Ceist na Teangan | The Language Issue

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant

in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,

then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bulrushes by the edge
of a river

only to have it borne hither and thither,
not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh’s daughter.

by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill | translated by Paul Muldoon

From An Leabhar Mòr: The Great Book of Gaelic, © the author. Reprinted in An Leabhar Mòr by kind permission of the author and the Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Ireland.

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill was born in Lancashire in 1952 and brought up in Ireland. Her collections include An Dealg Droighin, Pharaoh’s Daughter, Feis and Cead Aighnis. She is also a playwright and screenwriter and has won many prizes for her work.

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.

Snake, Swimming

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Slim, not a whisper through liquid but still
Silently moving, elegant as silk and slender,
That yellow neck-ring poised above the water –
You move alongside, yet distant, vulnerable,

So that we too try to stay still,
To watch you watching us, there in the river
As if this moment might go on for ever
Until you find those reeds, hospitable

Sheltering substance, close-packed, over the still
Moving and menacing tracks that cover
Where you might go, your sole endeavour
To sound out any agent that might kill.

You are with me now, unappeased, still
Fixed in my being, giving a shiver
Along the spine and spreading all over,
Magnificent, and lost, and beautiful.

by Anthony Thwaite

from Collected Poems (2007)

Anthony Thwaite’s Collected Poems, published as he reaches seventy-seven, give readers an opportunity to see gathered together all the poems he wants to preserve from the sixteen collections he has published since his debut in the Fantasy Poets series in 1953. Although his roots are partly in the Movement, he has developed a distinctive style – once described as ‘cunningly modulated eloquence’ – and a range of concerns which have defined his poetry from the beginning: memory, history, archaeology, travel (he has lived in Japan and Libya, writing of them with subtlety and affection), the intricacies of relationships, and now the frustrations of age. Through his own voice and those he has adopted (most memorably in ‘The Letters of Synesius’ and Victorian Voices), he has made a significant contribution to the literature of the last half-century, elegantly and perceptively setting the curiosities of the present against the layers of the past.

Anthony Thwaite was born in 1930. He spent his childhood in Yorkshire, the USA (1940-44) and school in Somerset. After national service in Libya he read English at Oxford. He then married and went to Japan for two years, where he taught English Literature at Tokyo University.  Since then he has been a BBC radio producer, literary editor of the Listener and the New Statesman, co-editor of Encounter, and in 1986 was chairman of the Booker Prize judges. He is a literary executor of Philip Larkin and the editor of his Collected Poems and Selected Letters.  He is a regular reviewer for the Guardian and other journals. In 1990 he was made an OBE for services to poetry.

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.

Please note: We’ll be taking a break from sending out Weekly Poems over the summer. The service will resume again in the autumn.

In the wet-faced hours of the night

~ oxfordbrookesuni

considering love, or the lack of it;
on-the-one-hand-this,
on-the-other-hand-that—

in these steep and solitary hours
come the raw questions.    
And sorrow surfaces as tears,
and moonlight finds me, stretched
like some trussed Gulliver, among
the little, scampering, bossy needs of life;
the pinpricks of the new day’s coming cares.

And yet.
The day will dawn.  A bird will sing.
A hundred different clichés spring to life.
Even in this January,
light, unstoppable, will show
the old camellia, up against the wall,
a shout of lipstick red.

by Ann Alexander

from Nasty, British and Short (Peterloo, 2007)

Ann Alexander’s poem “In the wet-faced hours of the night” appeared in her second collection, Nasty, British and Short (Peterloo, 2007).  A first collection, Facing Demons (Peterloo, 2002) was praised by Fay Weldon.  Ann Alexander, who lives in Cornwall with her husband, worked for many years in London as an advertising copywriter.  More recently she taught advertising skills at Falmouth College of Arts.  She won 1st prize in the 2007 Mslexia poetry competition.

Peterloo Poets was founded by Harry Chambers, still the Publishing Director, in 1976. Its masthead is “poetry of quality by new or neglected poets”. Peterloo publishes between 8 and 10 volumes of poetry a year, runs an annual poetry competition – the 2008 competition will be the 24th – and, since 1999, an annual International Poetry Festival.

“From time to time it has seemed to me that the Peterloo Poets series is a haven of poetic sanity in a world of modish obfuscation.”
Michael Glover, British Book News

Edgar

~ oxfordbrookesuni

(i.m. Edgar Bowers, 1924-2000)

A few things that recall you to me, Edgar:

A stately 80s Buick; hearing a car
Referred to by a coaxing sobriquet—
“Now come on, Captain, don’t you let me down.”
French spoken in a conscious southern accent;
An idiom calqued and made ridiculous
(“Eh, mettons ce spectacle sur le chemin”).
“Silly,” dismissive in its deep contempt,
“Oh, he’s a silly; an amiable silly,
But still a silly.” Or the words I first
Encountered in your captious conversations,
“Tad”, “discombobulated”, “catawampus.”
The usage that you gave me once for “totalled”—
“Oh cruel fair, thy glance hath totalled me.”

Most recently, in Cleveland’s art museum,
The French medieval tapestries brought back
Your unabashed reaction to their beauty,
And how, for once, you’d stood there almost speechless,
Examining Time’s Triumph inch by inch,
Enraptured by its richness, by the young man
Proud in his paradisal place, until
You saw what his averted gaze avoided—
The old man, beaten, bent double by fate’s blows,
Driven from youth’s charmed, evanescent circle:
And how you’d wanted to be sure I’d seen him.

by Dick Davis

rom A Trick of Sunlight
Anvil, 2007; Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2006
Copyright © Dick Davis 2006

This poem in memory of the American poet Edgar Bowers is from Dick Davis’s seventh collection. Unfashionably perhaps, Davis rejoices in the traditional tools of rhyme and metre, though this poem is a slight exception with its unrhymed, conversational address to the dead friend. His poetry has been applauded by Thom Gunn, Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht among others. Its wit, intelligence and grace often (and startlingly) achieve an immediacy and rawness of vision.

Dick Davis was born in Portsmouth, England. He is a professor of Persian at Ohio State University. He has also published translations of prose from Italian and poetry and prose from Persian. His previous collection, Belonging, was chosen by The Economist as a Book of the Year.

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

Amaretti

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Toadstool tops.  Two.  Cracked as nana’s old
knee sore.  And you launched one: thumb-spun
higher than a dollar – your mouth – that catpink
ridge-beam waiting; barely budged your chin to
grind it like a roof tile; offered the other, pathetic
as a button on your outstretched palm.  And I
snatched it quick as a whisker, bit, felt my tongue
melt caverns deep inside, release its acrid-sweet
almond adultness –
                                  which I dribbled out in spite
of the almost-shake of your loaf, the high arches
of your brows.  Then you tunnelled the wrapper
between fingers to roll a joke, a giant’s
cigarillo from air’s tobacco; stood it
end first on ma’s stainless tea tray, flicked
your flint lighter to chase the tip with flame
which seeped downwards, filled my head
with burning –
                                  until, at the last,
it wobbled, transfigured, a ganglion
of desire there, rose up into our cathedralled
Italian stairwell: willed wisp of your making
who stood, an edifice of father frowning
his gargoyled wonder into mine, our wish
held up by ash, all trembling, climbing
into hallowed space.

by Mario Petrucci

from Flowers of Sulphur (2007)

Flowers of Sulphur crackles with metaphorical energy.  Over a decade in the making, this remarkable new book confirms Petrucci’s reputation for exploring the gamut of human experience.  It demonstrates, once again, his rare capacity to bridge the gap between science and poetry with power and authenticity. ‘As with the best poets, thinking and feeling are, for Petrucci, a single act’ (George Szirtes). Indeed, just as we now know that light is both corpuscular and wave-like in nature, so Flowers of Sulphur is able to embody many, often seemingly paradoxical, qualities.  These poems ring with complexity and clarity: like our quantum world, this award-winning collection reinvents itself moment to moment so as to unsettle, move and inspire us.

Mario Petrucci is an ecologist, physicist and war poet. He is also the only poet to have been in residence at the Imperial War Museum. His book-length sequence on Chernobyl won the Daily Telegraph / Arvon International Poetry Competition in 2002. A Natural Sciences graduate, Mario works as an educator and a radio/TV broadcaster. Poems from Heavy Water are featured in Poetry Review, The London Magazine, Acumen, Agenda, on BBC Radio and at The Royal Festival Hall. Flowers of Sulphur has won an Arts Council of England Writers’ Award and the London Arts New London Writers Award, but also collects together many individual prize-winning poems, including successes in the Bridport, the London Writers Competition, and Frogmore and the National Poetry Competition.

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 

To the Boy Elis

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Elis, when the blackbird calls in darkest wood,
This is your destruction.
Your lips drink the cool of the blue rock-spring.

When your brow softly bleeds, forsake
Ancient legends
And dark readings of the flight of birds.

But you walk with soft steps into the night
Where purple grapes hang thickly
And you move your arms more gracefully in the blue.

A thorn-bush sounds
Where your moonlike eyes are.
O how long, Elis, have you been deceased.

Your body is a hyacinth
Into which a monk dips his waxen fingers.
Our silence is a black cave

From which at times a gentle beast emerges
And slowly lowers heavy eyelids.
Black dew drips onto your forehead,

The last gold of decayed stars.

by Georg Trakl, translated by Margitt Lehbert

from The Poems of Georg Trakl
Anvil, 2007
Translation copyright © Margitt Lehbert 2007

Margitt Lehbert’s deft and attentive translations of Trakl’s poems and her introduction to The Poems of Georg Trakl are a fine guide to a poet now regarded as among the most original of the twentieth century. Surreal, expressionist and starkly beautiful, his poems responded to his own pain and to the traumas of the First World War with work of unique depth and power. Although he is a complex and difficult poet in many respects, he translates well into a complex and difficult English.

Born in Salzburg, Austria, he lived from 1887 to 1914, mainly in Vienna. He died after a drug overdose in a military hospital in Krakow, Poland. Margitt Lehbert has translated Elizabeth Bishop, Carol Ann Duffy and Les Murray for German publishers, and Sarah Kirsch into English for Anvil. She lives in southern Sweden where she runs a small press, Edition Rugerup.

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

Yesterday When I Was Young

~ oxfordbrookesuni

in memory of Dusty Springfield 

Mimosas, dear, forcing lemony scent
into a cold reactionary March wind,
I bought them on the day you died
to raise a yellow torch in memory
of how your voice addressed our needs
in every shade of love that’s blue
and shared with us its aching entreaty
to find a little sunshine after rain,
a sanctuary from bruises dealt
invisibly across the soul.
Today, your death-day, you are on the air
posthumously, your husky R&B
slow-burners building in their rise and fall
smokily pitched delivery.
Your life returns with every anguished catch
in phrasing, you the bouffant blonde,
the patron saint of mascara

wreathed in a boa, lending signature
to how the song hinged on a frantic sob
to make the pain definitive…
I keep on hearing retros of your voice
as though you’re still singing familiar hits
six hours after your death. Big purple clouds
arrive, dispensing hints of flashy showers.
You’ve gone away, like someone takes the train
with no-one knowing, no address,
no destination, no reporting back
about pure music on the other side.
We listen to you in Freedom, First Out,
and hold you near this way and celebrate
a torchy diva’s dramas, feel the hurt
in your vocal authority,
and hope you’re healed in passing, wish you where
the light in its entirety shines through.

by Jeremy Reed

from This Is How You Disappear (2007)

This Is How You Disappear is Jeremy Reed’s most autobiographical book to date, and one in which he celebrates the dead and missing friends who were the formative and enduring influences on his life as a poet.  Using the elegy to imaginatively recreate the often extraordinary individual characteristics of his subjects, Reed’s personal book of the dead is one that burns with his customary dynamic for dazzling imagery, glows with compassion for the suffering, and sparkles with a visual retrieval of detail so acute it hurts. With the title taken from the first line of a Scott Walker song, ‘Rawhide’, This Is How You Disappear is elegiac poetry at its most brilliant.

Jeremy Reed was born in Jersey, Channel Islands, and read for his PhD at the University of Essex. He is widely acknowledged as the most imaginatively gifted British poet of his generation, praised by Seamus Heaney for his ‘rich and careful writing’ and by David Lodge for his ‘remarkable lyric gift’. His Selected Poems were published by Penguin in 1987. Subsequent collections have been Nineties (Cape, 1990), Dicing for Pearls (1990), Pop Stars (1994), Sweet Sister Lyric (1996), Saint Billie (2001) and Duck and Sally Inside (2004), all from Enitharmon Press.  He has also published Heartbreak Hotel (Orion, 2002), a verse biography of Elvis Presley.

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.

16 transit of venus. (2)

~ oxfordbrookesuni

protean shape unshaping, my desire,
that turns in me like starlings whorling dusk,
or like high cloud that burns belated fire
as in the dark damp blooms release their musk,
go figure; press on leaves that suppler print
of yours than breath, write in declining sheets
of long grass trailing lines, and urge, and hint,
and ring the round that being rung, repeats;
but coil in shadows, love, and never touch
that finest of her hairs, the lightest drop
welled at her eye, whose globe is made too much
a world, for your discovery to stop;
hold; linger at her lip, and at her ear
by turns, returned, that make to disappear.

by Andrew Zurcher

from coming home by andrew zurcher (Landfill, 2006)
Copyright © Andrew Zurcher

Andrew Zurcher is a Fellow in English at Queens’ College, Cambridge and the author of Spenser’s Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern England (D.S. Brewer, 2007). His poems have previously appeared in Bad Press Serials.

coming home is a sequence of 56 mostly Shakespearean sonnets. Here, in the second of three poems titled ‘transit of venus’ – a rare astronomical event, when the planet passes between the Sun and the Earth – the poet considers the difference between desire as a force of nature (the ‘turns’ of the vivid opening) and love as an understanding of transience (the ‘turns’ of the enigmatic ending). Venus, we are reminded, was also the Roman goddess of love, eternal provoker of transitory desire.

Landfill Press was founded in Norwich in 2004 as a publisher of contemporary poetic sequences.

Muriel

~ oxfordbrookesuni

We are sorting her chest of drawers—
This for me, This for you, This was so much hers—
‘I’ll never have a friend like that again.’
We are meeting the jaunty lawyer
And signing his forms and discussing the weather.
‘I’ll never have a friend like that again.’

She used to play cards at this table,
Now it’s covered with cake-crumbs after the funeral.
‘I’ll never have a friend like that again.’
We wash cups in the broken sink
And it’s time to go and she rings me. ‘I think
I’ll never have a friend like that again.’

And now it’s winter and snow,
She’s no light, she’s no heat, she is ill, did I know
She’ll never have a friend like that again?
She spent Christmas with cousins, she died there.
I cannot remember her face, but I hear
‘I’ll never have a friend like that again.’

by Ruth Silcock

from Biographies etc.
Anvil, 2006
Copyright © Ruth Silcock 2006

This is from Ruth Silcock’s third collection. She brings a sharp yet compassionate eye for the oddities of human behaviour to her poems about the extraordinary lives and deaths of ‘ordinary’ people: children, senior citizens in residential homes, doctors, orphans, nurses, grannies, social workers at a dance. A lifetime’s accumulated wisdom, and the experience gained during her career as a social worker, enrich these cheerful poems that frequently address uncheerful subjects such as ageing and death.

Born in Manchester in 1926, Ruth Silcock studied at Girton College, Cambridge before devoting herself to social work. She has written several children’s books. Anvil has published her previous collections, Mrs. Carmichael (1987) and A Wonderful View of the Sea (1996).

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

Female Nude, circa 1916

~ oxfordbrookesuni

North of the Somme, the birds stop
Singing, sensing silence is the anthem
Fit for no-man’s-land, for foetal
Bodies drowned in mud, draped
Like weekend washing across lines
Of viper wire.  Spent shells

Nest in craters, nothing blue
And speckled waiting for a tapping break
But everywhere the litter of limbs
And bayonets red with stranger’s blood.
In frontline trenches, lovesick
Soldiers pencil notes as time

Ticks towards the whistles
For over-the-top commands, about
The time a police commissioner
On the Rue Taitbout is
Tearing down Modigliani nudes,
Affronted by full frontal pubic hair.

by Tim Cunningham

from Unequal Thirds (Peterloo, 2006)

Tim Cunningham’s poem “Female Nude, circa 1916” comes from his second collection Unequal Thirds (Peterloo, 2006).  His first collection was Don Marcelino’s Daughter (Peterloo, 2001) which was favourably reviewed in the TLS by Peter Reading.  Adrian Mitchell has written “Tim Cunningham’s poems are as various and fascinating as the animals in Noah’s Ark.  He has a most musical ear, a keen eye and an open heart.”  Tim Cunningham was born in Limerick in 1942 and has lived in Limerick, Tipperary, Dublin, the U.S.A. and London.  At present he lives in Billericay.

Peterloo Poets was founded by Harry Chambers, still the Publishing Director, in 1976. Its masthead is “poetry of quality by new or neglected poets”. Peterloo publishes between 8 and 10 volumes of poetry a year, runs an annual poetry competition – the 2008 competition will be the 24th – and, since 1999, an annual International Poetry Festival.

“From time to time it has seemed to me that the Peterloo Poets series is a haven of poetic sanity in a world of modish obfuscation.”
Michael Glover, British Book News