From ‘Stillness’

~ oxfordbrookesuni

In darkness let your fan of fingers open,
imagine amethyst’s purple crystals
at a geode’s heart liquifying to honey
until your face muscles loosen, your shoulders,
which have borne so much, begin to unlock
and stillness is a quilt over your body,
a feather lining within. Now the tock
of pulse emerges and breath passes quietly
as a slippered friend. Beyond the house tyres
whirr on tarmac and geese call as they rush
the sky. The grief of the bereaved will push
into your room and nameless losses sustained
by the displaced. Hold silence and you may hear
rain on fruitless fields, grasses rising again.

by Myra Schneider

© Myra Schneider, 2008

Circling the Core is the most recent collection of Myra Schneider‘s prolific writing career, which has encompassed children’s fiction as well as ten poetry collections. ‘Stillness’, the long poem from which this is a complete part, is indicative of her sensitive explorations – often situated within nature – which she performs through sympathetically inhabiting her subjects. The result is sensuous and intricate verse, aided by the technical brilliance which has made Schneider a poet loved by poets. You can find out more about Myra Schneider 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.

The Three Cypress Trees

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Transparent and frail,
like the slumber of woodcutters,
serene, foreshadowing things to come,
the morning drizzle does not conceal
these three cypresses on the slope.

Their details belie their sameness,
their radiance confirms it.

I said:
I wouldn’t dare to keep looking at them,
there is a beauty that takes away our daring,
there are times when courage fades away.

The clouds rolling high above
change the form of the cypresses.

The birds flying towards other skies
change the resonance of the cypresses.

The tiled line behind them
fixes the greenness of the cypresses
and there are trees whose only fruit is greenness.

Yesterday, in my sudden cheerfulness,
I saw their immortality.

Today, in my sudden sorrow,
I saw the axe.

by Mourid Barghouti

© Mourid Barghouti, 2005

Mourid Barghouti was born on 8 July 1944, in Deir Ghassana, near Ramallah, Palestine. He has published twelve books of poetry, the most recent being Muntasaf al-Layl / Midnight (Arc, 2008), the collection from which this poem is taken. His autobiographical narrative, Ra’aytu Ramallah / I Saw Ramallah (1997), published in several editions in Arabic, won the Naguib Mahfouz Award for Literature (1997), and was translated into several languages, with the English translation being published by the American University in Cairo Press, Random House, and Bloomsbury. In the year 2000, he was given the Palestine Award for Poetry. Mourid Barghouti has participated in numerous conferences and poetry readings and festivals in almost all the Arab countries, and in several European cities, and his work frequently appears in journals and magazines in both Arabic and in English translations. He has been in exile from Palestine since 1967, and lives in Cairo. To read more about Barghouti, and to see further examples of his work, visit this page.

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.

Notebook Hokku

~ oxfordbrookesuni

1.

Low grey cloud. Against
the wind, the melancholy weight
of one last heron.

2.

Invisible across the field
the echo of an axe
among the cricket willows.

3.

Cold summer wind. And
unripe apples, tossed up, thump
the light green under foliage.

4.

Immobile and clotted, black
fly submit to red ants’ traffic
on the runner bean stalk.

5.

Inside the ruins of this fallen
willow: damp earth, fungus
and dry white fruit stones.

6.

As the flycatcher
pirouettes,
the globe revolves with it.

7.

Silence huge. A solitude without limit.
What moves through these spaces?
Not I but a function.

8.

Picking through a bowl of damsons.
Fame, success, enlightenment.
These are well-construed notions.

9.

Damsons in handfuls echo
in the basin. Quiet between
mouth and a dark blue flavour.

10.

Bird song was scrolled
tightly, as I walked beside
the elder, between umbels.

by Tom Lowenstein

© Tom Lowenstein, 2009

Author’s Note: These shorter forms were suggested and inspired by Japanese and Chinese poetry, but I have not attempted to write haiku. The title of this sequence is the nearest I’ve come to admitting that some of the poems, in this section particularly, represent haiku echoes. All of the above are to be read as separate individual poems, notwithstanding the common title.

These poems are drawn from Conversation with Murasaki by Tom Lowenstein (Shearsman Books, 2009).

Tom Lowenstein was born near London in 1941. After completing his education at Cambridge University, he taught for six years in English secondary schools. He has also taught English and creative writing at Northwestern University, worked for the Alaska State Museum and spent a year, in the mid-1970s, in an Alaskan Eskimo village, recording and translating its legends and histories. This work was later to bear fruit in a number of publications: Eskimo poems from Canada and Greenland; The Things That Were Said of Them: Shaman Stories and Oral Histories of the Tikigaq People (University of California Press, 1992); Ancient Land: Sacred Whale (Bloomsbury, 1993; Harvill, 2000). He has also written on Buddhism.

Tom Lowenstein’s own poetry has been collected in The Death of Mrs Owl (Anvil, 1977), Filibustering in Samsara (Many Press, 1987), in the Ancient Land: Sacred Whale volume, and in the Shearsman Books publications Ancestors and Species: New & Selected Ethnographic Poetry (2005) and Conversation with Murasaki (2009). You can discover more about Tom Lowenstein and his poetry 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.

“Could it be true…”

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Could it be true we live on earth?
On earth forever?

Just one brief instant here.

Even the finest stones begin to split,
even gold is tarnished,
even precious bird-plumes
shrivel like a cough.

Just one brief instant here.

by Nezahualcoyotl

From Flower and Song: Aztec Poems, translated and introduced by Edward Kissam and Michael Schmidt.

This book has recently been published by Anvil Press to coincide with the British Museum’s exhibition Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler (September 2009–January 2010).

Two young poets who grew up in Mexico became fascinated in the 1960s by the fabled Aztec poems composed before and during the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire in 1521. They encountered these extraordinary poems largely in Spanish translations, made from the texts recorded by the early friars who followed in Cortés’s wake.

Nezahualcoyotl, the original author of this poem, was King of Texcoco. He lived from 1402–1472. He is the most famous of the Nahuatl-language poets, considered by his contemporaries to be the best master of the classical style. Many tales are told of his wisdom as judge, public servant, philosopher, and teacher.

Nahuatl is unlike any European language – so different that Michael Schmidt doubts whether meaningful translations can be made, the cultural context of the poems being so alien and having, in any case, been destroyed. But all we can know of Aztec poetry is what these two gifted poet-translators have given us. It may be inadequate of course, but the poems are fascinating and often quite beautiful. Schmidt and Kissam’s introduction to Flower and Song is also a superb, distilled account of the background to the Aztec empire: from its way of life and its fall, to the role of poetry in Aztec life, and how the poems were preserved. It is an ideal introduction to the British Museum exhibition.

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.

‘II’

~ oxfordbrookesuni

II
“Can we believe that we are fulfilling the purpose of our existence while so many of the wonders and beauties of the creation remain unnoticed around us?”
                                          – Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life.

For Torben Larsen, entomologist.

In case after case,
            amazements of complex colour:
dots and stripes and swirls –
            the Peruvian dazzle,
                        frail mica-translucence,
                                    mercury-liquid blueness,
                                                glass-wing come-and-go glitter.

It’s the entomologists’ fair,
           and we’ve queued in October rain
                        for the Kempton Racecourse turnstiles,
jumping to islands between puddles,
            cracking jokes with strangers.

At the trestle tables inside
            it’s quite hard to get a look-in,
what with these serious chaps,
            boxes tucked under arms,
                        and the quiet observant children
                                    unsurprised as experts.

About killing, I learned yesterday:
            most often a light pinch
                        under raised-up wings,
the long heart constricted
            to its last beat.

Among all the rest, birdwings.

Why, if Wallace’s wonder –
                        golden-winged croesus croesus –
                                     turns up, should I not buy one?
                                                I feel hesitation beginning.

A naturalist once said to me:
            ‘The individual doesn’t matter’ –
and I doubt it’ll be the collector’s
            delight in rare acquisitions
                        that will one day extinguish species,
or the scientist’s need to test
            theory by close observation –
                        which may, rather, help to save them.

It’s logging, it’s slash and burn.
            Smoke stifling the forest.
                        Commerce. And desperation.

And I too have needed a body –
            something more dead than a photo –
                        to bring me the sense of his life
                                    ancient, single, and other.

Those glaucus solid mounds
            that gave him mosaic vision,
colours that still reflect
            his favourite yellow flowers,
hind-wing edges, silky
            with hair-like scales, that combed
                        the lek with a sexual perfume.

I think of your hands showing,
            like this, how he’d rise from beneath,
                        touching his body to hers,
and her antennae tilt to smell
            his personal scent, the hairs
                        and pheromone hind-wing patches,
                                    intimate under her feet.
‘The taste of this one?’ Choosing.

What need do I still have,
            now, to possess a body,
                        having sensed (overhear myself think this)
                                    a soul – what better word is there?

On the train home, I turn
            the pages of second-hand books
                        purchased instead – facts and photos;
wonder, dozing a little,
            at the tenuous job of poet.

by Anne Cluysenaar

From Batu-Angas, Seren 2008

This beautiful sequence of poems by Anne Cluysenaar is inspired by the travels and discoveries of the great naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913). The title Batu-Angas, meaning ‘burnt rocks or cooled lava’, is derived from the language spoken on the volcanic island of Ternate, where Wallace experienced that flash of insight which led him to the theory of natural selection. To the poet, ‘cooled lava’ suggests the brief glimpses we get as human beings into the “huge slow changes” of evolution. The poems – evocative, precise, questioning – are accompanied by a rich selection of images: some of living animals and plants, some chosen by Wallace to illustrate the accounts of his travels, while others, photographed for this book, are of Wallace drawings and specimens sent back by him to Britain during his years in Amazonia and the Malay Archipelago. 2008 is the 150th anniversary of the discovery by Wallace and Darwin of evolution by natural selection.

Anne Cluysenaar’s Timeslips, New and Selected Poems, appeared from Carcanet in 1997. She has edited the selected poems of Henry Vaughan and is a poetry editor for the journal Scintilla. She and her husband run a smallholding on the Welsh borders.

Seren is an independent literary publisher, specialising in English-language writing from Wales. Our diverse and eclectic list has something to offer anyone with an interest in excellent writing. Our aim is not simply to reflect what is going on in the culture in which we publish, but to drive that culture forward, to engage with the world, and to bring Welsh literature, art and politics before a wider audience.

Please visit our website for more information on our authors and titles.

Collected, Selected, Neglected …

~ oxfordbrookesuni

… My poems …
I write them, I forget them, I misplace them! They come back,
then I change them – though they can’t change the world,
they change me … Sometimes they disagree with me.
They are my inheritance – but who are the heirs?
Who needs this improbable, almost useless fortune, no matter
               how poor people are,
while the great oppressors maintain and adore others’ poverty?
Why should I collect them (some of them are really pitiful)?
Why should I select them (am I the impartial judge of their
               supposed value)?

Better neglect them, those rags of paper and words, leave them
               on their own.

We disappear in the chilly global warming
of Stepmother Earth …

by Nina Cassian

© Nina Cassian 2008
from Continuum (Anvil, 2008)

Nina Cassian has been living in New York since 1985, when she was warned not to return to Romania, then still under Ceausescu’s iron grip, from a trip abroad. An involuntary exile, she quickly began to learn English – to such good effect that her latest collection of poems is her first composed entirely in English. (Her last collection had mixed her own original English with translations by others, and before that her poems were only published in translations.)

This is perhaps not a typical Cassian poem, but its wry humour is attractive. The apparent modesty about her poems is not, I think, self-deprecatory but a perfectly serious self-assessment of their place in the greater scheme of things. Question: why Stepmother, rather than Mother, Earth?

Anvil Press Poetry was founded in 1968 and publishes English-language poetry and poetry in translation, both classic and modern.

Christy Ring

~ oxfordbrookesuni

He aimed at the impossible
each Sunday on the pitch;
sometimes he succeeded.

Down on one knee,
trapped in the corner of a field,
when his prechristian electronic eye
lit up in combat,
and the ball, a missile,
sped from him straight above the bar,
the air shook in awe.

When a driving lunge
brought him clear beyond
the ruck of men,
and the ball, propelled,
self-destructed in the net
to smithereens of light,
our cheering became a battle cry.

In one moment of raw frenzy
as his playing days ran out,
he summoned Cú Chulainn
to aid him on the pitch:
his trunk swelled up
in sight of thousands,
one eye bulged
and danced, demented…

* Christy Ring was the Babe Ruth of the Irish sport of hurling

by Louis de Paor | translated by the poet

From An Leabhar Mòr: The Great Book of Gaelic, © the author.

Louis de Paor was born in Cork in 1961. His most recent collection is Corcach agus Dánta Eile, which was published in a bilingual edition in Australia as Cork and Other Poems. Other collections include Próca Solais is Luatha, 30 Dán and Aimsir Bhreicneach/Freckled Weather.

Featuring the work of more than 200 poets, calligraphers and artists, An Leabhar Mòr is a unique collection of Irish and Gaelic poetry, from the sixth century to the present day, and includes the earliest Gaelic poem in existence.

Poets include Iain Crichton Smith, Louis de Paor, Sorley MacLean, Aonghas Dubh MacNeacail, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Máirtín Ó Direáin. Each poem appears in the original Irish or Gaelic, accompanied by an English translation. The poems were selected by well-known poets Seamus Heaney, Hamish Henderson and Alastair MacLeod, and by the contributing poets themselves. One hundred artists (50 from each country) were specially commissioned to produce an original and individual work of art to complement each poem. They include Robert Ballagh, Steven Campbell, Shane Cullen, Alan Davie, Rita Duffy and Alasdair Gray.

The O’Brien Press is one of Ireland’s leading trade publishers. A wide selection of free teaching resources for this title, together with audio clips of some poets reading their work and musical renditions of some of the poems, is available from the website. This title and all O’Brien Press books are available to buy direct from the website or from Amazon.

Comet

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I walked at night over Fountains Fell under Pen-y-Ghent.
The moor was a still wave and I was riding it,
my head capped in the sky’s metal.

The god was hammering out stars, the hill its anvil.
Where they fell they left a darker trail, 
the glints speeding away in the gill.

Hale-Bopp was a fist of flung glitter, a child’s firework
on black paper, my marker the five miles
from dale to dale.

I never made it to the village,
but lay under the broken eaves of a barn,
watched to see the god unsheathe his sword.

by Sarah Corbett

from Other Beasts, Seren (2008)

From the first sumptuous poem, ‘Birthday’ where the protagonist, running at night, thinks of her body as a “nocturnal bloom”, the reader is immersed in the compelling voice of Sarah Corbett. From her first book, The Red Wardrobe, nominated for both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prize, we are familiar with the world she portrays, of the childhood spent in rural North Wales, and the first half of this new collection is devoted mostly to poems that re-create scenes from a youth that was haunted by trouble, but also redeemed by a strong attachment to the beauties of nature, particularly horses, and an early love of reading and culture. In poems like ‘Rivers, Roads’ the two images mesh and intertwine, becoming symbolic and strangely evocative.

This poet bravely eschews lightness and irony for a whole-heartedly passionate and intensely physical response to life. Other Beasts differs from her earlier work in that in the latter half of the collection, she moves away from her own personal history and focuses on in-depth and often scary narratives of other lives. In these poems, such as ‘dreaming history’ she closely identifies with survivors of trauma, in this case the horror of a small girl hiding in a trunk while her family is massacred in a war-torn country. In the long poem ‘Testimony’ she inhabits the voice of Joanne Lees, the woman at the centre of the famously controversial case in Australia where her partner, Peter Falconio, was murdered and she managed, although tied up, to escape into the bush. Another sequence, ‘Cuttings’ weaves a week’s worth of international press cuttings together, creating an alternately horrible, sad, funny and odd tapestry of events.

Sarah Corbett was born in Chester, raised in north Wales, and educated at the Universities of Leeds and East Anglia. This is her third book of poems, following the acclaimed The Red Wardrobe (1998) and The Witch Bag (2002). She has published her poems in a wide selection of magazines and anthologies and has read her work at festivals internationally.

Seren is an independent literary publisher, specialising in English-language writing from Wales. Our diverse and eclectic list has something to offer anyone with an interest in excellent writing. Our aim is not simply to reflect what is going on in the culture in which we publish, but to drive that culture forward, to engage with the world, and to bring Welsh literature, art and politics before a wider audience.

Please visit our website for more information on our authors and titles.

Nár Mhéanar É | Wouldn’t It Be Lovely

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Me on the pillion behind you,
my two arms tight around you,
the motor-bike going fast,
a hundred miles an hour, say,
right through the Phoenix Park,
swifter than deer,
more canty than kine,
at break-of-day or at noon,
with nobody else there
in the whole vast park,
the pair of us bright-naked,
and the bike moving fast
under the light of the sun
in the trees over our heads,
no noise at all from the engine –
only the small sound
of you and me breathing.

by Pearse Hutchinson | translated by the poet

From An Leabhar Mòr: The Great Book of Gaelic, © the author. Reproduced in An Leabhar Mòr by kind permission of the author, from The Soul That Kissed the Body (1990), The Gallery Press.

Pearse Hutchinson was born in Glasgow in 1927, and educated in Dublin. He is a poet in Irish and English and a translator from Catalan, Irish and Galacio-Portuguese. He has two Irish collections – Faoistin Bhacach and Le Cead na Gréine – and many English ones.

Featuring the work of more than 200 poets, calligraphers and artists, An Leabhar Mòr is a unique collection of Irish and Gaelic poetry, from the sixth century to the present day, and includes the earliest Gaelic poem in existence.

Poets include Iain Crichton Smith, Louis de Paor, Sorley MacLean, Aonghas Dubh MacNeacail, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Máirtín Ó Direáin. Each poem appears in the original Irish or Gaelic, accompanied by an English translation. The poems were selected by well-known poets Seamus Heaney, Hamish Henderson and Alastair MacLeod, and by the contributing poets themselves. One hundred artists (50 from each country) were specially commissioned to produce an original and individual work of art to complement each poem. They include Robert Ballagh, Steven Campbell, Shane Cullen, Alan Davie, Rita Duffy and Alasdair Gray.

The O’Brien Press is one of Ireland’s leading trade publishers. A wide selection of free teaching resources for this title, together with audio clips of some poets reading their work and musical renditions of some of the poems, is available from the website. This title and all O’Brien Press books are available to buy direct from the website or from Amazon.

Translation

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Take away the hands that held me,
the eyes in which I first saw
love, the mouths from which I learned
to speak.

Take away the house I played in,
the bed I slept in, knowing
they were near. Take their footsteps
from the earth.

Take the city and the sky with it,
the streets I walked looking
for them, take the plane from around me
in mid-air.

See how I land with what they gave me.

Hands that are ready to hold,
eyes in which you will see
love, a mouth that is learning
to speak.

by Gregory Leadbetter

(c) Gregory Leadbetter

From See How I Land: Oxford Poets and Exiled Writers, ed. Carole Angier, Rachel Buxton, Stephanie Kitchen, and Simon White, with a foreword by Shami Chakrabarti (Heaventree Press, 2009)

We’re delighted to begin the current series of Weekly Poems with a poem from See How I Land: Oxford Poets and Exiled Writers – indeed, with the poem which gives the anthology its title.

See How I Land is a collection which brings together the work resulting from the ‘Oxford Poets & Refugees Project’, an initiative of the Brookes Poetry Centre and Oxfordshire charity Asylum Welcome.

The project paired 14 established poets with 14 exiled writers, refugees, and asylum seekers. Greg Leadbetter was one of the poets involved; he worked with Dheere, who came to the UK from Somalia in 1999.

For more information about the project, and to find out how to purchase a copy of See How I Land, please visit the project webpage.

You can also find links on this webpage to some of the other poetry that came out of the project: Bernard O’Donoghue’s ‘Emigration’, a passage from Yousif Qasmiyeh’s ‘Holes’, and Jean-Louis N’Tadi’s ‘Flight of the Writers’.