The Artist Mixes Colour in the Renaissance

August 23, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Don’t think of me as lime-robed and lost
in undailiness; I come with sleeves rolled-up,
worker in a mire of substance. Yes, I stink!

I chew on a rotted wafer of dried fish glue
my saliva in the mix. How else to stretch the hue
of some frosty cleric? My paints are part kill:

rabbit skin, horse hoof, pig’s blood.
I knife, mine, grind, churn, pound, steep, sweat
my way to that primal blue you worship.

When you varnish me with meaning, remember
the grit under my nails, the fumes. Green
comes from the labour camps you made

for your longing. And that hair-coiled girl
resolved from light. She’s no touched-up
pink fix. She took on the earth

to coagulate: egg-yolk, red clay, mineral, old linen
marble dust. Do you think, if she looked up
she wouldn’t roar with the energy of her roots?

by Rosalind Hudis

News from the Poetry Centre: our new ignitionpress pamphlets by Fathima Zahra, Zein Sa’dedin and Katie Byford are now available to buy! Join us this Wednesday 25 August as we launch them in an online event at 7pm BST. It’s free to attend, but you’ll need to sign up (via Zoom) in advance.

Our International Poetry Competition, judged this year by Will Harris, closes in a month! There are two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language, and the winner of each category receives £1000. For more information and to enter, visit our website.

‘The Artist Mixes Colour in the Renaissance’ is copyright © Rosalind Hudis, 2021, and is reprinted here from Restorations (Seren, 2021) by permission of Seren. You can read more about the collection and buy a copy on the Seren website.

Notes from Amy Wack, Poetry Editor at Seren:

Restorations is a journey into what it means to preserve – a monument, a moment, a life-story, a poppy. It’s about the hunger to possess and the need to let go. Welding themes from art and history with the contemporary, there are poems about pigments and dictators, glue and glass houses, collections, crinolines, and barometers, and the vagaries of memory itself. Entwined, is a more personal story that tracks the loss of a parent to dementia. Also running through, is a theme of women eroding the straitjacket of gendered roles: we meet a variety of characters including the explorer, Isabella Bird, and the nineteenth century navigator Sarah Jane Rees (Cranogwen) who lived in Llangrannog in Ceredigion. Linking all is a play with colour, particularly blue, in all its stages from vital to decayed. Find out more about the collection and buy a copy on the Seren website.

Rosalind Hudis grew up in Suffolk, but after a nomadic period making a living in different countries, and areas, of Britain, settled in West Wales where she has lived for many years with her partner, the puppeteer Tony Heales, and her family. A person of very mixed ethnic background, with roots as far apart as Moldova and Senegal, she finds Wales to be the place that is home. A onetime musician, she has also written from an early age, and now works as a freelance writer, editor, reviewer and tutor. She has taught creative writing at the University of Wales Trinity St David’s Lampeter, and offers writing workshops and readings to community groups or events. She sits on the editorial board of The Lampeter Review.

Besides appearing widely in journals, Rosalind has published a pamphlet with Rack Press, Terra Ignota (2013) and a full collection, Tilt, with Cinnamon Press (2014), poetry from which was highly commended in the 2015 Forward prizes. She has won awards in various competitions, including the National Poetry Competition. Rosalind is a Hawthornden Fellow (2017) and the recipient of a Literature Wales Writers bursary in 2013 and 2018. Read more about Rosalind’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Seren is Wales’ leading independent literary publisher, specialising in English-language writing from Wales. With a list spanning poetry, fiction and non-fiction, many of our books are shortlisted for – and win – major literary prizes across the UK and America. 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. At the heart of our list is a beautiful poem, a good story told well or an idea or history presented interestingly or provocatively. We’re international in authorship and readership, though our roots remain here in Wales, where we prove that writers from a small country with an intricate culture have a worldwide relevance.

Since its beginnings in 1981, Seren has developed into one of the most interesting publishing houses in Britain. Based in Bridgend, Seren continues to nurture and publish new talent whose quality is recognised around the world. This year we celebrate our 40^th anniversary. We’ve had a whole series of online events readings and launches since the start of the Pandemic lockdowns and hope to return to live events in the coming months. We also publish Poetry Wales Magazine and we present the yearly Cardiff Poetry Festival featuring readers from all over the world. Our Managing Editor is Mick Felton, longtime Sales and Publicity Officer is Simon Hicks, Sarah Johnson is our Marketing Officer and Jamie Hill is in Design and Production. Jannat Ahmed is Poetry Wales’ administrative assistant. Find out more by visiting Seren’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.

London Aquatics Centre, Stratford

August 16, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The first time you wear a bikini
in public, it’s ladies’ hour at the local
pool — your mother’s disapproving
brows follow you. The changing
room is filled with the ghosts of
middle school girls’ staccato laughter.
Your skin winces with no place
to hide. Stand in front of the mirror,
wishing you could be reduced to a sliver
of light. Picture knives caressing your hips,
walk down the hall to a symphony
of rapid Bengali, breathe it all in
and jump. Here, I could be rain
bow fish or electric eel.

by Fathima Zahra

Listen to Fathima Zahra read ‘London Aquatics Centre, Stratford’

This week we’re delighted to feature the final of three poems by new ignitionpress poets Katie Byford, Zein Sa’dedin and Fathima Zahra, all of whom have pamphlets forthcoming from our press. We’re very excited to be launching them (online) on Wednesday 25 August at 7pm BST and hope that you will join us! You can sign up for the Zoom webinar via this link.

Sargam / Swargam evokes a deep sense of precarity in being, belonging and in the very words we choose to mean home. This pamphlet, simultaneously forthright and fragile, touches on themes of girlhood, shame, desire and an uneasy burgeoning into maturity. Through exquisitely-wrought language and precise character observations, these poems capture what it is to grow up in three different locations, illuminating the legacies of that experience. Find out more about the pamphlet on the Poetry Centre website.

Fathima Zahra is an Indian poet based in Essex. She is a Barbican Young Poet and a Roundhouse Poetry Collective alum. She has won the Bridport Prize, the Wells Fest Young Poets Prize and the Asia House Poetry Slam 2019. Her work has been published or are forthcoming in Tentacular Magazine and Khidr Zine; has been anthologised in SLAM! You’re Gonna Wanna Hear This (Pan Macmillan, 2020), A Letter, A Poem, A Home (Red River Press, 2020). She been featured across BBC World News, The New Indian Express and Young Poets Network. Commissions include Poet in the City, Adrian Brinkerhoff Foundation and Bedtime Stories for the End of the World. She has performed at various festivals including Hay, Latitude, VERVE poetry festival, The Last Word and Brainchild. She is currently completing her MA in Creative Writing and Education at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Follow Zahra on Twitter and Instagram and find her on Linktree.

Established by Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre in 2017, ignitionpress is a poetry pamphlet press with an international outlook which publishes original, arresting poetry from emerging poets. Pamphlets published by the press have so far received three Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice selections (for A Hurry of English, Hinge, and Ripe) and Hinge by Alycia Pirmohamed was also shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award, 2020. Read more about the press on our 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.

staircase – جبل اللويبدة jabal alweibdeh

August 9, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

the tourists are taking over
the square & i’ve seen it

past the frenchified streetlamps
& wallace fountains

i’ve seen it by mama’s childhood
home near duwar al hawooz

i’ve seen it the window sign
reading ‘شقة للإيجار for expats only’

i’ve lived my life so far an archive
of this city my face my mother’s

mirrored outside its sandstone
walls bas this city holds its people

differently as it always has
it stages its streets like an exercise

in circumstance its gaze
towards whatever else

is west of itself

by Zein Sa’dedin
Listen to Zein Sa’dedin read ‘staircase’

This week we’re delighted to feature the second of three poems by new ignitionpress poets Katie Byford, Zein Sa’dedin and Fathima Zahra, all of whom have pamphlets forthcoming from our press. We’re very excited to be launching them (online) on Wednesday 25 August at 7pm BST and hope that you will join us! You can sign up for the Zoom webinar via this link .

Staircase is an extraordinary debut, exploring landscape, locality and the constructions of a self that inhabits and manoeuvres through many layered textures – mediated by the cultural influences of music and other artistic forms. Those familiar with the neighbourhoods on the seven hills of Amman will recognize the places named, yet all readers will be entranced by them. The Arabic script interwoven through the poems allows the printed word to reflect the literary contours and evocative images contained within this intensely crafted work.

Zein Sa’dedin is a poet, editor, and educator from and currently based in Amman, Jordan. She is the founding editor-in-chief of BAHR // بحر – an online literary and creative platform dedicated to championing writers and artists from Southwest Asia and North Africa in all their languages. Zein holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews and a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She currently teaches English language as well as the occasional writing workshop. Zein is also working to establish a bilingual literary journal from, within, and for SWANA and the Levant. Her poem, ‘the sea is the most flexible of things,’ was the recipient of the 2019 Third Coast Poetry Prize. Zein’s work has appeared in harana poetry, The Shuruq Festival, Zarf Poetry, Third Coast Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, Muzzle Magazine, Winter Tangerine, Sukoon Magazine, Jaffat el Aqlam, and others.

You can follow Zein on Twitter and Instagram.

Established by Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre in 2017, ignitionpress is a poetry pamphlet press with an international outlook which publishes original, arresting poetry from emerging poets. In the future, we plan to work with established poets who are developing interim or special projects. Pamphlets published by the press have so far received three Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice selections (for A Hurry of English, Hinge, and Ripe) and Hinge by Alycia Pirmohamed was also shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award, 2020. Read more about the press on our website.

Salt Creatures

August 2, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

We try at first to still the rush, the roar, but
as the swell reaches our chins we reconsider.
We will be sanded down, polished like seaglass
—the current rips and foams around us,

capricious. We boast burns shaped like open mouths,
blood-bright anemones on our necks, breasts; fingers swim.
I will drift with you over the ocean’s edge
—our shoulders gleam, dolphin backs silver

and leaping. Held in an exhaled breath, small mercy,
our closeness carves a grotto between us, shivering with thunder.
You are a salt creature, let your spine dissolve
—we curl up in a periwinkle.

It dawns. You ebb and unravel, leave me clutching at
cloudy handfuls of sand, that curdle in the air as I retrieve them.
You will hear my breath in every murex shell
—the sea cave in me roars, cracks—opens.

by Katie Byford
Listen to Katie Byford read ‘Salt Creatures’

This week we’re delighted to feature the first of three poems by new ignitionpress poets Katie Byford, Zein Sa’dedin and Fathima Zahra, all of whom have pamphlets forthcomingfrom our press. We’re very excited to be launching them (online) on Wednesday 25 August at 7pm BST and hope that you will join us! You can sign up for the Zoom webinar via this link.

In her new pamphlet, He Said I Was a Peach, Katie Byford’s vital poems resound with a chorus of restless voices. Stifled by male power and drunken violence, the women of these verses nevertheless speak, alive in Byford’s compelling writing. Persephone defies her ‘mud king’, Pygmalion’s creation describes her own drowning, Clytemnestra plots revenge in a hotel bathroom. Encountered alongside stories from contemporary life, myth embodies profound wounds which will not heal. Yet in this pamphlet, the women can be heard, enduring in their pain and fear and calling us to see them differently.

Katie Byford is a poet and filmmaker from London. She has a BA in Classics from Durham University, where she received the Maltby Exhibition Prize for her dissertation on Sappho’s work as translated and interpreted by contemporary poets and artists. She regularly delivers guest lectures at Durham on the use of Greek and Roman sources in her poetry. Katie’s poem ‘Appetit, for Persephone’ placed first in the open category of the 2020 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition; her poem ‘Son, for Thetis’ was also shortlisted. She was part of the Barbican Young Poets from 2011 to 2014, and since then has worked extensively with the Barbican Centre, most recently delivering workshops and performing commissions for 2019 exhibitions AI: More than Human and Lee Krasner: Living Colour. Other commissions and performances include those at Durham Castle, the Wellcome Collection, Spread the Word and the Houses of Parliament. Her work has featured in Magma, Popshot, Modern Poetry in Translation and anthologies Hallelujah for 50ft Women (Bloodaxe Books) and She is Fierce: brave, bold & beautiful poems by women (Macmillan). Find out more about Katie on her website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

My Father Cycling Up a Hill, 1957

July 29, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It’s the hill from the bottom of Factory Trip
all the way up to Manor Farm –
a Welsh hill, one long steep and steady climb

to nowhere, punctuated by the occasional sharp
or suicidal incline. These
are his feet, his calves – they’re pushing,

pushing against the weight of the side
of beef or lamb in the basket
on the front of his bike. From his uncle’s

butcher’s shop to Manor Farm is a climb so far
if I were doing it now, by car, I’d think
twice. By bike? No way! Yet there

he is, my father, twelve years old, the weight
of the hill on his legs, setting out
once a week all winter, to deliver

the Sunday joint to Old Man Hodge. These
are his feet, the look on his face
as he pushes, pushes. This is the sweat

on his brow. His uncle pays him
in promises, end-of-week scraps, the back
of his hand. It’s silly to know

what I do: my father is doing this
for his mother, his younger brother,
for his own father, who hasn’t worked properly

since he got back from the war. This
is his front wheel, squeaking,
squeaking as he inches up that hill. I know

all the reasons he’s doing this
and I wasn’t even born then, so it’s silly as can be
to know what I do – that he was doing it all –

look at him, pushing and pushing all afternoon – for me.

by Jonathan Edwards

The Poetry Centre has launched the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition for 2021! Our judge this year is the fantastic poet Will Harris, and as usual there are two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. Winners in each category receive £1000 and runners-up, £200. For more details and to enter, please visitour website .

‘My Father Cycling Up a Hill, 1957’ is copyright © Jonathan Edwards, 2021, and is reprinted here from Ten Poems about Work (Candlestick Press, 2021) by permission of Candlestick. You can read more about the collection and buy a copy on the Candlestick website.

Notes from Candlestick Press:

We may not love our jobs, but when we can’t go to work we find that we miss them. This mini-anthology, Ten Poems about Work, reflects on our working lives in all their glorious variety with a delightful mix of nostalgia, celebration and humour. Poet Jonathan Edwards’ eclectic and highly entertaining selection of poems explores our complicated and often surprising relationship with the things we have to do to earn a living. The pamphlet includes poems by Liz Berry, Sujata Bhatt, Gillian Clarke, Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Lux, Helen Mort, John Ormond, Kathryn Simmonds, James Tate and Walt Whitman.

Read more about the collection on the Candlestick website.

Jonathan Edwards’s first collection, My Family and Other Superheroes (Seren, 2014), received the Costa Poetry Award. His second collection, Gen (Seren, 2018), was Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice 2019. He lives in Crosskeys, South Wales.

Candlestick Press is a small, independent press publishing sumptuously produced poetry pamphlets that serve as a wonderful alternative to a greetings card, with matching envelopes and bookmarks left blank for your message. Their subjects include Clouds, Walking, Birds, Home and Kindness. Candlestick Press pamphlets are stocked by chain and independent bookshops, galleries and garden centres nationwide and available to order online. In 2019 Candlestick sold over 100,000 pamphlets, supporting its nominated charities with donations equivalent to around 49% of pre-tax net profit. Since 2008 nearly 600,000 pamphlets have been sold, which means that some six million poems have been read via its publications.

Find out more about the press on the Candlestick website and follow it on Twitter.

Jet

July 21, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The morning after my fortieth birthday, I met
a bright arc of water. It was thirty feet high.

The source: a cracked pipe under the road,
the point of emergence flanked by barriers.

Our gleaming street was shut.
I couldn’t help it—I had to bounce.
It was pure force, that singing curve,
racing up regardless, liquid stamping down.

It was the best guest: late, theatric,
one I never thought could arrive

at anyone’s party. Happy Spurt Day, John!
What more could I have needed

in that moment, I who didn’t know there was
such thirst in my life till that maverick

showed up and scotched it, till surprise
watered my defiant grey hairs?

by John McCullough

‘Jet’ is copyright © John McCullough, 2021, and is reprinted here from Ten Poems about Getting Older (Candlestick Press, 2021) by permission of Candlestick. You can read more about the collection and buy a copy on the Candlestick website.

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Being old isn’t what it used to be. Sixty is the new forty. The world is full of expressions designed to make us feel better about the inevitable passing of the years. This fascinating mini-anthology of poems selected by John McCullough looks in both directions; backwards to heydays of young love and time deliciously misspent, and forwards to the perils and thrills of middle age and beyond. It includes poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Rita Dove, Mark Granier, John McCullough, Frank O’Hara, Alasdair Paterson, Elvire Roberts, Judith Shaw and Jackie Wills. Find out more about the pamphlet on the Candlestick website.

John McCullough is a poet and poetry tutor living in Hove. His third collection Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins, 2019) was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature. His two previous collections are The Frost Fairs (Salt, 2011) and Spacecraft (Penned in the Margins, 2016). You can read more about John’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.

Find out more about the press on the Candlestick website and follow on Twitter.

Drokpa

July 15, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

‘Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.’
– Robert Hass
In another life, my father
must have been a nomad.
He drinks butter tea,
knows his way around a saddle,
turns the living room into open rangeland.
There are horses at the door,
nudging their big noses into the hallway,
familiar to him as brothers.
Everywhere we turn they are
stamping down the carpet, swinging wide,
sweating hard, and right in the centre
of that heaving bunch of muscle,
dad pours out the door like wind,
loose bridle, easy seat, running like hell.
In Tibetan, drokpa means ‘people of the solitudes’,
as if solitude was open country
in which we learn early
to lean into the gale, to forage old ground.
He does not dwell long,
disappears for seasons at a time
and we came to realise the way he loves
is the way a horse makes a break for it,
steaming, impatient, expectant,
body corded tight. Horses like clouds
scudding across fields of grass, wild iris,
lashed canvas. He takes off, bad back and all.
His heart opens like a valley.

by Cynthia Miller

Notes from Nine Arches Press:

Cynthia Miller’s debut poetry collection, Honorifics, is an astonishing, adventurous, and innovative exploration of family, Malaysian-Chinese cultural identity, and immigration. From jellyfish blooms to glitch art and distant stars, taking in Greek gods, space shuttles and wedding china along the way, Miller’s mesmerizing approach is experimental, luscious, and expansive with longing – ‘My skin hunger could fill a galaxy’.

Here, the poetry is interwoven with the words for all the things we honour – our loved ones and our ancestors, home and homecomings, and all that is precious and makes us feel that we belong and are beloved. It is also a book that examines contemporary issues of migration in sharp and enquiring relief. Language itself becomes a radical power for reimaging, challenging, and making change, and Miller’s distinctive and multifaceted poetry creates an extraordinary space for multiplicity and celebration.

You can read more about the collection – and buy a copy – on the Nine Arches website, and watch the recent launch of the book via YouTube.

Cynthia Miller is a Malaysian-American poet, festival producer and innovation consultant living in Edinburgh. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ambit, The Rialto, Butcher’s Dog, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, harana poetry, The Best New British and Irish Poets and Primers Volume Two. She is also Co-Founder of the Verve Poetry Festival. Honorifics has been shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Read more about Cynthia’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram. You can also read an interview with Cynthia that was conducted to celebrate her shortlisting for the Forward Prize.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2017, All My Mad Mothers by Jacqueline Saphra was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Our titles have also been shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize, and in 2016 David Clarke’s debut poems, Arc, was longlisted for the Polari Prize. To date we have published over one hundred poetry publications. Read more about the press here and follow Nine Arches on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Spring in Hartsop

July 9, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

As though God had risen above the fells
and shown his face, the earth answered…
So long since the sun broke the clouds

or the hills shone in their veil of air,
and now the thorn, unturning its clusters,
its spokes of flower – the snowdrops

pushing in rings like choirs, each tilting
its neck, ready to sing. Since you left, I too
have slept in the dark of my body’s

wintering; but now, by the window,
I can feel my heart hatching; your hand,
gentle, lifting my head to the sun.

by Seán Hewitt

‘Spring in Hartsop’ is copyright © Seán Hewitt, 2021, and is reprinted here from Ten Poems from the Countryside (Candlestick Press, 2021) by permission of Candlestick. You can read more about the collection and buy a copy on the Candlestick website.

Notes from Candlestick Press:

Seán Hewitt lives in Dublin where he teaches at Trinity College. His debut collection, Tongues of Fire (Cape, 2020), was an Irish Times Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. A memoir All Down Darkness Wide is forthcoming in 2022. Find out more about Seán’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.

Candlestick Press is a small, independent press publishing sumptuously-produced poetry pamphlets that serve as a wonderful alternative to a greetings card, with matching envelopes and bookmarks left blank for your message. Their subjects include Clouds, Walking, Birds, Home and Kindness. Candlestick Press pamphlets are stocked by chain and independent bookshops, galleries and garden centres nationwide and available to order online. In 2019, Candlestick sold over 100,000 pamphlets, supporting its nominated charities with donations equivalent to around 49% of pre-tax net profit. Since 2008, nearly 600,000 pamphlets have been sold, which means that some six million poems have been read via its publications.

Find out more about the press on the Candlestick website and follow the press on Twitter.

Kitchen Window, Wells-next-the-Sea

June 24, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The window of the second kitchen
in what was once a railway house
looks out on salt-flecked

stones hauled from the sea
and a latticed fence
where sweetpeas climbed

in summer, now flakes of paper
by a single frozen rose.
Through the middle pane

another window
where a woman wearing an apron
leans over

a sink of bubbles,
below the clock above the cupboard,
her pearl earring framed

by a wave of wavy hair
as she leans and dips
while from somewhere

out of this grey afternoon the sun
alights on the casement
and a gold leaf rises. Light hovers

then brightens, follows her
as she enters another room,
then another.

by Mara Bergman

The Poetry Centre has just launched the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition for 2021! Our judge this year is the fantastic poet Will Harris and as usual there are two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. Winners in each category receive £1000 and runners-up, £200. For more details and to enter, please visit our website.

This poem is copyright © Mara Bergman, 2021, and it is reprinted here from The Night We Were Dylan Thomas (Arc Publications, 2021) by permission of Arc. You can read more about the collection and buy a copy on the Arc website.

Notes from Arc:

Writing about The Night We Were Dylan Thomas, poet Jackie Wills has commented: ‘Like a great photographer, Mara Bergman celebrates the moment and detail at the core of memory. Together, her poems show the great changes families experience – the free and fearless life of a young woman set alongside a dying mother hanging on so she can hold a great-grandchild, the one-sided conversations we have with the dead.

Her dynamism is infectious – you are drawn into this family’s wonder, love, compassion, grief and happiness. Bergman’s poems remind me of Pablo Neruda’s belief in the driving force of love: ‘Hold on to that, don’t let it get away …’ and one of the final poems, ‘The Happiness’, delivers the book’s message: ‘Before it leaves, I will bury it deep enough to save.’

After reading these poems, you’ll feel braced and ready, you’ll feel wiser and more generous, you’ll want to hold on to moments that contain your own astonishment.’

You can read more about the book and buy a copy on the Arc website.

Mara Bergman grew up in Wantagh, New York, and graduated from the State University of New York at Oneonta. During her third year, she studied at Goldsmiths College and later made her home in the UK.

Mara’s poetry has been published widely in the UK and abroad. Her collection The Tailor’s Three Sons and Other New York Poems won the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition and was published by Seren in 2015. In 2016, Crossing Into Tamil Nadu won a Templar Quarterly Pamphlet Competition. Her poems have been awarded prizes in the Troubadour competition and the Kent & Sussex Open Competition, among others. Her first full-length poetry collection, The Disappearing Room, was published by Arc Publications in 2018.

Mara works in London as an editor and is also an award-winning author of more than twenty books for young children. She lives with her husband in Tunbridge Wells and has three grown-up children. Find out more about Mara’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Founded in 1969, 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, visit the publisher’s website. You can also find Arc on Facebook and on Twitter.

Learning to Love in Greek

June 16, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

They said beware eros, though many
begin with madness. Learn to fall
in love with dancing – this is ludic,
the love you felt for skipping ropes
or bikes. If eros and ludus combine
you may suffer mania, the white blood
of the moon that petrifies. Grow phillia,
the love of football fans on terraces.
Chant together. Fight with the same heart.

If you have children or a puppy
you’ll know storgi, it rhymes with be.
It sits at kitchen tables, magnetises
crayon drawings to fridges. If you don’t
have these, you may feel storgi
from an old aunt, a mate. A lover
might see the child hiding in you
from a cowlick of grey that won’t
be brushed straight. Then philautia,
loving the self. Not so easy. For others,
who dive into pools of themselves,
too easy. Be your own best friend.
When love moves into a house
with a mortgage and enough space
for the future, this is pragma.
To stand in love comes after falling.
Pray you’ll land on your feet.

Above all, agapè – when you forget
who you are and take someone’s hand.

by Maria Taylor

Notes from Nine Arches Press:

Dressing for the Afterlife is a diamond-tough and tender second collection of poems from British Cypriot poet Maria Taylor, which explores love, life, and how we adapt to the passage of time. From the steely glamour of silent film-star goddesses to moonlit seasons and the ghosts of other possible, parallel lives, these poems shimmy and glimmer bittersweet with humour and brio, as Taylor conjures afresh a world where Joan Crawford feistily simmers and James Bond’s modern incarnation is mistaken for an illicit lover.

Consistently crisp and vivid, these poems examine motherhood, heritage and inheritance, finding stories woven in girlhood’s faltering dance-steps, the thrum of the sewing-machine at the end-days of the rag trade, or the fizz and bubble of a chip-shop fryer. And throughout, breaking through, is the sense of women finding their wings and taking flight – “and her wings, what wings she has” – as Taylor’s own poems soar and defiantly choose their own adventures.

You can read more about the collection and watch Maria read a selection of poems from it on the Nine Arches website. You can also watch the launch of the book on YouTube. In addition to Maria, the launch event featured readings from Mona Arshi and ignitionpress poet Kostya Tsolakis.

Maria Taylor is a British Cypriot poet, critic and reviewer who has been published in The Rialto, Magma and the TLS, among other publications. Her debut collection of poetry, Melanchrini, was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, and her poetry featured in the Penguin anthology The Poetry of Sex, edited by Sophie Hannah. She has a pamphlet, Instructions for Making Me (2016), and is also the creator of Poetry Bingo, a quirky set of cards which are part-game and part-concrete poem, both from HappenStance. She is also a keen runner and walker and lives in Leicestershire. Read more about Maria’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.