Extraordinary Rendition

~ oxfordbrookesuni

You gave me back your frown
and the most recent responsibility you’d shirked,
along with something of your renown
for having jumped from a cage before it jerked

to a standstill, your wild rampage
shot through with silver falderals,
the speed of that falling cage
and the staidness of our canyon walls.

You gave me back lake-skies,
pulley-glitches, gully-pitches, the reflected gleams
of two tin plates and mugs in the shack,

the echoes of love sighs
and love screams
our canyon walls had already given back.

by Paul Muldoon

A collaborative work with photographer Norman McBeath, Plan B is an evocative set of visually-inspired poems from Paul Muldoon. Born in Northern Ireland, Muldoon is a world-renowned poet and academic. These lines are extracted from ‘Extraordinary Rendition’, one of the poems in the book. They display Muldoon’s verbal dexterity and uncompromising tone, and convey a visceral yet understated power – an effect amplified by their juxtaposition with McBeath’s stunning photographs. You can find out more about the book here, and more about Muldoon on this page.

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.

babel 6

~ oxfordbrookesuni

we don’t know the name of the plant
we want to know the name of the plant
carroty liquid streams out when we break
the stem; strange substance of meaning
I would dip my finger into
to draw my hieroglyphs on your forehead
but there is no credit in the phonemes that pour out of my mouth
shrivelled cherries half rotten papayas not worth purchasing
ok I find diphthongs embarrassing to say the way you do
lips need to be elastic slugs in the act of androgynous love
but look at these unusually shaped fruits I dare you to eat them
roll them in your sinuses and spit the pips drawing accents
on a vowel bearing öszibarack or málna; say it little by little
say it and then take a look at the tiny boy
who sits in silence on the stone floor
in the garden near a pot of flowers
reaches out for a handful of soil from time to time
to chew and then to swallow smiling with black teeth

by Agnes Lehoczky

© Agnes Lehoczky, 2008

Agnes Lehoczky was born in 1976 in Budapest. Her work has appeared in a number of online and print publications both in Hungary and in the UK. Budapest to Babel, published by Egg Box in October 2008, is her first collection in English. A second is due from Egg Box later this year.

‘babel 6’ is from a sequence of poems entitled ‘garden dialogues’, which appear in Budapest to Babel, a lively and rewarding collection about the difficulties and joys of language. Often poignant, always inventive, the book explores states of confusion and chaos, playfulness and delight, with a freshness of style and tone. Find out more about the book at this page, where you can also watch Agnes Lehoczky reading from her book at the Hungarian Cultural Centre in London last year.

Egg Box is a small, independent poetry publisher based in Norwich, run by 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.

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.

80

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Imagine a small state with a small population
let there be labor-saving tools
that aren’t used
let people consider death
and not move far
let there be boats and carts
but no reason to ride them
let there be armor and weapons
but no reason to employ them
let people return to the use of knots
and be satisfied with their food
and pleased with their clothing
and content with their homes
and happy with their customs
let there be another state so near
people hear its dogs and chickens
and live out their lives
without making a visit

by Lao-tzu, translated by Red Pine

Translation © Red Pine, 2009

Bill Porter assumes the pen name Red Pine for his translations. 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 in 1972 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 produced over a thousand programs about his travels in China. In 1993 he returned to America with his family and has lived ever since in Port Townsend, Washington.

Lao-tzu’s Taoteching, from which this poem comes (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), is an essential volume of world literature, and Red Pine’s nuanced and authoritative English translation is one of the bestselling English versions. This revised edition includes extensive commentary by Taoist scholars, adepts, poets, and recluses spanning more than 2,000 years. You can read two more selections from the book here, and learn more about Lao-tzu 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.

Severn Song

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The Severn was brown and the Severn was blue –
not this-then-that, not either-or,
no mixture. Two things can be true.
The hills were clouds and the mist was a shore.

The Severn was water, the water was mud
whose eddies stood and did not fill,
the kind of water that’s thicker than blood.
The river was flowing, the flowing was still,

the tide-rip the sound of dry fluttering wings
with waves that did not break or fall.
We were two of the world’s small particular things.
We were old, we were young, we were no age at all,

for a moment not doing, nor coming undone –
words gained, words lost, till who’s to say
which was the father, which was the son,
a week, or fifty years, away.

But the water said earth and the water said sky.
We were everyone we’d ever been or would be,
every angle of light that says You, that says I,
and the sea was the river, the river the sea.

by Philip Gross

© Philip Gross, 2009.

This poem is from The Water Table, a new collection by Philip Gross. It was published by Bloodaxe Books in November 2009 and won the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize.

A powerful and ambiguous body of water lies at the heart of these poems, with shoals and channels that change with the forty-foot tide. Even the name is fluid – from one shore, the Bristol Channel, from the other Môr Hafren, the Severn Sea.

Philip Gross’s meditations move with subtle steps between these shifting grounds and those of the man-made world, the ageing body and that ever-present mystery, the self. Admirers of his work know each new collection is a new stage; this one marks a crossing into a new questioning, new clarity and depth.

For more information about Philip Gross and to see a video of him reading from The Water Table, 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.

Tashi Aged Four

~ oxfordbrookesuni

A little of me goes trotting off
    In a bright red swimsuit.
The ocean’s barely stirring.       
    But a little of her is already
Slipping away without our knowing,
    Since – with me gone –
She will never have run
    So well for anyone else
Out to the sparkling pleat
    The sea folds over anew
Rising towards the spade and bucket
          That mark out our forgetting.

by Jacques Réda

Original poem © Jacques Réda, 2009. Translation © Jennie Feldman and Stephen Romer, 2009.

From Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets, 1938-2008, edited and translated by Jennie Feldman and Stephen Romer, Anvil Press, 2009.

Anvil Press Poetry writes:

‘Tashi Aged Four’ by Jacques Réda is almost my favourite piece from this anthology of French poetry. Poems about children by their parents or grandparents flirt with sentimentality – but it’s resolutely avoided here, as it is in Ted Hughes’s ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’, or Victor Hugo’s poems in L’art d’être grand-père (The Art of Being a Grandfather).

The poem is simply an elaboration of a fleeting incident: his reaction to seeing his grand-daughter “trotting off” on the beach. From this, with the device of “a little of me” linking with “a little of her”, he weaves a meditation on time and the human condition: one that is light and natural as his passing thoughts. It is done with such firm delicacy – and, I think, tenderness.

The poem is of course a translation, and it’s a testament to the translators’ skill in capturing the poet’s voice that one hardly notices this fact. Jennie Feldman’s translations of a selection of Jacques Réda’s poems, Treading Lightly, was published by Anvil in 2005. You can find out more about that book and Réda 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.

In Xochicalco

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Cows grazing among the ruins.
The dry cornfield extends a yellow fence.
Walls of fog blur directions.
No flower opens.
Thorns catch in clothing
and the jaguar devours the heart.

Drizzle,
         precarious offering.
Droplets draw fleeting signs in puddles—
no more fleeting than the day
when we saw what we loved most
fall apart between our hands
                                  like an ancient urn.

We waded the fog like a river.
It surrounded the hills.
Only the peaks emerged like islands.

Purple,
ashy face of earth.
Voices like bats’ wings
through the stone notches
where the hills meet,
where the wind cuts
                         like an obsidian knife.

The black air widens.
The mist blinds us,
it closes around the temple.
The same mist wraps the heart.

Higher up,
deeper under the earth,
wherever she goes who gathers souls,
she who scatters ashes.

by Elsa Cross

Original poem © Elsa Cross, 1991. Translation © Luis Ingelmo & Michael Smith, 2009.

Note: Xochicalco is the site of an impressive Aztec temple, not far from Mexico City.

Elsa Cross was born in Mexico City in 1946. The majority of her work has been published in the volume Espirales. Poemas escogidos 1965-1999 (UNAM, 2000), but a new complete edition of her poetry will appear this year, published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica in Mexico City. ‘In Xochicalco’ is taken from the recent volume Selected Poems, published by Shearsman Books, edited by Tony Frazer, and translated by Anamaría Crowe Serrano, Ruth Fainlight, Luis Ingelmo & Michael Smith, and John Oliver Simon.

Cross’s poems have been translated into twelve languages and published in magazines and more than sixty anthologies in different countries. She has an MA and PhD in Philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she holds a professorship and teaches Philosophy of Religion and Comparative Mythology. In 2008 Elsa Cross was awarded the most prestigious poetry prize in Mexico, the Xavier Villurrutia Prize, an award that she shared with Pura López-Colomé. You can find out more about Elsa Cross 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.

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.

Century-end Prayer

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Let the arctic birds,
friendly with polar winds,
have an easy time of it, Lord,
for the next hundred years.
I don’t even know
if there are any arctic birds.
I am as ignorant
about bird-life near the Poles
as birds are about good and evil.
I wish my ignorance could also be
equated with innocence.


But my prayers are not hooked
to some mariner’s compass;
and when I start walking down
with my back to the Pole Star,
I lead my prayers by the hand.
And here in warm-rain country
let the rhinoceros
trundle through mire
and the next millennium
and the next.
May the beaver and the porcupine
burrow their way
to their underground haven
and may the elephant shed his tusks
so that we don’t shed his blood.


And a small skylight prayer, Lord:
may the sparrow know glass
from the crisp air outside.

by Keki N. Daruwalla

© Keki N. Daruwalla, 2008

Keki N. Daruwalla is one of India’s leading English-language writers. Born in 1937 in Lahore, Daruwalla has published nine volumes of poetry. ‘Century-end Prayer’ comes from The Glass-Blower: Selected Poems, a book published by Arc in 2008 and which collects poems from all of the poet’s previous collections. Keki Daruwalla has won the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia. His Collected Poems: 1970-2005 appeared from Penguin India in 2006. He is also the author of three volumes of short stories, a novella, two collections of poetry for children and, more recently, the travelogue Riding the Himalayas (2006). Daruwalla is also well-known as a writer on international affairs, having served in both the Indian Police Service and in a number of positions within the civil service, including Special Assistant to the Prime Minister. He was part of the Commonwealth Observer Group for the Zimbabwe elections in 1980, and at the time of his retirement was Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee in India. For more information about Daruwalla, click here or here. You can listen to him reading his work 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.

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.

BC-AD

~ oxfordbrookesuni

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect

Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.

by U.A. Fanthorpe

© U.A. Fanthorpe, 2002

Having been one of Britain’s most popular poets since publishing her first collection in 1978, U.A. Fanthorpe sadly passed away in April, 2009. Christmas Poems, first published in 2002, collects Christmas card messages sent by Fanthorpe to friends since 1974, and is a fitting tribute to her versatility and wit as a poet. ‘BC-AD’ offers an askance perspective on the Nativity story, striking with the quicksilver power of an epiphany. You can find out more about the collection here, and more about Fanthorpe 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. 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.

The Weekly Poem service takes a Christmas break for the next two weeks, and returns on 11 January. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all readers, and thanks for your continued support of the Weekly Poem initiative.

Like the Ghost of a Carrier Pigeon

~ oxfordbrookesuni

In a couple of hours darkness will throw its blanket

over the scene    she will pretend to read a mystery
                                 the mower and hammering will cease

The bees leave the andromeda and then

So much has been spent constructing a plausible life
she did not hear the engines of dissent run down

Some still attempt to cover the skull with the wire of their hair
                                           others shave everything instead

A solitary relives the pleasure of releasing his bird

There is no sacrosanct version    there is only time

Even now   if someone yells Avalanche    she has one
Thoughts shudder against the ribs and go still

Soon the son would be out running around in her car
with a sore throat    soon the decibels commence killing off hair cells

She checks to see if the phone is charged and then

The ones responsible for slaying the dreamer are mostly in the ground
but the ones responsible for slaying the dream

           suffer only metabolic syndrome

Even now    now that her supply of contact lenses has dwindled
                                she was refusing to sing the Wal-Mart song

The bees would be back and then

All efforts at reconciliation aside    even if everyone exchanged germs
                                         happiness is only for amateurs

A dress worn only once before has been hung on the door
                               the mirror under the cloth receives its image

by C.D. Wright

© C.D. Wright, 2009.

Deeply personal and politically ferocious, Wright’s thirteenth collection Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) addresses, as Wright has said elsewhere, “the commonly felt crises of [our] times” — from illegal immigration and the specific consequences of empire to the challenges of parenting and the honesty required of human relationships.

C.D. Wright has published over a dozen works of poetry and prose. Among her honours are the Robert Creeley Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. She lives near Providence, Rhode Island. To learn more about her work, click 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.

From ‘In the Face of History: In Time of War’

~ oxfordbrookesuni

4.  Doisneau: Underground Press

Were I to fall in love all over again, it would be
with this low ceiling, with the calm faces
of the two men going about their craft
and with her now twisting towards them
beautiful, defiant and free.

Because we forget how beauty was once itself
and nothing else, how it held its stellar
moment in attic and cellar.

Because that is what beauty is, this compact
with time and the silence of concentration
on one subversive operation,

that requires courage and sacrifice
and never comes without a price.

5.  Sudek: Tree

The visionary moment comes
just as it is raining, just as bombs
are falling, just as atoms

burst like a sneeze in a city park
and enter the dark
as if it were the waiting ark.

You open your hand and blow
the dust. You pick and throw
the stone. You make the round O

of your mouth perfect as light
and the tree bends and stands upright
in the stolid night.

by George Szirtes

© George Szirtes, 2009.

George Szirtes’ latest collection, The Burning of the Books and other poems, from which these two sections are taken, is a collection of narrative sequences by a writer who came to Britain as a child refugee after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. The two poems above come from a sequence which was commissioned by the Barbican Art Gallery to accompany its exhibition ‘In the Face of History: European Photographers in the 20th Century’. There is more information about the exhibition here, and you can see the photographs which were the inspirations for Szirtes’ two poems here and here.*

George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948. He was educated in England, trained as a painter, and has always written in English. In recent years he has worked as a translator of Hungarian literature, and co-edited Bloodaxe’s Hungarian anthology The Colonnade of Teeth. His poetry books published by Bloodaxe include The Budapest File (2000); Reel (2004), which won Szirtes the T.S. Eliot Prize; and New & Collected Poems (2008). The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009), has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009. Szirtes lives in Norfolk and teaches at the University of East Anglia. You can read more of the poems from the ‘In the Face of History’ sequence on the Poetry website here, and learn more about the poet 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.

* Sudek took a number of similar photographs of this tree in his garden, and the photograph displayed at this link may not be identical to the one exhibited at the Barbican.

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.