Pig’s Heaven Inn

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Red chiles in a tilted basket catch sunlight —
we walk past a pile of burning mulberry leaves
into Xidi Village, enter a courtyard, notice
an inkstone, engraved with calligraphy, filled
with water and cassia petals, smell Ming
dynasty redwood panels. As a musician lifts
a small xun to his mouth and blows, I see kiwis
hanging from branches above a moon doorway:
a grandmother, once the youngest concubine,
propped in a chair with bandages around
her knees, complains of incessant pain;
someone spits in the street. As a second
musician plucks strings on a zither, pomelos
blacken on branches; a woman peels chestnuts;
two men in a flat-bottomed boat gather
duckweed out of a river. The notes splash,
silvery, onto cobblestone, and my fingers
suddenly ache: during the Cultural Revolution,
my aunt’s husband leapt out of a third-story
window; at dawn I mistook the cries of
birds for rain. When the musicians pause,
Yellow Mountain pines sway near Bright
Summit Peak; a pig scuffles behind an enclosure;
someone blows his nose. Traces of the past
are wisps of mulberry smoke rising above
roof tiles; and before we, too, vanish, we hike
to where three trails converge: hundreds
of people are stopped ahead of us, hundreds
come up behind: we form a rivulet of people
funneling down through a chasm in the granite.

by Arthur Sze

© Arthur Sze, 2009

Arthur Sze was born in New York City and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, he has conducted residencies at a number of different universities in the United States including Brown University, the University of Utah, and Washington University. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Book Award, and has received grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation. Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, Carol Moldaw, and daughter, Sarah. You can read a recent interview with Arthur Sze here.

A temple near the hypocenter of the atomic blast at Hiroshima was disintegrated, but its ginkgo tree survived to bud and bloom. In his ninth book of poetry, The Gingko Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), from which ‘Pig’s Heaven Inn’ comes, Arthur Sze extends this metaphor of survival and flowering to transform the world’s factual darkness into precarious splendour. He ingeniously integrates the world’s mundane and miraculous into a moving, visionary journey. More poems from this collection are available to read here.

Copper Canyon Press is a non-profit publisher that believes poetry is vital to language and living. For thirty-five years, the Press has fostered the work of emerging, established, and world-renowned poets for an expanding audience. To find out more about Copper Canyon and its publications, click 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.

Love Song for Fidel Castro

~ oxfordbrookesuni

They’ve started a tight salsa
when Elisa strolls on, hips round as a drum.

Her band whoops, edges up the percussion
and the bass whips her calves.

She looks at each woman, remembering
how she brought them together,

their babies now workers, mothers,
or fathers, grins at the years they display

in their breasts, waists and eyes,
one thousand, three hundred and three.

She nods to Aleida on congas holding rivers
in her palms and Mathilda, the oldest,

on rhythm guitar, playing just as she’s waited
in a chair by the door, night after night all her life.

Elisa turns to the room, finds the President’s table,
puts a mike to her mouth.

“For this man tonight, twenty lovers,” she jokes
and her eyes won’t leave as she sings

of sun in the citrus, Batista,
all the sweat and fists in the wind,

of a child in a cellar, paths through the cane,
the wings on every island’s shoulder blades.

She sings of the speeches scrolled in his pockets,
of Angola, Mandela, his friend.

She sings of Havana, how it still burns
on maps of the world,

of Martí’s white rose and an exile’s return
to the Island of Youth.

Then she picks up the claves and the crowd
shines the floor with its footwork,

as they dance the way heat breaks
the line of a road, each beat and bell of the salsa,

a gasp in the hand.

by Jackie Wills

© Jackie Wills, 2007

Jackie Wills has been resident poet at, amongst other places, an airport, the Surrey countryside, and with marketing teams at Unilever. Powder Tower (Arc), her first full collection, was shortlisted for the 1995 T. S. Eliot prize and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her second collection, Party (Leviathan), was published in 2000. ‘Love Song for Fidel Castro’ comes from her latest collection, Commandments (Arc, 2007). You can find out more about the book here.

A former journalist, Wills now works as an editor and creative writing tutor. She lives in Brighton with her partner, the South African musician Risenga Makondo, and their two children. Jackie Wills writes a blog about her work, available here.

Arc Publications publishes contemporary poetry from new and established writers from the UK and abroad, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English, and the work of overseas poets in translation. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. To learn more about Arc and to see its range of titles, click 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.

Leaving Fingerprints

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I know this frosted landscape
better than it knows itself, its layers
a busy clock of history, still ticking.

Under my feet I feel the trail of the slug,
the snail, the earth’s deep squirm
around an anklet or an amulet, a broken cup.

Lost, the names of the ones
whose fingers made and used
and threw away these things,

written and rewritten in the calligraphy
of roots. The worm’s heave
and turn delivers messages up,

scribbled in folds of soil and mud, afterthoughts
that grow to trees, trunks with arms,
branches with fingers, twigs with nails,

scratches on air, tear
after tear on a white page.
These names have given their artefacts away

to be sparse as winter. Here I am, they say.
Here and here for you to see,
fingerprinted on the sky.

by Imtiaz Dharker

© Imtiaz Dharker, 2009

Imtiaz Dharker was born in Pakistan, grew up in Glasgow, and now divides her time between Bombay and London. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings. Leaving Fingerprints, the title poem of which is printed above, is her fourth book from Bloodaxe.

In these poems, the only thing that is never lost is the Bombay tiffin-box. All the other things which are missing or about to go missing speak to each other – a person, a place, a recipe, a language, a talisman. Whether or not they want to be identified or found, they still send each other messages, scattering a trail of clues, leaving fingerprints.

You can watch Imtiaz Dharker read two of her poems here, and find out more about her and her work here.

Founded in Newcastle in 1978, Bloodaxe Books is one of Britain’s leading independent poetry publishers. Internationally renowned for quality in literature and excellence in book design, its authors and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry. Details of all Bloodaxe’s publications, plus sample video and audio clips of poets reading their work, can be found 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.

Setting Out from Great-Scatter Pass and Wandering Fifteen or Twenty Miles of Meandering Trail…*

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I rest three times every mile on this trail’s
ten thousand precarious twists and turns,

and when it loops back, I see friends vanish
into distant forests and hills, then reappear

beneath windblown rain high atop pines.
Water clamoring through stones becomes

silent conversation in the stream’s depths,
and across high peaks, winds wail and sigh.

Gazing out toward South Mountain’s sunlit
south face, sun white through far-off haze,

I see azure marshland all tranquil beauty
and dense forests that seem to drift at ease.

Forever hemmed in, I trust myself to wide-
open distance: it melts tangles clean away.

by Wang Wei, translated by David Hinton

Translation © David Hinton, 2009

* The full title of this poem by Wang Wei is ‘Setting Out from Great-Scatter Pass and Wandering Fifteen or Twenty Miles of Meandering Trail Through Deep Forests and Thick Bamboo, We Reach Brown-Ox Ridge and Gaze Out at Yellow-Bloom River’. It is taken from The Selected Poems of Wang Wei, translated by David Hinton (Anvil Press, 2009). You can find out more about the book here, and more about Wang Wei here.

Zen Buddhism became a sort of cult religion in the sixties and seventies, thanks to its espousal by such luminaries of the Beat movement as Gary Snyder, who himself translated some Wang Wei poems. Wang Wei was a master of the short, imagistic landscape poem that came to typify classical Chinese poetry. His practice of Zen Buddhism led him to develop a landscape poetry of resounding tranquillity, beautifully conveyed and introduced in Anvil’s book by David Hinton. Learn more about Hinton’s work and read more of his translations of Wang Wei here.

After translating the T’ang Dynasty contemporaries of Wang Wei (Po Chü-i, Li Po and Tu Fu) over the last fifteen or so years, David Hinton is thoroughly at ease in the intimate, almost conversational idiom of the great Chinese poetry of the 8th century AD. It is strange to think that around this time in England the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf was written: what a contrast between the sophisticated Chinese elegance and the rough-hewn Old English verse.

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.

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 Sun Has Burst The Sky

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The sun has burst the sky
Because I love you
And the river its banks.

The sea laps the great rocks
Because I love you
And takes no heed of the moon dragging it away
And saying coldly ‘Constancy is not for you’.

The blackbird fills the air
Because I love you.
With spring and lawns and shadows falling on lawns.

The people walk in the street and laugh
I love you
And far down the river ships sound their hooters
Crazy with joy because I love you.

by Jenny Joseph

© Jenny Joseph, 2009

Nothing Like Love (Enitharmon, 2009), from which this poem is taken, is a brilliant new collection from Jenny Joseph that brings together a number of her early and previously uncollected love poems. A prolific and wide-ranging writer in prose and verse, Joseph is best known for ‘Warning’, a dramatic monologue about ageing. Joyous and bright, ‘The Sun Has Burst The Sky’ showcases her aptitude for love poetry, its seemingly simple sentiments made fresh and vibrant through deft composition. Find out more about the book here. You can hear her read ‘The Sun Has Burst The Sky’ and other poems at this site.

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.

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.

Dark View

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The sun that puts its spokes in every
Wheel of manhandle and tree

Derives its path of seashines
(Spiritual centrality) from my

Regard. I sent it
My regards. Some yards

Of lumen from the fabrika
Have come unbolted in the likes

Of it, or maybe
In the likes of me — a long

Unweaving or recarding I
Cannot recall begun — and there

Before my eyes the palm
Puts lashes round the sun.

by Heather McHugh

© Heather McHugh, 2009

Heather McHugh, a 2009 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of thirteen books of poetry, translation, and literary essays, including a Griffin International Poetry Prize translation, as well as Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist volumes. McHugh has taught literature and writing for over three decades, most regularly at the University of Washington in Seattle and in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. From 1999 to 2005 she served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2000 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In Upgraded to Serious (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), the book from which ‘Dark View’ comes, McHugh presents a fast-paced, verbally dexterous, and brilliantly humorous book. Utilizing medical terminology to work through loss and detachment, McHugh’s sly rhymes and rhythms talk of love, raised hackles, and much in between. You can read further selections from her new collection at this page.

Copper Canyon Press is a non-profit publisher that believes poetry is vital to language and living. For thirty-five years, the Press has fostered the work of emerging, established, and world-renowned poets for an expanding audience. To find out more about Copper Canyon and its publications, click 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.

Hope

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Like lightning in dark skies
I love to brighten up dark lives
and rid sad hearts of lonely cries.

I have one fierce enemy, despair,
all driven energy, forever there,
rips hearts apart and doesn’t care.

I care. Let’s walk together now,
help me to help, to grow and thrive
and let the future shine alive.

Despair would murder it and make you
guilty. Let’s talk now as we walk and see
the future reaching out to you and me.

Our skies are brightening up today.
I love your company, dear friend,
and always will, come what may.

I dream of being the living song
everyone would love to sing.
Impossible? No. That’s me. Let’s keep walking

until both our hearts are singing.

by Brendan Kennelly

© Brendan Kennelly, 2009

Much of Brendan Kennelly’s poetry gives voice to others and otherness. Whether through masks or personae, dramatic monologues or riddles, his poems inhabit other lives, other beings and other ways of being in the world.

The riddling poems of Reservoir Voices (Bloodaxe Books, 2009) of which ‘Hope’ is one, add a further dimension to these explorations, inspired by an autumn sojourn in America where he would sit by the edge of a reservoir, trying to cope with loneliness by contemplating black swans, blue waves, seagulls, trees and rocks:

‘It was in that state of fascinated dislocation, of almost mesmerised emptiness, that the voices came with suggestions, images, memories, delights, horrors, rhythms, insights and calm, irrefutable insistence that it was they who were speaking, not me. To surrender to loneliness is to admit new presences, new voices into that abject emptiness. So I wrote down what I heard the voices say and, at moments, sing.’

To find out more about Brendan Kennelly and to watch videos of him reading from his work – including ‘Hope’, click here.

Founded in Newcastle in 1978, Bloodaxe Books is one of Britain’s leading independent poetry publishers. Internationally renowned for quality in literature and excellence in book design, its authors and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry. Details of all Bloodaxe’s publications, plus sample video and audio clips of poets reading their work, can be found 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.

A Kingfisher

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Frequenting a corner of an eye,
Like a thing one didn’t really see,
Its dodges reconcile me
To the way you get undressed,
Affording less than a glimpse!

As for the one apparent
To our friend, eliciting
Her outburst as it darted
Close to the surface,
I guessed that stain on a backdrop

Of river and trees, that flight
I very nearly caught (but where
Was one supposed to look?)
Was lost for good. And then,
There went the streak of it

– Sooner gone than seen.
Was it, was it – what?
Sapphire? Emblem of all
Snatches: sought like the dream
One forgets even as one wakes from it.

by Anthony Howell

© Anthony Howell, 2009

Anthony Howell has been described as a “dandy” (in a review by Peter Porter) and the elegance of his poetry certainly justifies that. Perhaps it’s that quality which has led him to be compared with the American poet John Ashbery, a poet whose influence is more to be seen in his earlier work. In fact Howell employs a variety of methods, formal and other, in this highly enjoyable collection, which features two longer poems: one a detailed narrative description of the joys, or rather lack of them, in commuting across London; the other, the book’s title poem, a fable about lust which the poet describes, perhaps teasingly, as “extending a theme of dubious empathy explored by Browning in “My Last Duchess”.’

‘The Kingfisher’ comes from The Ogre’s Wife, published by Anvil Press in 2009. You can find out more about Howell’s collections here.

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.

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 Bread-Maker Speaks

~ oxfordbrookesuni

after Brendan Kennelly

It is true that you comfort me
As I slit your flesh
When kneading is done,

Marking a cross
To create four quarters.
I am not brutal,

Your crushed kernels,
Have long awaited
The flow from jug to bowl,

Moisture not known since before
You were beheaded
In an August field.

Through milk, you remember rain,
What made you grow.
And I remember another kitchen,

The smell when soda
Was spooned, a pinch of salt,
Melted butter. Each time

My fingers glide
Beneath your thinly-floured
Mound, I learn again how days

And dreams fatten in warmth,
Wetness, barely dusted by
What contains them:

Routine acts, healing
In work, pleasure
In slit and cut.

From the fingers out,
I make shapes.
The oven’s belly groans.

by Mary O’Donnell

© Mary O’Donnell, 2009

Mary O’Donnell was born in Monaghan, Ireland. She has been a teacher of English, German and Drama, worked with the development agency Concern, been a translator, and worked in journalism as The Sunday Tribune‘s Drama Critic. She has a particular interest in poetry in translation and wrote and presented the RTE Radio programme ‘Crossing the Lines’, a series which focused on European poetry and included readings from many European countries. O’Donnell has published five previous poetry collections, including The Place of Miracles (New Island, 2007), as well as three novels and two collections of short fiction. You can find out more about Mary O’Donnell here and here.

‘The Bread-Maker Speaks’ comes from her latest collection, The Ark Builders, a book in which she attends to the nature of love, loss and continuity, and provides an insight into the complex energies of a struggling global ecology. The rhythms of her own country, Ireland, are keenly observed as it lives out its modern role, partly in flux, partly still aware of ancient connections to land and language. You can find out more about the collection and read other poems from it here. ‘The Bread-Maker Speaks’ is partly a response to the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly’s own poem ‘Bread’, available to read here. The Poetry Centre will be featuring a more recent Kennelly poem in the next few weeks.

Arc Publications publishes contemporary poetry from new and established writers from the UK and abroad, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English, and the work of overseas poets in translation. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. To learn more about Arc and to see its range of titles, click 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.

November: River

~ oxfordbrookesuni

November shall have been a sombre month
like breath fetched from the navel of the earth
to say a word of ending. November
shall be a solemn month, recipient
of sides dashed down by rainfall, human turf.
The grass lashes. Flames ascend. The ash bed
a patch beneath god-eyebrow sky collects
a lifetime like the water’s look. This month
nods its face downwards. This was November.
Someone has died. Who hardly knows this.

by Vahni Capildeo

© Vahni Capildeo, 2009

Vahni Capildeo was born in Trinidad in 1973, and has lived in the UK since 1991. She is a Contributing Editor and the UK agent and representative for the Caribbean Review of Books. She is also a Contributing Advisor to Black Box Manifold, the University of Sheffield e-zine, and a member of the International Advisory Board for the Journal of Indo-Caribbean Studies.

This poem is from a series entitled ‘Winter to Winter’, and appears in the collection Undraining Sea, which was published by Egg Box last month. A poem from this book was Highly Commended in the Forward Poetry Prize, 2009. A second collection by Vahni Capildeo, Dark & Unaccustomed Words, is due out from Egg Box in 2010. You can find out more about Capildeo here, and hear her read some of her poems here.

Egg Box is a small, independent poetry publisher based in Norwich, run by young poet Nathan Hamilton. It is rapidly establishing a strong reputation for its freshness of approach and keen eye for talented newcomers. Click here to visit Egg Box’s website.