(Untitled)

~ oxfordbrookesuni

When the sun’s rays appeared
that day
in my head they shook up
the seasons, all four
and I found the way, my love
in the midst of May
into your arms once more.

We had taken the same train
to the same station
but I don’t know why
today it’s from behind the window
that I see you pass by.

Your train winds, unwinds
infernally
will you ever stop one day
to stand on the same side
                                              as me?

by Rachida Madani

From: The Other Half of History: Francophone African Women’s Poetry.
Edited by Georgina Collins.

Rachida Madani was born in Tangiers, Morocco in 1951 and still lives there today. After working as a teacher for thirty years, she decided to dedicate her time to writing. Rachida has published several collections of poetry, including Blessures au Vent and a novel entitled L’Histoire Peut Attendre.

Georgina Collins is a PhD researcher at Warwick University, focusing on francophone African women’s poetry. Prior to a career in global marketing, she travelled the world as a journalist with BFBS Forces radio.

The Heaventree Press is an independent poetry press based in Coventry. For more information on Heaventree and to buy The Other Half of History: Francophone African Women’s Poetry, please visit the Heaventree Press website.

Lieserl Einstein

~ oxfordbrookesuni

That summer waiting to hear about my GCSEs
I worked in an ice-cream kiosk on the beachfront
and met a boy expecting to study maths in London
who had a way of putting Mr Whippy in cones,
and away from the children dripping lollies along
the promenade, I let his fingers do sums on my skin.

Come September I was counting back the weeks,
trying to predict when the multiplication we had been
working on would be noticed, and I could understand
what my new physics teacher meant about the cat
in the box that’s just been poisoned which you can’t
be sure is dead until you lift the lid and take a look.

Throughout October there was morning sickness and
the cat was running around the house to the screams
of my mother, who called me a slut loud enough
for Mrs Evans and her hard hearing, while my father,
too stunned to remind his wife about the neighbours,
tore up my postcard of Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

Now it’s September again and I’m back at my desk,
my mother at home with her own second chance,
another summer gone, a new law of motion learnt,
comparing hair and eyes, the way we sometimes cry,
and the boy from the kiosk comes home when he can
and demonstrates that he also has a way with bottles.

Tonight, when you finally slept, I read about Einstein
and how even he with his head for figures could make
the classic miscalculation and get his girlfriend pregnant;
but they gave their daughter away, a wrong answer.
We will work this out. You are simply someone new
among our number that we need to take account of.

by Lorraine Mariner

from I am twenty people!: A Third Anthology from The Poetry School, edited by Mimi Khalvati & Stephen Knight (2007)

The third of an ongoing series of anthologies, I am twenty people! celebrates The Poetry School’s tenth anniversary in style. Adventurous, unorthodox, playfully serious and seriously playful, these new poets explore their different worlds with confidence and panache. Nothing, it seems, is off limits, neither political engagement nor experimental audacity. From the intimate lyric to the historical narrative, the poetry gathered in I am twenty people! is more than simply a promise of future achievement.  Offering, from each of its twenty poets, selections from a mature body of work that will surely lead to outstanding first collections, here is an anthology that stands in its own right as a hallmark of the best of new writing in Britain today.

ALICE ALLEN · LINDA BLACK · JEMMA BORG  · CAROLE BROMLEY · CLAIRE CROWTHER · PATRICK EARLY · LUCY HAMILTON · LOUISA HOOPER · VALERIE JOSEPHS · JENNY LEWIS · MARY MACRAE · LORRAINE MARINER · BARBARA MARSH · KAREN MCCARTHY · DAVID PENN · DERRICK PORTER · SHAZEA QURAISHI · KATHRYN SIMMONDS · SARADHA SOOBRAYEN · KAY SYRAD

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.

The Astronaut’s Return

~ oxfordbrookesuni

She looks familiar; yes, she is my wife.
Her hair is longer; it’s been months.
I don’t think she expected to see me again.
She doesn’t talk as much as I remember
and when she does she’s speaking to a child.

I notice how her body moves beneath her clothes
and when she’s naked, in the bath or in bed;
how independent it is, in spite of her.
When she sees me looking she turns away.
When I touch her skin she flinches.

The clothes she says are mine no longer fit.
Eat, she says, please eat, and I love you.
I soothe her as best I can. I tell her that
I’m learning to come back.  But my eyes,
still wide open, sparkle like topaz when I sleep.

by Gregory Leadbetter

Gregory Leadbetter was born in Stourbridge in 1975. He practised as an environmental lawyer for several years before transferring his main interests to writing. Since then he has written for the BBC radio drama series Silver Street, and his poems have been published widely. He is currently completing a PhD on Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A pamphlet of his poems, The Body in the Well, is published with HappenStance Press.

Heaventree New Poets, now in its fourth volume, is a series collecting the best new poetry. The collections aspire to Heaventree’s philosophy of providing high quality new modern literature at a relatively low cost. Volume 4 featured Gregory Leadbetter alongside Patrick Gilmore and Jonathan Morley, three poets noted for their bold content and technical precision. To purchase a copy of Heaventree Poets, Volume 4 please visit the Heaventree Press website.

Gags

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Up from the descending semis,
Sean’s nan had the forest
in her mouth, bracken
plumbing her tongue.

The strait’s liquids
had changed a child’s sibil-
ance to ancient
occlusive stops.

We called her Gags.
My butty said he could
understand the babble.
I’m not sure.

She was a leaf-
thing, curled in her chair,
waiting for a second
turn to take her off.

by Richard Marggraf Turley

From The Fossil-Box (Cinnamon, 2007).

“I grew up in the Forest of Dean. ‘Gags’ was written as the final section in a longer poem called ‘Vorrest’, which explores the idea of Dean as part of my ‘impending past’. Gags was the nan of my childhood best butty (forest dialect); to our eyes she seemed as old and strange as the forest itself.”

Richard Marggraf Turley won First Prize in the Keats-Shelley Prize, 2007. His poems have appeared in journals and magazines. Richard was born in the Forest of Dean and moved to Wales when he was seven. Richard’s co-authored volume, Whiteout, appeared with Parthian in 2006. His first solo collection, The Fossil-Box, was published by Cinnamon in 2007. He is also the author of two books on the Romantic poets. Recent radio interviews include an appearance on Radio 3’s The Verb, presented by Ian McMillan.

Cinnamon Press is a young, fast-growing small press based in North Wales and publishing writers from Wales, the UK and internationally, as well as the poetry journal Envoi. The list is mainly poetry, but also includes some fiction and cross-genre books.

[untitled]

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I am sure I shouldn’t hate myself for feeling guilty! what can I do! Let me say it was a struggle to give up punctuation but we all have to make sacrifices not everybody has such a lot of punctuation these days better not have any just to be quite fair but there are some things I can’t quite give up it’s wicked I know it’s the apostrophes that get me I could never resist a well-placed apostrophe dinky things when you come to think about it wriggling there like the fish and the hook all in one sometimes I wake up with such a craving for a semicolon they say those are the worst bring you to a halt sooner than anything else and abolish your vitals like a dissolving fire so I just remind myself you’ve got to talk to people at work today no punctuation at all till after six p.m. then you can put your feet up and snuggle on the sofa in an Argos fleece throw with a mug of hot chocolate and a dash or so as a little pressie to yourself and watch The Bill is it wrong to wish sometimes I wish I were back in Europe it was grand that summer over there I would get up with a real thirst hold off till about ten in the morning then sit in that café in the cool with a tall glass of fizzing vitamins and brilliant punctuation there were real people from Europe at that café and you know what they had been at it since breakfast as far as I could tell big dignified people happy as children with crystal and stoneware brackets and suspensions properly placed you could see how they liked it they thought the rules were fun though I am sure they must have had their sacrifices somewhere just like us yet the funny old things weren’t self-conscious at all go figure.

Yes!

by Vahni Capildeo

from Person Animal Figure by Vahni Capildeo
Copyright © Vahni Capildeo

Person Animal Figure is a long poem in three voices, represented by three different kinds of prose poetry. Here, the voice which seems to represent ‘Person’ reflects upon her own unpunctuated thoughts as she sets them down, characteristically drifting off into memories of comfort and pleasure. The ‘Yes!’ that ends the paragraph is perhaps an acknowledgment of a literary ancestor for this shrewd vulgarian: Molly Bloom, whose stream-of-consciousness concludes James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Vahni Capildeo was born in 1973, in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. She came to England in 1991. Her first book, No Traveller Returns, was published by Salt in 2003.

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

The Third Way

~ oxfordbrookesuni

We set out early, riding through the day
on the broad summer roads of Logres,
yet further out from Camelot
the paths grew narrower, & woodland nearer.
Approaching the borders of the other land,
one of us – or sometimes more – would start,
glimpsing some dream-creature among dim trees,
very close now; no more familiar wolf & boar,
but faun or centaur would appear for a moment,
then flick away into the undergrowth, leaving us
uneasily wondering whether to doubt
or to speak. It was difficult here to see birds,
and they seemed changed, and knowing.
We came with falling night
to the place where three ways meet,
the Road against Reason,
the Road without Mercy,
the Road without a Name.

And the third way brought us here,
to the Waste City;
demons that obeyed the enchanter Virgilius,
giants, or worse, must have built the nodding walls,
the vaulted palace and huge towers
whose ruin is our silent home;
we cannot read its inscriptions
or decipher its mosaics;
the images of Emperor & City are distorted
as by a witch’s mirror or pack of cards;
we find no living soul here
but ourselves, who cannot leave.

by Sally Purcell

from Collected Poems
Anvil, 2002
Copyright © Hilary Purcell 2002

Sally Purcell is an unusual poet and it is not easy to choose a single representative poem by her. She published four main collections of poetry and prepared the last of them just before her final illness at the age of 54. This poem, like so many of hers, draws on folklore and mediaeval sources. Her poems have a dramatic tension, are fluid in rhythm and diction, and alive with a sense of the numinous. Anvil published her Collected Poems, edited by Peter Jay and with an introduction by Marina Warner, in 2002.

Sally Purcell was born in Bromsgrove, Worcs in 1944. She studied French and Provençal at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and continued to live and work in Oxford (as typist, barmaid, researcher and, above all, writer) until her death in 1998.

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

Frozen

~ oxfordbrookesuni

We pooled out into a field at dawn,
a scattering of angry men
and me, fierce at the heart of them,
my back still wet with blood,
shining from the whip. I was calm,
like water. The pressure of it
frozen. Men, my men. I had those
marks on my bare legs
from damp grass, my bodice
was open, they could see
my breasts. But I was their sister,
their goddess, their queen;
my lightning grief was theirs,
my thunder anger rolled
across the milky fields, a star
for them to follow – on foot
or broken, on their knees.

by Jane Holland

This poem is taken from Jane Holland’s second collection, Boudicca & Co., a provocative  and vibrant exploration of women and their roles in society. The perennial themes of motherhood, love and sex jostle for space here with elegies, poetry written for performance, and Celtic-inspired mythological pieces. Richly allusive, these poems create networks between each other, tell stories, make music and ask unexpected questions of the reader.  

A collection with a powerful sense of place, Boudicca & Co. is located mainly within the British Isles, though not always in the present day. Often retrospective in mood, these poems deal with the poet’s own difficult past and with historical Britain, reinventing Celtic and Medieval stories and myths in particular. Yet there is also a Britain here that never existed, a landscape of the imagination, where a restless questioning spirituality tries to make sense of the gaps between expectation and reality. 

Sensual and politically engaged, Boudicca & Co. drives narrative poetry in new feminist directions, creating a host of female characters with strong individual voices and complex agendas. The title poem is a long ambitious sequence in the voice of Boudicca, disenfranchised Queen of the Iceni who leads the Ancient Britons in rebellion against the Roman settlers. It follows Boudicca’s transition from wife and mother to warrior queen, prepared to kill in the pursuit of freedom, blindly ruthless in her desire for revenge. The sequence explores the themes of national identity, personal betrayal and civil war with dark anarchic humour and an uncompromising starkness not for the faint-hearted.

Jane Holland is an English poet, novelist, editor and former professional snooker player, born in Essex in 1966. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1996. Her first collection, The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman, was published by Bloodaxe in 1997. A first novel, Kissing the Pink, followed from Sceptre in 1999. One of the top poetry performers in the Midlands, she lives in Warwickshire with her husband and five children. She was named Warwick Poet Laureate in 2007.

For further information, go to Salt Publishing.

Please note: we’ll be taking a break over Easter – the Weekly Poem service will resume at the beginning of April.

Falling Asleep with Henry James

~ oxfordbrookesuni

The wrongly placed (as it had seemed to him)
Apostrophe got up upon its several
Tiny feet, strode purposefully across

The margin and began a traverse
Of the ridges of his index fingernail.
In the meantime, Miles had passed his arm

Around his little sister and was reading
To her as they walked together, up and down,
In the garden.   No doubt an English

Garden with flowerbeds ─ nothing to match
The Villa Rincon and its high, cool terraces,
The grey-green leaves of the olive trees

Set off by the wrinkling blue of the sea.
Page fifty-six was where his marker was.
The children had evidently gone inside.

But not the pair of ladies, who were deep
In agitated conversation.   Fifty-eight.
The cicadas had stopped, leaving behind

One of those silent moments when the world
Seems to have gathered itself together
And be crouching.  The younger of the ladies

Was threatening to leave.   A pine cone dropped,
And he had the uneasy feeling there was
Someone else looking out from underneath

His eyelids and leaning their elbows
(Could it be Quint?) on the sills of his skull.
And in that instant nothing seemed to him

More natural than that these things, as he
Had read somewhere, should be those other things
Which clearly they were absolutely not.

by Neil Curry

from Other Rooms: New & Selected Poems (2007)

There is a powerfully dramatic and narrative quality to the new poems which preface Neil Curry’s Other Rooms, and we hear in them a wide variety of voices speaking to us from different times and different places, but speaking to us of things which nevertheless concern us deeply today.  Whatever form Curry adopts is handled with flexibility and skill, and wherever the poems are set there is a geographical and linguistic exactness which makes them as compelling as his acclaimed translations of the classics.    

Neil Curry was born in Newcastle upon Tyne and now lives in Ulverston in the Lake District. His verse translations of Euripides, published by Methuen and Cambridge University Press, and in the USA by Doubleday, have been performed in many countries. Enitharmon has published his four earlier collections:  Ships in Bottles (1988), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Walking to Santiago (1992), The Bending of the Bow (1993) and The Road to the Gunpowder House (2003).

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.

“the poem is nothing”

~ oxfordbrookesuni

i

the poem is nothing
if not an anvil

scolding spikes of tangerine get
hammered into various shapes on its surface

maybe a wild black horse or
a scrap of the moon or a girl
sitting on the rim of a fountain
about to fall in or not
about to fall in & ruin her good summer dress
or a set of steel teeth with a winding mechanism
big enough to chew the entire city up
munch munch off it goes

glaring sparks rainbow through the air
they could start fires but the poem
stays cool black motionless & there
you can’t shift it now

ii

the poem is nothing if not an anvil
it whistles down the coyote gets it

by Simon Turner

Simon Turner has been writing poetry for ten years and this poem comes from his collection, You Are Here, recently published by Heaventree. He lives and works in Warwickshire. Alongside other West Midlands poets, Matt Nunn and Milorad Krystanovich, Simon Turner’s work is part of a larger-scale movement in innovative contemporary poetry in the region, supported by Heaventree.

The Heaventree Press is an independent poetry press based in Coventry. For more information on Heaventree and to buy You Are Here, please visit the Heaventree Press website.

Flax

~ oxfordbrookesuni

There are two kinds of flax – the first
has blue flowers.

I picked some this morning,
oversleeping

in a shimmering Lincolnshire field.

Simple clothing and sheets –
that keep temperatures low.

The other flax – a bluer blue
(my reference works don’t have enough pictures).

I picked some this morning,
treking back from that radiant Lincolnshire.

This flax endures, bluesy at the roadside.
It cheers a place up, kept to a small vase.

(Varnish – a layer
to seal this spoken
painting, your painting.)

by Richard Price

from Earliest Spring Yet by Richard Price (Landfill, 2006)
Copyright © Richard Price

Richard Price is Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library. His widely-acclaimed first collection, Lucky Day (2005), was nominated for the Whitbread and Forward poetry prizes. His new collection, Greenfields, was published by Carcanet earlier this year.

‘Flax’ is from the title sequence of Earliest Spring Yet. Its lyricism hovers between sleep and waking. Like the rest of the poems in the book, it is a love poem, but an oblique one. The speaker seems to be living two lives, symbolised by the poem’s two flowers: one in a lonely dream of fields, and one in the real world of roadsides. The ‘blues’ of both are presented in conclusion to a private addressee as a ‘spoken / painting’, a picture of the speaker’s heart.

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