The pandanus

~ oxfordbrookesuni

hunkered by the beach wall daubed
with the Disney B-list
leached by constant sun – its dusky

loopholes carven of necessity –
overachieves like Caliban,
its trunk a shivalingam

propped, not understood by this
freakishly-enlarged birdcage
of roots with no bird

trapped in it – a listening structure
taps Ariel’s vein with feedback
loops outpacing their own shadows

on the sand, those tiger stripes
crab-strafed with bulletholes
glazed over by high tide.

Aerial roots extrude
their twilight slowly – the Colombo skyline’s
emergent dot dot dot of light

picks out floating green coconuts
arivarl-halved and cursed
with grave-ash, prayer-beads, menses.

Each mist-wall the sea throws up
is capons to the pandanus who knows
the air is crammed with glittering données.

by Vidyan Ravinthiran

from at home or nowhere (2008)

“This poem is about visiting Sri Lanka, where my family’s from, though I was born here in Leeds. There’s a kind of tree there called the pandanus which roots itself in tropical areas, or on the beach, and it’s got aerial roots so it can survive by taking its necessary moisture from the air, not the earth. Those ‘aerial roots’ provided me with a way of talking about my background, or lack thereof, in Sri Lanka. It’s also one of my most helplessly academic poems, and I’m not ashamed of that – with its token allusion to Caliban, its bits and bobs of Shakespeare, an embedded phrase of Marvell’s. I’d like to say I didn’t do all this deliberately – I’ve never wanted to write blatantly self-regarding and ‘difficult’ poetry – but it’s really an expression of who I am, of what I felt as I looked at the tree. To pretend to some kind of more stripped-down authenticity would be false. I didn’t want this poem to be a workshop-type thing, streamlined and unembarrassable.”

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds and studies in Oxford where he serves as Poetry Editor of the Oxonian Review. His pamphlet at home or nowhere is published by tall-lighthouse in their pilot series, which is under the editorial guidance of Roddy Lumsden.

tall-lighthouse was founded in 2000. It publishes full collections, pamphlets, chapbooks and anthologies of poetry, and organises poetry readings & events in and around London and South East & South West England, as well as facilitating writing workshops in conjunction with Arts, Education, Library & Community Services.

How to Make a Woman Out of Water

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Move to a boathouse by a river –
the walls must be yellow, the windowsills blue.
Sleep downstairs with your head upstream,
wait for a dream of swimming.

When it rains all night and you lie awake
collecting the music of a leak
and reading The Observer’s Book of Water
until you’ve learned that chapter

on whirlpools and waterspouts by heart,
listen to her whisper and giggle
as she scribbles her slippery name
over and over down the glass.

Have a bucketful of oysters in the sink
in case she’s feeling peckish
and a case of Rainwater sherry
chilling in a cave behind the waterfall.

At the bottom of the well
there’s one white pebble –
put it beneath your tongue
until it dissolves into a kiss.

Become so dry she will slip
into the shape of your thirst.
Prepare to be a shiver on her surface.
Taste her arrival on the wind.

by Charles Bennett

from How to Make a Woman Out of Water (2007)

The title poem of Charles Bennett’s new collection, his first since the highly-acclaimed Wintergreen, is full of sensual magic and supple music. It is charged with power and grace, yet lightened by a wry sense of humour. It is lithe and strongly flowing as water itself, and gives a pure pulse of clarity and drive that runs like an undercurrent through the whole collection. Beguilingly simple and approachable, these poems speak with the fluid voice of water. Vivid explorations of water’s depth, linked to the dark release of deep sleep, culminate in the collection’s central sequence: when one of a pair of lovers falls asleep on a beach, the other muses on the seascape, on lives that flourish on the littoral, and the nature of love itself.

Charles Bennett was born in 1954 and was a mature student in the 1980s at London University and the University of Massachusetts, where he was mentored by Joseph Brodsky and Amy Clampitt. He later wrote his doctorate on Seamus Heaney. He has been virtual poet-in-residence for the National Library of the Blind and until recently director of the Ledbury Poetry Festival. He won the North West Poetry Pamphlet competition for The Mermaid Room and his first collection Wintergreen was published by Headland in 2002.

Founded in 1967, Enitharmon Press publishes fine quality literary editions. While specialising in poetry, we also publish fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, and an extensive list of artists’ books.

Two poems

~ oxfordbrookesuni

MOTHER

What peace
between the folds
of her old black dress, grimy
from blowing into the fire,
peace always
as long as her head
covered my own
with whitened hair.

 Translated by Richard Burns

TICKLED THE LAUGHTER

The memory is dear to me
like the often too short
meals of my hungry childhood.
From hardened hands yellow flour
into boiling water
while the fire
crackling on the stones
tickled the laughter
from my eyes tearful with smoke.

 Translated by Peter Jay and Linda Lappin

by Aldo Vianello

from Selected Poems by Aldo Vianello. Translations by Richard Burns, Peter Jay, and Linda Lappin.

Aldo Vianello is a little-known poet from Venice, now in his early seventies. He has never been abroad; his work is firmly rooted in the city he has loved all his life. His poems are mostly quite short, so I have given two which are connected as they both reflect his childhood and focus on his mother. The second shows how his mainly straightforward style can be suddenly sharpened by a twist of syntax – here, the omission in line 4 of words to the effect of “she poured”, which quicken and dramatize the image.

Vianello’s first English selection, Time of a Flower, translated by Richard Burns, was Anvil’s first publication in 1968. His new, bilingual Selected Poems, with additional translations by Peter Jay and Linda Lappin, appeared in 2008 as part of Anvil’s 40th anniversary celebration.

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

Webcam Sonnet 4. Now

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Film and photograph only show
how it was. You’re seeing how it is,

now, this moment. A moody sunrise
bruising the nimbus above Hammerfest

to a nacreous flush that will never outlast
the next refresh. The very townsfolk

will miss it, unless they chance to look
now, right now. Can you catch his attention,

the man crossing the Torg, head down;
can you make him see one moment of sky

unlike all the others you and he
will walk under today, unlike the moment

passing in Padua, Jaipur, Tashkent,
that you don’t happen to be watching now?

by Sheenagh Pugh

from Long-Haul Travellers, Seren (2008)

Some of the journeys in this collection can be found on maps. But some travellers are journeying from one self to another, like those strange adventurers Murat Reis and Tristan Jones. Some, like Adwaitya the tortoise, have traversed time as well as space. Some travel in dreams. And the longest-haul travellers of all are the dead, like Josephine, whose memory returns to haunt our consciousness and remind us that not all places can be found in the atlas. (Sheenagh Pugh)

Elisions, displacements, journeys, dreams: this new collection of poems by Sheenagh Pugh has a pervasive, elegiac quality. Known for her intriguing narratives, many of these new poems work more by implication than explication. Typical is ‘The Unconversations’ which is a beautiful paean to the shorthand of private references used by a long-married couple. A longer poem, ‘Murat Reis’, chronicles the life of a man who was Dutch, Algerian, Christian, Muslim and many other things according to circumstance and his own whim. History provides vignettes such as ‘Victor’ which mourns the life of a young freed slave in Roman times, via the words and images carved on his gravestone. ‘Webcam Sonnets’ capture the subtle, sometimes poignant, sometimes sad, illusion of intimacy given by webcam contacts.

Sheenagh Pugh is a poet, critic, essayist, lecturer, and author of several works of fiction, non fiction and translation. The winner of many awards, including the Bridport Prize and the Forward Prize, she has published twelve individual collections of poetry, most recently The Movement of Bodies, which was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and also shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize.

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.

Hoppy New Year: a one-legged nursery rhyme

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Winter stiff with frosts and freezes.
Spring renews with warming breezes.
Easter sinks us to our kneeses,
Grateful for the griefs of Jesus.
Summer – bright with birds and beeses.
Autumn – leaves forsake the treeses.
Winter, damp with foul diseases,
Rounds in dark: the season seizes.

by Thomas Kinsella

From Something Beginning with P, © the author.

‘… a sumptuous collection of new work by Irish poets. Like all the best anthologies, it offers poems that extend one’s definition of what the art can do, especially for children nine years old and upward. This book should be in all schools where English (and Irish) is spoken. It is a place where poets and children meet, with no condescension from the former. Buy two copies – one will be stolen.’ Times Educational Supplement

Thomas Kinsella was born in Dublin in 1928 and now lives in the USA. His many collections include Butcher’s Dozen, Poems from City Centre, Madonna and Other Poems and A Dublin Documentary. His translations of The Táin and of Gaelic poems in An Duanaire are major contributions to modern poetry. He is the editor of the New Oxford Book of Irish Verse.

The O’Brien Press is one of Ireland’s leading trade publishers and a multi-award-winning children’s publisher. A wide selection of free teaching resources for this title is available from the website. This title and all O’Brien Press books are available to buy direct from the website or from Amazon.

Please note that there will now be a break in the Weekly Poems until late January. Best wishes to you all for a happy holiday.

Division Street

~ oxfordbrookesuni

You brought me here to break it off
one muggy Tuesday. A brewing storm,
the pigeons sleek with rain.
My black umbrella flexed its wings.
Damp-skinned, I made for the crush
of bars, where couples slip white pills
from tongue to tongue, light as drizzle,
your fingers through my hair,
the little way you nearly sneaked
a little something in my blood.

At the clinic, they asked if I’d tattoos
and I thought again of here –
the jaundiced walls, the knit-knit whine
of needle dotting bone, and, for a moment,
almost wish you’d left your mark;
subtle as the star I cover with t-shirts,
the memory of rain, or your head-down walk
along Division Street, slower each week, pausing
by the pubs, their windows so dim you see
nothing but yourself reflected.

by Helen Mort

from The shape of every box, published by tall-lighthouse.

“Having moved from Derbyshire to Cambridge, I find my poems often contain a kind of longing for people and places I used to know, and ‘Division Street’ is no exception. The poem is named after a street in Sheffield. So much of poetry is a kind of nostalgia – Michael Donaghy’s poem ‘Upon A Claude Glass’ captures this perfectly for me, the notion that the past is in front of us, not the present:

‘Don’t look so smug. Don’t think you’re any safer
as you blunder forward through your years

squinting to recall some fading pleasure,
or blinded by some private scrim of tears.’

“Like many semi-autobiographical poems, this one started from fact, and took off in the writing process.  That can make you feel as if you aren’t being faithful to your experiences, but it’s important to let a poem write itself, rather than always trying to direct it.”

Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985, and now lives in Cambridge. Five times winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year competition, Helen’s work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Tower Poetry, The Rialto and Poetry London. The shape of every box was published by tall-lighthouse in 2007; that same year she received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. In 2008, she won the Manchester Young Writer Prize. Helen is part of the ‘Escalator’ live literature scheme for performance.

tall-lighthouse was founded in 2000. It publishes full collections, pamphlets, chapbooks and anthologies of poetry, and organises poetry readings and events in and around London and South East and South West England, as well as facilitating writing workshops in conjunction with Arts, Education, Library and Community Services.

For the cosmonauts

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I, Yuri Gagarin, having not seen God,
wake now to the scrollwork of a body,
to my own white fibres leafing into the bone:
know that beyond this dome of rain there is
only the nothing where the soul sweeps
out its parallax like a distant star and truth
brightens to X, to gamma, through a metal sail.

So I return to you, cramming your pockets
with the atmosphere and evening news,
fumbling for gardens in the moon’s shadow,
in its waterfalls of silence. I wish for you
familiar towns, their piers and amusement arcades
unpeopled at dusk, the unicorn tumbling by
on china hooves behind the high walls
of parks, among congregating lamps.

May you find Earth rising there, between
your steepled hands. May your voyages
end. May you have a cold unfurling
of limbs each morning, when I am fallen
out of the world.

by Meirion Jordan

from Moonrise, published by Seren in November 2008.

Finely held moods and moments resonate throughout this unusually accomplished first book. The rich, complex history of Wales often crops up in expected places, as in the post industrial imagery of ‘A Camera at Senghenydd Pit’, and then, in often unexpected contexts: ‘The New World’ is a vision, a cross between ‘Under Milk Wood’ and an early J.G. Ballad novel, of post-global warming Wales, with a polyglot population: “Ronaldinho Davies/wowing the crowds at the Millennium Stadium” and swamped by tropical vegetation: “cobalt lizards and coral snakes/swallowing the cottages in Llandinam/the mahoganies uprooting Carno’s hearths”. Another apocalyptic scenario prevails in ‘Pirate Music’ where a typical weekend in the binge-drinking culture unravels vividly as one of Dante’s circles of Hell.

Such inversions of myth are rife in this book. There is a freshness with which classical motifs echo in thoroughly modern contexts. A girl on a motorbike: “you fly your hair like a flag” is a glimpse of a goddess at speed. ‘The Head of an athlete in an Ionian shipwreck’ is the past as ghost: “his smile as white as alum”. What starts as portraiture sometimes veers off in darkly mysterious incantatory digressions as in ‘The Magdalen College Chef’ whose “souffles bloom from a dipped fork./Upstairs his ragouts seethe under the grins of dons and demons”.

There are also clever, out-and-out satires like ‘The Nuclear Disaster Appreciation Society’ where “We love to watch/the palm trees beating in the thorium breeze…” and ‘Blockbuster Season’ where the protagonist is bizarrely ensnared by the cliché plots and B-list actors of the cinema “Darth Vader using my Ford Fiesta to escape from Colditz…”. The plot twists and clever inversions available in these poems often recall science fiction writers like Philip K. Dick. Engaging, musically deft, an intelligence that wears its learning lightly, this is a sparkling debut from one of the most promising young poets Wales has seen in some time.

Meirion Jordan was born in 1985 in Swansea, Wales, read Mathematics at Somerville College, Oxford, and is currently studying in the University of East Anglia Writing programme. He won the Newdigate Prize in 2007 and has been published in Poetry Wales, the TLS, and Gallous, amongst other places. He is influenced by poets David Constantine, Andrew Waterhouse, Gillian Clarke, Geoffrey Hill, Byzantine & mediaeval art, music and science fiction.

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.

Apologies to the handful of you who also received this poem by e-mail in October. Our software wasn’t working properly then and the poem only reached the first twenty on the maillist, and we didn’t want the other 650 to miss out.

Cuair | Curves

~ oxfordbrookesuni

She stares
at the rising sun,
rests her eyes
on the roundness of hills.
On paper
she draws circles,
arcs of circles,
circle after circle.
Since a surgeon
scalpelled out
her femininity,
she is haunted by curves.

by Áine Ní Ghlinn | translated by the poet

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

Áine Ní Ghlinn was born in Tipperary, Ireland, in 1955. Her collections include An Chéim Bhriste, Gairdín Pharthais and Deora Nár Caoineadh. She also writes children’s stories and for the Irish television drama series Ros na Rún.

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.

he 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.

Cold Spell

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Back from the grave my mother chills the air
as she used to. “It wasn’t like that at all,” she says,
speaking from a frosted pane on the stairs.

She shakes herself into her shape – quite
a feat after nineteen years under ground:
“You know I did my best for you, despite

the sacrifices – which I gladly made,”
almost as if now dead she spoke her mind,
who in this life left much she meant unsaid.

My childhood passed as if she wasn’t there.
What I remember most was her blank face
turned to the window, empty as the air.

There are many things I am tempted to say
like: “Yes, but you always lied” or “You never asked
what I thought and wouldn’t listen anyway”,

but I half believe the claim because I know
how tenderly I felt at first for her flesh
that winter underneath its ice tattoo.

But now it is the season of stone-hard ground
and she is back again in modern dress,
a new lilt to her voice, more refined.

“Give me what I never had,” I say, and love’s
blast furnace barbecues my face. It’s still
not what I want but I can’t get enough

and slam out to the cold night, leaving you
your angry tears, to gulp the icy air
and breathe the distance as I used to do.

by Julian Turner

from Orphan Sites
Anvil, 2006
Copyright © Julian Turner 2006

This must have been a hard poem to write from the personal point of view, but it is done without over-dramatization and with not only great power but understanding and restrained feeling. Turner’s technical skill quietly reinforces what’s going on in the poem: you hardly notice them, but both the rhymes and the way that colloquial rhythms play against the metre are finely handled. It isn’t one of Julian Turner’s funnier poems, for sure (read the books for those), but it’s a compelling poem.

Julian Turner was born in Cheadle Hulme, near Manchester in 1955. He lives in Otley, West Yorkshire, and works for the mental health charity Mind. His first collection Crossing the Outskirts appeared in 2002 and Orphan Sites, his second, came out in 2006.

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

At Last

~ oxfordbrookesuni

At last, there is some colour in the house.
Quite amazing, how these four daffodils
have made this room so bright, made the blank walls
painted, the light come back into the space.

It’s all so simple. Pick them from the side
of busy roads, their petals grey with fumes.
Then put them in a jamjar. Now you’ve made
an ornament, a pet, a fire, a home,

an installation, a mausoleum.
I never thought I’d love such sentiment,
and never thought I’d dare to utter ‘pain’.
I didn’t want to take the easy slant

on things. Did not intend. But here we are,
a room, one window, four yellow flowers.

by Michael McKimm

From: Sherb: New Urban Writing from Coventry.

Mike McKimm graduated from the University of Warwick with an MA in English Literature in 2006. His poetry, much of it first published by Heaventree, won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007. This poem comes from the collection Sherb: New Urban Writing from Coventry.

The Heaventree Press is an independent poetry press based in Coventry. For more information on Heaventree, and to buy Sherb: New Urban Writing from Coventry, please visit the Heaventree Press website.