about him here (in French), and read another poem from this book here.

The translator, Philip Mosley, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He earned his M.A. in European literature and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of East Anglia. Among his book publications are Split Screen: Belgian Cinema and Cultural Identity, Ingmar Bergman: The Cinema as Mistress, and Georges Rodenbach: Critical Essays. He has translated The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlinck, Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach, Tea Masters, Teahouses by Werner Lambersy, and October Long Sunday by Guy Vaes. In 2008 he was awarded the Prix de la Traduction Littéraire by the French Community of Belgium for his translations of Belgian authors into English.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. Find out more about Arc by visiting the publisher’s website, where there are discounts available on Arc books.

A Diamond is not a Stone

January 31, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

A car is not a purse
I want to say to the man
down the road whose house
is so full of things
he can’t throw away
he buys car after car,
fills them with newspapers
he plans to read, letters
he hopes to answer.

The cars still run
when he abandons them,
weighed down like trees
with too much fruit,
like the trees in his yard.

by Wyn Cooper

Notes courtesy of BOA Editions:

Wyn Cooper has published four books of poems: The Country of Here Below (Ahsahta Press, 1987), The Way Back (White Pine Press, 2000), and Postcards from the Interior, (BOA Editions, 2005), and, most recently, Chaos is the New Calm (BOA Editions, 2010), as well as a chapbook, Secret Address (Chapiteau Press, 2002). His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Slate, and more than 75 other magazines. His poems are included in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry, including The Mercury Reader, Outsiders, and Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms.

Chaos is the New Calm, from which ‘A Diamond is not a Stone’ comes, is a book of sonnets and sonnet-like poems, some rhymed, some not. Starting with the idea of the sonnet as a fourteen-line lyric poem, this book plays with the form, putting rhymes in unusual places, inventing new stanza forms, and addressing an unusually broad variety of subject matter. You can find out more about the book here, and more about Wyn Cooper 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. To find out more about BOA Editions, visit the website.

Accents

January 24, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I lay down under the cherry trees
in our garden where the grass was balding

a little, and looked up into the branches.
I was learning the catechism,

and I went over a few questions
and answers as absolutes; I was thinking

of a dance I had been to on a farm
a dress I wore, something I said

too revealing of feeling;
those chicks left in an open crate

in the shade behind the farm, near a wall,
came into my mind. I thought of how

they might have struggled all wet
out of their eggs, like light escaping;

Senorita Morales came into my thoughts too,
her long fingernails when she pointed out

where the accents should go over the words
on the blackboard, and the way she said

penultima silaba and antepenultima;
and all these thoughts lightly hooked together

like young girls walking down the street
holding each others’ hands by the little finger.

by Jane Duran

Notes courtesy of Enitharmon:

As a young girl, Jane Duran moved to Chile with her family, travelling from New York to Valparaiso on the Santa Barbara, one of the Grace Line fleet. This long journey, passing through the Panama Canal and down the Pacific coast of Latin America, has inspired her collection of poems Graceline. These meditative poems cross over continually between illusion and reality, past and present. Although they evoke the journey, and the extraordinary landscapes of Chile, they also explore darker undercurrents. Her sequence ‘Panama Canal’ evokes the terrors of the Canal’s construction; a sequence on the regime of Augusto Pinochet (‘Invisible Ink’) interweaves cityscapes and landscapes with allusions to the cruelties and bereavements of that time. But the poems are also about her life as a young girl in Chile, the impact of the Chilean landscape on her, and convey a powerful feeling of love for that country. You can learn more about her book here, and more about Jane Duran here. At the second link you can hear her reading from her own work.

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. Discover more about Enitharmon here.

Flood Song

January 17, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I sensed the knife in your past,
its sharp edge shanked from the canyon stream—
a silver trickle between the book jacket,
nihízaad peeled open inside a diabetic mouth.

The waters of my clans
flash flooded—
I fell from the white of its eyes—
our fathers had no children to name their own
no baby’s cry to place between argument and arguments.

The commercial flashed a blue path
across the lakes of our veins
the bluest glint, a rock in the ear
told our tongues entwined,

that I was reaching for the corn field inside you,
that I was longing to outlive this compass
pointing toward my skull
gauzed inside this long terrible whisper

damp in a desert canyon,
white-washed by the ache of fog lights
reaching to unravel my combed hair.

by Sherwin Bitsui

‘Flood Song’ is taken from the book Flood Song, and reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Notes courtesy of Copper Canyon:

“I bite my eyes shut between these songs.” So begins Flood Song, a concentrated, interweaving, painterly sequence in which Native tradition scrapes against contemporary urban life. In his second book, Sherwin Bitsui intones landscapes real and imagined, populated with the wrens, winds, and reeds of the high desert and constructed from the bricks and gasoline of the city. Reverent to his family’s indigenous traditions while simultaneously indebted to European modernism and surrealism, Bitsui is at the forefront of a younger generation of Native writers. His poems are highly imagistic and constantly in motion, drawing as readily upon Diné (Navajo) myths, customs, and medicine songs as they do contemporary language and poetics. “I map a shrinking map,” Bitsui writes, a map tribal and individual, elemental and modern — and utterly astonishing.

Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is Diné of the Tódích’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tlizílaaní (Many Goats Clan). He holds an A.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program and is currently completing his studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He is the recipient of a 2005 Lannan Foundation Residency in Marfa, Texas, and the Whiting Writers Award in 2006. He also works for literacy programs that bring poets and writers into public schools where there are Native American student populations. Bitsui has published his poems in American Poet, The Iowa Review, Frank (Paris), LIT, and elsewhere. His poems were also anthologized in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Flood Song is the Winner of the 2010 PEN Open Book Award and a 2010 American Book Award. You can read more about Bitsui here and at his own website here, and more of his work here.

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 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.

My Brother Was Writing Poetry

January 10, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

While I was writing my verses, my brother was working on his boat. He carefully dismantled the seats. He upturned the boat, sanded it down to white (making the cherry-tree turn white). Then he took it to a master to be given a number, to pass the test more easily. He applied putty for hours, then an undercoat, the way people polish teeth against tartar or put plasters on grazed knees. He circled it and wondered what to christen it. He named it after the hero of his favourite film. While I was working, my brother was writing poetry.

by Tsvetanka Elenkova

‘My Brother Was Writing Poetry’ is taken from the volume The Seventh Gesture by Tsvetanka Elenkova, translated by Jonathan Dunne, and reprinted by permission of Shearsman Books.

Notes courtesy of Jonathan Dunne and Shearsman Books:

Tsvetanka Elenkova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1968. She is the author of three poetry collections – The Stakes of the Legion, Amphipolis of the Nine Roads and The Seventh Gesture – together with a book of essays, Time and Relation. Her work has been translated into twelve languages and, in English, has appeared in magazines such as Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and Absinthe. An English edition of The Seventh Gesture, which Sarah Crown called ‘an unusual, uplifting collection’, was published by Shearsman Books in 2010. She translates poetry from English, Greek and Macedonian, including collections by Raymond Carver, Bogomil Gjuzel and Fiona Sampson, and has been a guest at several literary festivals (Vilenica, Poeteka, Tinos). Her translation of the anthology of Indian mystic poetry Speaking of Siva was nominated for the Hristo G. Danov National Literary Award in 2000. She is the Bulgarian Writers Association’s representative at the International Writers and Translators Centre of Rhodes, and also co-directs the publishing house Small Stations Press. You can find out more about Elenkova here, and read more of her work here.

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.

Virgin Snow

December 20, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It happened, not as we had hoped,
underneath the stars, or along the banks
of a lake, or in an empty pasture,
but shut in amidst a virgin
snowstorm. It was among the coats and castoffs
on the bed in one of our parents’ bedrooms,
they having vacated the premises for some exotic island
just, we naively imagined, so we might have our tryst.
The sensation, if I had to describe it,
was like stepping over the edge
of a cliff into water and not quite knowing
how deep the fall or whether we’d surface again.
I wish I could say it was sublime,
but here is what I remember:
the smoke and liquor like a halo
over the room, the scratch
of his rough jeans on my thighs,
the parting, swift as an axe
splitting wood in half.
Downstairs the party in full
motion as if Bacchus himself
were hosting the celebration
fully aware,
as the ball dropped
to announce the beginning of the new year,
and sailed down the long tunnel of Eros,
of what temptation would lead to.
There were no bells,
no feelings of enlightenment.
Later when I was alone in my bed
I thought one thing: What if it was true,
that in the end he was irrelevant?
I waited all night but not once did I hear
the nightingale fill the sky with reason,
or glimpse the sun muscle through the sky
to announce the birth of the miraculous.

by Jill Bialosky

This is the final weekly poem before the Christmas vacation. Poems will return to your inbox in the week beginning 10th January. The Poetry Centre hopes that all our readers enjoy a very merry Christmas and an excellent start to 2011! Thank you very much for your support of the weekly poem this year.

‘Virgin Snow’ is taken from The Skiers by Jill Bialosky (Arc International Poets, 2010), published by Arc Publications.

Notes courtesy of Arc:

Jill Bialosky was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She studied at Ohio University and received an M.A. in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She is the author of the poetry collections The End of Desire, Subterranean, a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Intruder, a finalist for the 2009 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in journals such as Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review and The Atlantic Monthly. She is author of the novels House Under Snow and The Life Room and co-edited, with Helen Schulman, the anthology Wanting a Child. Jill Bialosky is an editor at W. W. Norton & Company and lives in New York City. The Skiers is Jill Bialosky’s first collection to be published in the UK. You can find out more about Jill Bialosky here, and read more of her work here.

Big Band Theory

December 13, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It all began with music,
with that much desire to be

in motion, waves of longing
with Nothing to pass through,

the pulsing you feel before
you hear it. The darkness couldn’t

keep still, it began to sway,
then there were little flashes

of light, glints of brass
over the rumbling percussion,

the reeds began to weep and sing,
and suddenly the horns

tore bigger holes in the darkness—
we could finally see

where the music was coming from:
ordinary men in bowties and black

jackets. But by then we had already
danced most of the night away.

by Sharon Bryan

This poem is taken from Sharp Stars by Sharon Bryan (2009).

Notes from BOA Editions:

Winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for 2009

As she’s shown throughout her career, Sharon Bryan is a rare breed of contemporary poet. A practitioner of acrobatic language that probes matters philosophical and psychological, Bryan is also playful and humorous, and this mixture of attributes reveals itself in each of these tightly-knit, succulent poems. Concerned with the interplay of matter and spirit, Bryan’s poems in this collection also address, and sometimes blend, issues of biology, astronomy, and music. The poems in Sharp Stars, from which “Big Band Theory” is taken, represent more than ten years of work. Of her last book, Flying Blind, published in 1996, Small Press wrote: “In Sharon Bryan’s most effective poems, word play is a matter of life and death… Bryan won’t let any ordinary phrase off the hook as she dangles it, circling in brilliant focus.” Indeed, in Sharp Stars we find her unraveling common phrases or sayings in the all-too-human desire for transcendence, a transcendence Sharon Bryan accomplishes with her own blend of levity and gravitas, always mindful of the complicated, vexing dynamic of body and soul. You can learn more about Sharon Bryan by listening to an interview here.

Awater

December 6, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The small salon is ﬂanked by shelves and cupboards
and so awash with the overpowering reek
of toiletries that it seems smaller still.
Awater – I must admit I’m quite relieved
to see him, he’d almost given me the slip –
is sitting at a round ceramic sink
wrapped tightly in a cloak of starched white linen.
The barber does his job and I pretend
to be the next in line and take a seat.
I’ve never seen Awater closer by
than in this mirror; never has he appeared
so absolutely inaccessible.
Between the bottles, glittering and splintered,
he rises in the mirror like an iceberg
the scissors’ shining bows go gliding past.
But spring comes soon, and with the mist still hanging
from a sudden passing shower, the barber’s comb
now ploughs a furrow in his tousled hair.
Awater pays and leaves the barbershop.
I follow him without a second thought.
Chance takes a short cut to its destination.
Was it meant to be – Awater’s ending up
in the bar I used to visit with my brother?
It was: he’s even occupied our corner.
I sit down somewhere else. It’s hardly full.
The barman knows me. He knows the way I feel.
He wipes my table for a second time
and dawdles with the white cloth in his hand.
‘The times,’ he mumbles ﬁnally, ‘have changed.’

by Martinus Nijhoff

This poem is taken from Awater, translated by David Colmer, edited by Thomas Möhlmann, and published by Anvil Press.

Notes courtesy of Peter Jay at Anvil Press:

This is a bit of a teaser, or a trailer. It’s an extract from the middle of Nijhoff’s 300-line poem with the mysterious title, which is also the name of the mystery character in the poem. It’s not quite a detective story as there are no unexplained deaths – just unexplained lives! The story is that Awater goes to work, leaves it, and goes to the railway station via the barber’s, followed by the narrator who has decided to shadow him. Hardly material for great poetry, you might think, but it’s regarded as the classic Dutch poem of the 20th century.

The poem is formally a little more elaborate in Dutch than in the only possible English equivalent, David Colmer’s well-paced blank verse. How can a narrative poem with a plain story like this be so rich both in poetry and ideas? Simply described events become luminously riddling and mysterious: what is going on? why? what does it all mean? or are these the wrong questions?

For partial answers, you must read Wiljan van den Akker’s essay in Anvil’s new edition of the poem, edited by Thomas Möhlmann. The Dutch text is followed by three different English translations and several contributions (including from the late poet: Nijhoff lived from 1894 to 1953) which cast light on them, without ever quite solving its mysteries.

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern. You can read more about Anvil here.

Lullaby

November 29, 2010April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

People are murdered all the time,
Somewhere – be it in the laps
Of dozy valleys, or on watchful peaks
That peer; so what a cold comfort
To say ‘Ah, but it’s so far off!’
Shanghai or Guernica –
Either is just as close to my heart
As your small frightened hand,
Or the planet Jupiter high above us.
No don’t look up at the sky,
Don’t even look at the earth, just sleep.
For death is racing through
The sparkling dust of the Milky Way
And pouring molten silver
On the headlong shadows tumbling down.

1937

by Miklós Radnóti

‘Lullaby’ is taken from Forced March, published by Enitharmon Press.

Notes courtesy of Enitharmon:

Forced March is a new edition of Miklós Radnóti’s selected poems, in the powerful and moving translations of Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri. Poet Dick Davis explains why this book is so important: ‘Radnóti has emerged as the major poetic voice to record the civilian experience of World War II in occupied Europe. His poems are an extraordinary record of a mind determined to affirm its civilization in the face of overwhelming odds. He is one of the very greatest poets of the twentieth century, and Clive Wilmer’s and George Gömöri’s versions are by far the best that exist in English.’ You can find out more about this book here.

By the time the Second World War broke out, Miklós Radnóti was already an established poet. When the Nazis took over his home town of Budapest, Radnóti was sent to a labour camp at Bor in occupied Serbia. Then, in 1944, as the Germans retreated from the eastern front, Radnóti and his fellow labourers were force-marched back into Hungary. On 9 November, too weak to carry on, he and many comrades were executed by firing squad. When the bodies were exhumed the following year, Radnóti was identified by a notebook of poems in his greatcoat pocket. These poems, published in 1946 as Foaming Sky, secured his position as one of the giants of modern Hungarian poetry. You can learn more about Radnóti here and here.